Teslas surpass 1-billion mile mark

Tesla Motors announced today that the 75,000 or so cars it has built have driven 1 billion miles combined. As the company points out, that's equivalent to 4,000 trips to the moon, 40,000 laps of the Earth, or a road trip that lasts 2,000 years. (And yes, those comparisons would all demand a fair amount of charge time.)

The company says Tesla cars (mostly the Model S) have saved 570,000 tons of CO2 emissions compared with driving an average car over a similar distance. Better yet, Teslas have required no oil changes and no smog checks during that time, saving owners over $15 million, the company says.

We can't argue with any of that. But the company also makes a couple of spurious claims: That Tesla owners have saved 10 years of time standing at gas pumps and spent $0 on fuel. Implied but not stated is that Tesla drivers have spent less time "pumping" fuel into their cars, although more than a few have likely spent time charging on the road. Back when we first tested a 2012 Model S, we routinely spent 5-1/2 hours recharging. (Admittedly, we didn't spend those hours standing by the charger, but the electric-car lifestyle does require some scheduling.) And although Tesla provides free electricity at its Supercharger stations, the company also says that most charging is done at home – where the average kilowatt-hour costs 11 cents, according to the Energy Information Agency. Most Tesla owners also live on the coasts where electricity costs more than average.

No matter how you slice it, the gas savings are real. As experienced with our two examples, the Model S does not consume a drop of gasoline, emits no greenhouse gas, and by consuming 2.5 mi/kWh, running costs are extremely low. Based average electric prices, operating a Model S costs a fraction of what it does to run even non-luxury cars.

Tesla's billion miles is a momentous achievement no matter how you look at it, especially in an electric car with a shorter range than most gas cars' and much longer recharging times. But perhaps the final lesson to learn from all this data is how quickly Tesla was able to publicize these numbers. They're logging every last mile their owners drive. Now there's a data point to consider.

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—Eric Evarts