A second Model S has arrived at the edge of a million kilometres, and this one comes with the number the last one was missing. On 25 September 2026 Nigel Raynard, who runs a limousine service in Byron Bay, New South Wales, posted that his Model S 75D had passed 600,000 miles — about 965,000 km — after roughly eight years. The Driven reported it the following day.
What the car has actually needed
| Item | Raynard's figure |
|---|---|
| Odometer | 600,000 miles / 965,000 km |
| Time in service | about eight years |
| Battery packs | one replacement, at 666,666 km |
| Replacement pack | 90 kWh, under warranty |
| Brake pad sets | one |
| Consumption since the swap | 186 Wh/km |
| Tyre life | 50,000 to 75,000 km per set |
| Fuel avoided | close to 100,000 dollars |
A Slovak write-up of his posts adds the rest: suspension arms and struts, a climate control unit, three electric door handles, and seats after 700,000 km. The motors have not been replaced.
The gap this fills
Eight days ago TeslAnt covered a Model S taxi in Kelowna that passed one million kilometres on its original motors and suspension. That story had a hole in it, and we said so: nobody published that car's battery history. Its operator gave a fleet average instead — four packs across roughly 15 million km and about 45 cars.
A fleet average cannot tell a buyer what one car does. Raynard's can. One pack carried 666,666 km before it was replaced, and the second has done roughly 300,000 km since. That is a per-car curve, not a ratio.
The warranty is the more useful fact
The pack was replaced free, and the reason is a term Tesla has since withdrawn. Model S and Model X batteries of that generation carried eight years with no mileage cap at all; in 2020 Tesla replaced that on new cars with eight years or 150,000 miles, about 241,000 km. A Model 3 or Model Y Long Range has never had better than eight years or 192,000 km, whichever comes first. The same failure at 666,666 km would have been the owner's bill on any of them.
What a European buyer should check
This inverts the usual second-hand logic. On that generation the odometer is the wrong thing to be frightened of: a high-mileage Model S from 2017 or 2018 may have been inside its battery cover at distances no Model 3 could reach, and a pack replaced under warranty is younger than the car around it — worth finding in the service history.
The timing cuts the other way. Eight years with no mileage cap still ends after eight years, and this cohort is reaching that now: a Model S delivered in 2018 runs out during 2026. For a European buyer the in-service date matters more than the distance, because it decides whether the next pack is Tesla's bill or theirs.
Two honest limits
This is one owner's account of his own car, posted to X. The Driven did not independently verify it, and neither have we; there is no diagnostic report, no state-of-health reading and no degradation figure for either pack.
And the duty cycle flatters the result, exactly as it did in Kelowna: a limousine on long, steady runs treats a battery far better than short trips and deep discharges do. What survives both caveats is narrow but real — high mileage on its own did not kill this car, and where the pack did fail, an unlimited-distance warranty covered it.