Electric vehicles have plenty of advantages over combustion cars but all of them have an uncomfortable truth sitting under the sheet metal. Engines wear out over time, but the size of their gas tank doesn’t shrink. EVs will suffer battery and range degradation no matter what. The only question is how bad it’ll get before the battery fails. One seven-year-old Tesla still running on its original battery is providing some insight.

At over 380,000 miles (610,000 km), one Tesla Model 3 owned by the YouTube channel Drive Protected is going strong long after most vehicles (combustion or EV) are long dead. When new, it offered 240 miles of range. Today, a full charge shows 158 miles. That’s an 82-mile drop, or about 34.2 percent gone. There’s really no sugarcoating it. That’s substantial degradation and puts the battery well below 70 percent of its original capacity.

Read: Tesla’s Longest Range EV Is Here But Not For You

That said, it’s not quite the death sentence you might expect. The car was put through a real-world highway test at a steady 68 mph, returning 138.3 miles before hitting zero. That’s not impressive on paper, but it’s far from unusable. For shorter commutes or city duty, it’s still very much a functioning vehicle.

The numbers back that up. Over the test, it consumed 32.4 kWh. That’s well below the roughly 49 kWh it would have had when new. That aligns with the reduced range estimate and confirms the degradation isn’t just theoretical.

Still, despite losing over a third of its capacity, nothing else about the car appears fundamentally broken. No catastrophic failure, no sudden shutdowns. It’s just a steady erosion of range over time, and about double the miles of most cars when they head to the scrap yard.

In a way, this car is making a case for and against EVs. Yes, battery degradation is real, measurable, and significant. Making batteries cheaper and easier to replace in the near future is key to EV sustainability and longevity. But it also shows that even after mileage that would retire most vehicles, an EV can keep going, albeit with a shorter range.

The classic muscle scene is seriously tribal, but the one thing guaranteed to get GM, Mopar, and Ford fans to unite is a race between a V8 and a modern EV. And that’s exactly what’s served up in this surprising video, where a Tesla Cybertruck ventures onto a drag strip.

In the left lane is a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu, and while we don’t know the full details of the car in question, it’s obviously not rocking that year’s base inline-six. It rolled to the line wearing fat sticky rear rubber, aftermarket wheels, and the sort of stance that says this thing doesn’t spend much time below full throttle.

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The biggest factory motor available in 1970 Chevelles delivered 454 cubes (7.4 liters) of displacement, and modern builds on that big-block base can easily generate 500-600 hp (507-608 PS) in naturally aspirated form.

Cybersnooze

We’ve all seen enough EV videos to expect the Cybertruck to hook up instantly and erupt from the line, leaving the Chevelle struggling to get its tires hooked up. A few seconds later, the Tesla would be flashing across the finish with the Chevy trailing behind, its pride in tatters.

But that’s not how it worked out here. When the lights change, the Chevy gets the jump immediately and charges ahead, opening enough daylight to make it seem like the race might be over before the Tesla has fully woken up. For the first half of the quarter mile, the old-school muscle car looks comfortably in command.

Then the Cybertruck gets its act together. Once it’s moving and the motors are fully delivering, the giant stainless wedge storms downtrack and begins hauling in the Chevy at an alarming rate. What had looked like an easy Chevelle win suddenly becomes a blink-and-you-miss-it finish line showdown.

Times Come Second

You’ll need slowed playback to separate them by seeing whose numbers come up first, but the Chevelle appears to nose ahead at the line. In drag racing, that’s what counts. First across wins, even if the stopwatch tells a slightly different story.

And the stopwatch did tell a different story. The Cybertruck completed the quarter in 11.39 at 118.6 mph (191 km/h), that ET and trap speed suggesting it’s the top-spec Cyberbeast, which has a tri-motor setup and 845 hp (856 PS / 630 kW). The Chevelle registered 11.69 seconds at 114.9 mph (185 kmh).

So on this occasion, muscle fans got to celebrate taking an EV’s scalp, but you just know that if the Cybertruck sorted his reactions for a rematch, it would be a different story.

YouTube/@Wheels