Hansjörg von Gemmingen-Hornberg has driven his 2013 Tesla Model S past 3 million km, or 1,864,113 miles, and he marked the moment this week by posting the odometer reading as his new profile picture on X.
The total equals nearly 75 laps around Earth’s equator. A driver covering 20,000 km a year would need 150 years to match it.
From used car to high-mileage record
Von Gemmingen-Hornberg bought the sedan used in August 2014, when it already had about 30,000 km on the clock. Before the Model S, he had already piled heavy distance onto an earlier Tesla Roadster. The high-mileage routine started well before this car became known.
The car has run through four battery packs in total, so the 3 million km did not happen on one pack. The original was replaced at about 290,000 km, and the next two covered roughly 670,000 km and 550,000 km.
The pack in the car today went in during 2023 at about 1,758,033 km. Von Gemmingen-Hornberg said it was the first one he paid for himself, at a cost of about €20,000. In April 2026 he reported that this pack had passed 1 million km with no repair and 85% of its capacity left. If it stayed in service through the new reading, it has now covered about 1.24 million km on its own.
A rebuilt drive unit
The rear drive unit needed far more attention over the years. EV Clinic, an independent EV repair shop in Zagreb, said the car had gone through 13 remanufactured units by 1.8 million km, after an original unit that lasted about 800,000 km.
When the car arrived at the shop in 2023, technicians found coolant had slipped past a seal and reached the bearing area. They rebuilt the large drive unit with a fix aimed at the leak. In June 2026 the owner said the rebuilt unit and the battery had each cleared 1 million km without repair, and he noted the modification happened at exactly 1.8 million km. At the 3 million km mark the unit carries about 1.2 million km since the rebuild, and one report said a shaft seal had started to weep.
The pace behind the number
The sedan crossed 1 million km on November 28, 2019. It passed 1 million miles in 2022 and hit 2 million km in Morocco in spring 2024. The latest million came in about two and a half years.
The owner has kept up an unusual pace this year. In September 2026 he posted that he had covered exactly 39,633 km in a single month, an average of about 889 km a day from June 2022 through the new reading.
The Model S is widely treated as the highest-mileage electric passenger car on record. The 3 million km figure comes from the owner’s own account and later media coverage, and no current Guinness certification for an EV-specific entry was located.
The all-time single-vehicle mark sits well above this car. Irv Gordon’s 1966 Volvo P1800 had reached 3,260,257 miles, about 5.25 million km, by the time he died in 2018, so the Tesla would need years of added driving to close that gap.
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