UCLA Professor: "My Tesla Cost me Almost Nothing"- That's the Norm!

[101101]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregau...ectric-power-my-tesla-cost-me-almost-nothing/

That is one of the best and most truthful articles I've ever read on the Tesla experience.

Contrast that with schizophrenic CR that (presumably because it was bribed or blackmailed) just pulled the recommend from the Model 3 the car its own research just showed was the highest rated car by its customers that exists- above all others. But you see fossil fuel shill shorts have to try to deny Tesla access to capital on the up coming debt payment so they have to lie like crazy or Tesla will have an extra billion on hand to accelerate the transition to the end of fossil fuel rent seeking corruption even quicker.

Tesla if you make that split use the cash to investigate and expose all the fossil fuel attempts to undermine Tesla. I know its tough because you can't use the bribe based sponsored media that undermines our laws with its paid censorship and lying and circular selection of political candidate- imaging in bribery based elections when people given money to politicians they turn around and given it to the same people who censor their meaningful choice of candidates, citizens actually are paying for their own censorship its idiotic beyond belief- those media firms are not entitled to profit what they are entitled is having their charters pulled if they don't carry elections for free as under the very reasonable fairness doctrine that bribery got removed.

 

[Thomas Mitchell]

It’s a good article. Perhaps, next time, you can post the link without an incomprehensible rant. Thank you.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[interestedinEV]

One of these articles that has a mix of hard facts, circumstances that favor him and a mix of valid and crazy assumptions to justify his case. The government tax credits are hard facts. He is grandfathered into free charging and the savings in a cross country trip are hard facts but not available now. However he has solar in his home and he did get a tax credit for that, but there is still a real cost for generating the electricity. So the electricity is not fully free as he has to pay for the panels (less subsidies) and their maintenance.

There are very little maintenance costs on his Tesla and this a further saving. Till this point, I will not quibble with his numbers even though I may not agree with them completely. So from $95K the price comes to $77.5 K.

From here on his assumption is that he will run his car for 150,000 miles without changing it, and there is an extra maintenance saved, so that brings down the cost to $63,000 as per his argument. I have had several cars that I sold it once they reached the 140,000 range, so I will also accept the $63,000, no extra trannies etc. From here onward, it becomes fuzzy math. Because Tesla has a better resale value, he claims that reduces cost to $$52.600. May be there is a logic to this, that you will have a better resale value on a Tesla S compared to a BMW that costs $95K and has 150,000 miles. Again stretching it but let us accept it for now. However, what he does next baffles me.

He then takes of $47,500 off as he claims that by driving it for 150,000 miles, he did not need to buy another car. This is illogical. He has already taken extra costs for running a ICE for 150 K (there will extra maintenance etc.). So if I run a conventional car (like I did my Honda Oddessy for 140,000 miles), I avoided buying a new car. So he cannot say, running a Tesla for 150,000 miles saves you additional $14.5K (the difference between 77.5K and the 63K), and then say it also avoided him buying a new car. For the 140,000 miles I had my Oddessy, I did not buy a new car either, but I did pay more in maintenance (the $14.5 in his costs). If I had $95K BMW and also kept it till it reached 150K miles, I would not have to buy a new car.

Yes, there are some advantages to the Tesla, you are able to upgrade it (and not so an ICE), and so it is as far as possible state of the art. You can get new features etc. Difficult to quantify the value of soft benefits, and he has not done it. But there is a value to those benefits however, we cannot put a value for now. Let us say he said "I had a choice of buying a $95K Tesla and $95K BMW (or a Mercedes etc) and I was going to keep the car till it reached 150,000 miles. I bought the Tesla and due to savings, I avoided spending an additional $42,400 on the Tesla (this includes saving from higher resale value), compared to the BMW. So in essence my net cost was $52,600 i.e. $95k -$$42.6K. I also had other benefits like automatic upgrades and new features.". I would have not challenged that for in either case he would not have bought a new car. His justification for taking off an additional $47.5 K off, makes no sense.

However to be fair, the savings of $42.6 is great and significant. That is enough to justify a purchase.

 

[interestedinEV]

However to be fair, the savings of $42.6K is great and significant. That is enough to justify a purchase. I forgot to add the K after the number. His claim is he saved $42,600 without the other deduction and this in itself is a big number without fuzzy math.