A Tesla lost 9% of its range in a year. Qatar has no idea what its own number is

A YouTuber in Kentucky has spent a year putting 25,000 miles on a 2026 Tesla Model Y and publishing what the battery did about it. InsideEVs picked the story up this week, and the headline number is 9% — his battery now reports 91% of the health it had new. He is not worried, and on the numbers he is right not to be.

What the figures actually say

• 91% after 25,000 miles — a full charge still returns close to 300 miles of real-world range, and an 80% daily charge gives him around 240.
• The curve is front-loaded — battery testing data cited in the piece shows nickel-based Teslas lose most of what they are going to lose in the first two to three years, or the first 50,000 miles. After that it flattens.
• The old ones hold up — a 2015 Model S P85D was still at 86% after roughly 160,000 miles. A three-year-old Model 3 working as a taxi had 88.5% left.

That last figure is the interesting one. A taxi does the kind of mileage that would frighten anybody, and it lost less than twelve percent. The battery is not the fragile part of an electric car, and the fear that it is has cost a lot of people a lot of money in depreciation they did not need to accept.

Read the small print on the conditions

The car in that story charges at home, almost never sees a Supercharger, and lives in Kentucky. Heat is the single best-established accelerant of battery ageing, and Doha in August is not Kentucky. Neither is a car that gets fast-charged because the driver has no home charger and no patience. Nine percent in one year is a real number from a real car; it is not a promise about a car that has spent every summer of its life on a Qatari kerb.

The honest answer is that nobody in Qatar knows yet, because the cars are not old enough to have told us.

Now look at what is actually for sale here

We went through the live listings on BuMotar this morning. Of 12,186 cars, 81 are electric and 135 are hybrid — 216 between them, under two percent of the market. That much you could guess. The age profile is the part worth sitting with.

• 168 of the 216 are 2024 or newer — and only 18 are 2021 or older. This is not a used market. It is a new-car market with a few early adopters in it.
• 35 Teslas are listed, and one predates 2023 — a 2018 Model X on 96,000 km. Everything else is essentially a current car.
• 23 electric cars on the site have covered more than 30,000 km — twenty-three, in the whole country's largest listings pool. The degradation question has not arrived here because the mileage has not.
• The median electric asking price is 172,000 QAR — against 74,000 for petrol. Buying electric in Qatar today still means buying near-new, at near-new money.

Elsewhere the hedge is selling hard. Motor1 reported this month that Toyota's US plug-in hybrid sales were up nearly 190% in July year on year, with ordinary hybrids up almost 24%. That is an American number and Qatar's market is its own thing — but it is the same instinct you can see in our own listing mix, where hybrids outnumber pure electrics here too.

What to check when the used ones do arrive

Give it two or three years and the 2024 and 2025 cars filling the site now will be somebody's second-hand purchase. At that point battery health becomes what a service book is on a petrol car — the document that decides the price. Four things to ask for, in order of how much they tell you:

• Charge it to 100% and read the range — compare the indicated figure against what that model showed new. It is crude, it is affected by temperature, and it is still the check most buyers skip.
• Ask how it was charged — a car that lived on DC fast chargers has had a harder life than one plugged in at home overnight. The owner knows the answer.
• Check what is left of the battery warranty — traction batteries typically carry around eight years of cover, and whether it transfers to you is worth confirming with the local agent rather than assuming.
• Get the car's own battery report — most electric cars will produce one through the manufacturer's app or a service centre. Ask the seller to run it while you are standing there.

None of this is exotic. It is the electric-car version of asking whether the timing belt has been done — and in a market where almost nobody has had to ask it yet, being the buyer who does is worth real money.

Read next

• Toyota is betting on hybrids, not batteries — and it is about to get cheaper at it
• Monterey Car Week: what $31.5 million for one McLaren actually tells you