As you may already know, ABetterRouteplanner.com collects driving data from contributing users. This data is used to improve the ABRP car models (i.e., the mathematical representation of each type of car) and also to give back to the ABRP community providing the data, to be published here in the blog!
We have received a lot of Model 3 Long Range driving data and even enough data from Model 3 Performance to draw some first conclusions on how they differ. We have 220 different Model 3 Long Range users who have contributed a total of 70,000 km (43,000 miles) of driving, which caters to excellent data. Most of these Model 3 Long Range are the RWD version. For P3D, there are "only" 13 cars contributing so far, having driven around 7,000 km (4,300 miles) of driving, which means that statistics are a little bit more shaky but still usable.
To show off what those numbers mean, this is the graph of the 7,000 km of P3D data - every blue point corresponds to 30 seconds of driving at a certain speed and how much power that car has consumed during those 30 seconds. Yellow dots show the median power consumption for that speed, and the red line is our fitted model.
Now, let's boil that data down to something more understandable! First, the reference consumption, constant speed on flat land at 110 km/h (65 mph), becomes:
Tesla P3D: 173 Wh/km at 110 km/h (267 Wh/mile at 65 mph)
Tesla Model 3 Long Range, mostly RWD: 150 Wh/km at 110 km/h (232 Wh/mile at 65 mph)
This means that our real-world driving data shows that the P3D consumes about 15% more than the RWD version at highway speeds. This is expected, or somewhat low - most P3Ds run on 20" sports wheels instead of 18" Aeros, and perhaps more importantly, P3Ds may be driven more like performance cars by their drivers.
(Note that in https://abetterrouteplanner.com, we add some margin to the reference consumption to be on the safe side.)
Looking at efficiency numbers for different speeds, we get the following comparison between the Tesla Model 3 Long Range, P3D, and Model S100D:
We can see from this graph that there is a clear difference in efficiency between the RWD and the P3D, and at higher speeds where the Aero wheels have better aerodynamics, the difference grows even more. This efficiency leads to this range-vs-speed graph:
And finally, our standard road-trip challenge of a virtual 1,000 km (621 miles) drive with fast chargers every 200 km gives us:
Tesla Model 3 Long Range: Total trip time 09:44, of which charging 01:24.
Tesla Model P3D: Total trip time 09:59, of which charging 01:39.
Tesla Model S100D: Total trip time 10:05, of which charging 01:45.
So, the slightly higher consumption in a P3D does equate to 15 minutes more charging time in a 1,000 km road trip. Not too shabby!
Appendix - Graphs in Imperial Units
