In the U.S., most people typically drive less than 20,000 miles in a year. Germany’s Hansjörg von Gemmingen-Hornberg, however, drives well over 100,000 miles a year – and in a Tesla Model S. As InsideEVs reports, his 2014 Model S has officially crossed the million-mile mark, and currently sitting with just under 1.2 million miles on the odometer. Which, by any standard, is a lot of miles, especially for an electric car.
If you do the math, that’s more than 130,000 miles of driving every year, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that he’s no longer on the original motor or battery pack. In fact, the rear motor has been replaced 13 times, and the car is now on its fourth battery pack. Doing a little more math, that works out to one battery pack every 300,000 miles or so, which really isn’t bad. The engines in most gas-powered cars often fail before they hit the 300,000-mile mark.
Gemmingen-Hornberg hasn’t been as lucky with the rear motor, though. With the car on its 14th motor, that works out to less than 100,000 miles per motor and more than one motor replacement per year on average. As InsideEVs points out, that’s a common problem with early versions of the Tesla Model S, and it took Tesla a while to figure out what the problem was, so the motors kept failing.
Then again, most Tesla owners don’t drive 130,000 miles a year, so it’s not like regular people are replacing the motor in their Model S every year. As for why Gemmingen-Hornberg drives so much, the dude just likes to go on road trips. Long road trips. Last month, for example, he visited Morocco. It’s hard to imagine spending that much time in any car, but clearly he enjoys it, so we say rock on, Hansjörg. Let’s get this puppy up to two million miles.