So you’re talking anecdotal data. Everything I’ve seen from more rigorous reviews is that EVs, and Teslas in particular have lower cost of maintainence than ICs. Not zero, of course, and I’m sure lemons exist, but that’s a far cry from the motors only last 100K.
I hear ya, I commute more than i used to so high mileage scares me a bit more than it did in the past. It’s okay to drive an older car for sure, you save a heck of a lot, just nest egg a bit of your savings for the inevitable.
I’m thinking by the time I blow through this current car I may be in the hunt for an EV myself. The missus likes her SUV and we tend to use that on trips, as she never puts even 5K miles on the thing a year for other driving.
Jesus. Even with a comparative 30mpg car, with current gas prices that’s $25,000 saved. Now -that- is an EV win.
And an EDIT: A couple of reports on the Tesla shows people getting about 3 miles per 1 kWh of charge. So even if that owner paid for all of their charge, in my state we average 10.2 cents per kWh. With some math, that would have run about $10,200 for those 300,000 miles as, “fuel.”
I guess that also makes the case for any fuel vehicle car with 60+ mpg out there being a close win, losing a bit to maintenance.
Maintenance costs though have to be considered in more detail than just raw amounts. How and when they occur matters. A regular cycle of services costing a few hundred dollars each is easier for most people to handle than a spike cost of six grand, for instance. We can pretend people are saving all that money they are recouping due to not buying gas, but, really, they aren’t, they’re spending it.
I would jump on an EV in a heartbeat if it had the visual and tactile appeal of a current-gen Audi or Benz, inside and out, and didn’t look like an abstract artists’ version of a space pod inside. Of course, it would have to cost about the same as a comparable car, and work well enough in the winter, etc. But I have zero innate issues with EVs.
My next car, though, is going to burn dead dinosaurs, and probably more of them than it needs to.
Fair point, but we’re almost stuck with anecdotal for quite a while still. The Tesla S went on sale in 2012 and decent numbers started shipping in 2014. With an 8-year warranty we won’t be hearing much about repair costs for awhile. The fancy doorhandles tend to break. Also as a fairly high cost luxury sedan, they may not be getting the miles and seasonal abuse as your average Camry parked outside all winter.
TrueDelta has numbers on the Tesla Model S repair frequency, based on surveys of owners. The information is volunteered rather than sampled, so take that for what you will.
They have other Teslas, too, but the S has the longest history.
Today we did are annual inspection and review on our cars.
About 650 dollars of repair, including a new battery and break pads and two light on our Hyundai and a new filter and oil change for our 2007 Jetta and replacing the air filter.
It cost 37.50 to replace the air filter that we provided. And I do not think our mechanix was ripping us off. I think that the Jetta is a bitch to work on (I have tried) and very labor intensive.
Car maintenance is no joke, especially on the Jetta. I will never own another Volkswagen. It’s so much more expansive to maintaince then my shitty Chevy Cavalier.
Absolutely not my experience. Had one for 3 years. Total repair bill $0.
That’s good to hear… and I’m jealous. I’m not trying to be negative, I really want a Tesla model 3. I even installed a car outlet in my garage… without owning an EV. I’m just frustrated that my government took away the rebates, making them hard to justify on a cost basis. Really annoying especially after they invested big dollars in making the grid non-carbon, and now have a surplus of electricity.
It’s been a while since we’ve had some silly Elon quotes, so here’s a few from the latest Tesla earnings call:
Yup, seems like an error all right.
Stop saying shit like this. It’s dangerous and wrong.
Well geez, why didn’t I think of that? I just need to put more money in my bank account.
I always wanted a Mercedes, though.
Musk says a hundred dumb things a week, you don’t have to misrepresent anything to attack him on.
I thought it was pretty clear he is saying the issue is the Model 3 is too expensive, not that customers just need to miracle up more money. In other words, it’s not a marketing problem, it’s a cost of production problem.
That’s not exactly a deep insight either, though. “Demand for cars is elastic” probably didn’t surprise anybody on the call.
To give him a tiny benefit of the doubt, he’s probably commenting that they’re getting large numbers of buyers that aren’t qualifying for financing. Interest rates are up a bit, and the cost of the car is higher than they promised, so they’re probably experiencing lower sales than anticipated. Note the overall auto industry is in a bit of a downturn.
Still, in a way it’s a bad sign as the car is simply not selling as much as they hoped, despite it still as of now being the hottest thing on four wheels.
No, he’s not talking about it selling less than hoped (or about financing). It’s just an incredibly banal statement of price elasticity, as Fishbreath said. It’s in the context of him saying if they can get the price down they will sell a lot more units (assuming they can produce them, which he left unsaid).
Also, I forgot to mention, they lost another CFO, which Musk just sort of dropped at the end of the call.
So did he light up during the call?
I believe what he’s talking about is the fact that the car, as offered, costs too much.
Before you write that off as a stupid self-obvious statement, here is some elaboration: the car was originally promised as a $35k base model, with higher-priced versions. As they have rolled out the car, though, they’ve started at the top end (extra-range models, dual-battery models, etc). These are the $45 and $50k models. They have still not delivered on the initial promise of a $35k base model. I am pretty sure that’s what they are working toward, and as Elon says, once they can deliver that model they will have a ton more demand.
I signed up for that model when the car was first announced but I’ve since gotten my deposit back when it became clear they were focusing on the $50k models etc.
I know they’re working on getting the manufacturing costs down so they can offer a $35k car and still make a profit. I have no idea if they can get there though.
As I understand it, in the auto biz, the higher priced cars have higher margins–you make more selling Audis than VWs, on a per-car basis. You make money on lower priced cars through massive volume (which I’m sure results in massive service department use, where dealers make their money as well). Getting to the point where you can sell large numbers of lower-priced cars at a profit, though, seems to be the sticking point. Established car companies are further along the curve in terms of the up-front investment necessary to make inexpensive cars at a profit (R&D, production, distribution, support, marketing, etc.) than a company like Tesla.
It kind of makes sense that Tesla would start at the top end, where the margins are higher, and use the profits to bankroll the ability to make money on lower priced models. The problems that Tesla has had stem from, among other things I think, their messaging, because they emphasized the affordability angle long before they could deliver on it, and their efficiency/process, which so far has not seemed terribly scalable from low-volume high-end cars to high-volume low-end cars.
The autonomy stuff is a mixed bag in terms of their positioning I think. There are certainly those who respond favorably to the idea of super high-tech semi-autonomous cars, but there are others who rightly point out the gap between the implied claims and the real-world performance.
Anecdotally, I have heard mixed things about or from Tesla owners. A lot of them seem to be engineers or people with an engineering bent or mindset, for whom the tech in these cars is a positive draw and who think of them more as engineering experiments and cutting-edge technology, and don’t necessarily think of their Teslas the same way they would another type of car. Others are folks who were drawn in by the promises of performance, efficiency, and hyper-modernity, but who still really want the same level of high-end car experience they were used to from existing luxury brands. The former group seems a lot happier with their cars than the latter.