- A rented 2023 Model 3 with Tesla’s LFP battery still showed notable degradation.
- Tesla’s built-in battery test returned a worse result than the Tessie app estimate.
- LFP packs can withstand more than NMC packs, but rental use, tropical heat, and charging habits still matter.
Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) is often sold as the electric vehicle battery chemistry you can charge to 100% without worry. However, this 2023 Tesla Model 3 showed more degradation than expected at under 26,000 miles.
YouTuber Branden Flasch tested the battery health of a rented 2023 Tesla Model 3 Rear-Wheel Drive in Maui, Hawaii, and the result was lower than expected. For a three-year-old LFP car with that mileage, the Tessie app estimated that it had 92.27% of its original capacity remaining after 253 charge-discharge cycles.
That percentage turned out to be optimistic after Branden had the car run its built-in battery health test, which requires the car to be plugged in overnight so that it can discharge its battery to near empty and then charge it back up to full, giving an accurate picture of its full capacity and whether there’s an imbalance between the cells.
The test indicated that the car had 90% battery health and a usable capacity of 55.62 kilowatt-hours. That’s pretty low for its age, which suggests its life as a rental accelerated its battery degradation.
Rental cars are often charged to 100% and see a lot of fast charging. This car lived its life in Maui, where the most common public fast charger is still the 50-kilowatt, but there is a 12-stall Tesla Supercharger that can max out the Model 3’s charging capabilities, and it could have been regularly charged there.
The car’s actual history is unknown, and Maui is also a very specific use case. It could also have been used for very short trips, left out for prolonged periods, and braved the island’s tropical climate. Branden noted that this Model 3 also showed higher-than-average electricity consumption, possibly because the climate system was working extra-hard to maintain the car’s interior temperature when it was so warm outside.
However, Branden also compared it with his wife’s newer 2025 Model Y Long Range Rear-Wheel Drive, which has a nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) battery. He tested the battery at 88% health with around 13,000 miles. This makes the rental Model 3’s result not terrible in context.
Last week, we covered a three-year-old Model Y Standard-Range from Europe, which also had an LFP battery. It had covered 34,000 miles with 92% of its original capacity, which was also lower than the owner expected for the vehicle’s age. However, its rate of degradation seemed to have declined considerably, as it had lost only 1% over the last year.
