Tired or wired? UK road trip in the 260,000-mile Tesla Model S

The destination for our trip is one of Tesla’s original UK sites: the Westfield shopping centre in west London. Here, the company opened its first dealership at the end of 2013.

One of the early Supercharger locations also lurks in the car park beneath the bright lights and perfume.

Back to Exeter, and this being a new Supercharger site, our old Model S needs a converter to be able to charge from the CCS cables.

It’s all straightforward, though, and in under 60 minutes I manage a full charge from the 44% that I arrived with.

Now, we all know that electric car batteries degrade over time and mileage, and this one is no exception.

This nine-year-old car now has 84% of its original 85kWh usable capacity, but the 230 miles showing on the ‘guess-ometer’ at 100% charged suggests that it’s still got a very usable real-world range.

Rolling out of the Supercharger hub, I head east, towards the A303. The car is confident that it can reach Westfield, telling me that it will cover the 178 miles and still have more than 20% battery remaining.

It is yet another of Tesla’s miracles that it mastered the art of over-the-air software updates from the off, so this car has the same software that you will find in any modern Tesla.

It also feels pretty solid around the cabin, and smells like an airport taxi.

Which isn’t unpleasant but does make you wonder what precisely it is that makes modern high-mileage cars smell of the same, gentle musk.

The journey starts easily. I keep the 90D in ‘Chill’ mode, rather than Standard, as I don’t feel the need for any 4.0sec 0-62mph sprints anyway.

Other than that, I’ve got the air-con and the radio on, and regen in the lighter mode that I favour.

This isn’t an economy run and I want to know what a Model S will do on a single charge if you drive it in a completely normal fashion with the comforts that we all expect.

Predictably, the miles tick past smoothly, the light bouncing off the super-shiny steering wheel and the Tesla just doing its thing.

It doesn’t take long before, on clear roads, the estimated range starts to drop more quickly than the real miles.

At one point, it falls to 11% predicted charge remaining at our destination, before it creeps back up towards 20%.

Inevitably, the free-flowing traffic along the hilly stretches of the Devonian A303 was chiefly responsible for the drop in efficiency, but I’m still happy to sit back and enjoy the far-reaching views to the left and glimpses of the sea to the right.

Still happy to trust that the Tesla will make it.

Before you know it, it’s everyone’s favourite traffic jam: Stonehenge. A convenient halfway point on our route, this Neolithic hotspot is one of the UK’s most visited tourist attractions, as you’ll have been able to tell if you’ve ever tried to drive past it.

At this point, the Tesla’s range is getting a bit on the teeth-sucking side of things, not least because we have also taken a few detours to do some photography and added roughly 10 miles to our route.

As such, our total distance is going to be just over 190 miles. So I’m beginning to do electric car range maths – a complex branch of maths closely related to that executed at the end of a restaurant meal for many people, when the bill is being split.

In the end, the car is still confident that it will make it – sometimes with only 5% battery remaining, sometimes with over 10% – so I trust it and go with it.

It’s worth saying that there are plenty of rapid chargers, Superchargers included, on this route.

I don’t need to play range roulette at all but, on this occasion, I’m keen to stretch the car and see what it will do.

Onwards, then, and the M3 motorway flashes past, as do the rapid chargers at Fleet and those on the roadside, as London proper starts to crowd us.

It occurs to me, as we creep towards Shepherd’s Bush, that a Parisian-spec Model S is the ultimate London car. It’s already lightly scuffed and kerbed, so you’re not precious about it.

Yet it’s still got way more kudos than the overly common Tesla Model 3, not to mention its crushing traffic-light performance, a cushy ride, ULEZ exemption…

I’d even live with the fact that the frameless driver’s window doesn’t always go back up after you’ve closed the door, so you have to get in from the passenger side and raise it yourself.

There’s also no keyless entry, which feels weird for a car that has flush door handles and a proximity sensor so that they pop out as you approach them, yet you have to double-press the top of the key, which all feels a bit PC computer interface circa the early 2000s.

Our car’s efficiency as we creep through town is unsurprisingly impressive and the predicted range has simply stopped ticking down and has even started to rise.