Tesla Model S Reaches 1 Million Kilometres After Nearly a Decade as Kelowna Taxi

A Tesla Model S that has been operating as a taxi in Kelowna, BC since 2017 has officially reached one million kilometres, marking the end of nearly a decade of commercial service.

The Model S, known as S1K, was the first vehicle put into service by Current Taxi on February 9, 2017. The company celebrated the milestone on Saturday, September 19, at Tesla Kelowna, where the car’s odometer rolled over to exactly 1,000,000km as it entered the parking lot.

According to Current Taxi founder Dale Conway, over its nine years on the road, S1K transported tens of thousands of passengers throughout the Okanagan, averaging approximately 10,000 to 12,000 km per month.

S1K isn’t the company’s only high-mileage Tesla, with several others in the Current Taxi fleet exceeding 750,000 km, but those vehicles were eventually sold. S1K was kept in service specifically because it was the company’s original vehicle, and Conway wanted to see if it could reach the million-kilometre mark.

Reaching that exact number on Saturday required some planning. Current Taxi began managing the vehicle’s mileage about 30,000 km before the milestone, eventually parking it for two weeks ahead of the celebration.

The achievement provides another example of the long-term durability of EVs, particularly in commercial applications where vehicles accumulate significantly more mileage than the average passenger car.

Conway also highlighted the reduced maintenance requirements of an electric vehicle compared to a conventional taxi, noting that he would have been performing oil changes approximately every three weeks over the same period.

Despite now being retired, the company hopes the Model S can continue serving a purpose beyond transporting passengers. Conway told Castanet he would like to donate the vehicle to an engineering program at UBC or BCIT, allowing students to study a Tesla that has accumulated one million km of real-world driving.