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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • It’s actually not as bad as I was expecting. The electricity prices seem to be about right (17 cents per kwh at home, 43 cents at fast chargers), and the idea of having to drive farther to get to a charger is likely a reality for apartment dwellers.

    The two shitty parts are that they included the cost of the charger in this which is obviously a one time expense, and they calculated that “mostly at home” users would still supercharge 20% of the time, which seems like a TON. I put 21K miles on my car in the past year, and I supercharged 470/6897 total kWh, so 7%. If you rectify both those things in their math (let’s say maybe 10% is average?) then the “at home” EVs clearly win.

    But it is absolutely viable to point out that if you can’t charge at home (or at work, although I personally wouldn’t want to tie myself to an employer to be able to charge my car. I already hate that we do it for health insurance), then it is going to be much more expensive than for people who do, and possibly more expensive than similar gas cars. For example, I had a VW ID.4 for a year and it got AWFUL efficiency for my driving patterns (about 2 mi per kWh) and I exclusively fast charged at the local electrify america station because it was free.

    If I had had to pay retail price for the EA charging for the 10,000 miles that I drove, 48 cents per kWh * 5000 kWh, that would’ve cost me $2400 to charge, which is absolutely more than it would’ve cost to just drive our CRV instead (25mpg, $3.87 for gas over 10K miles = $1548).





  • There are definitely situations where it’s more expensive, like if you exclusively use DCFCs. My electricity is 15 cents per kWh at home (so that’s where i do all my charging), but the local ElectrifyAmerica station charges 48 cents per kWh, which would make my Model 3 cost 13 cents per mile, which is damn near what my Honda Accord costs me in gas (gas is $3.87 per gallon right now. at $3.25 it would be cheaper).

    I feel for people who don’t have the option to charge at home and I hope that problem gets solved quickly


  • I’ve got real world math that basically backs this up (you can find my other comment in this thread if you want all the juicy details): My honda accord got 22mpg and had a 17 gallon tank, and gas here is $3.87. $66 to fill up and drive 374 miles = 17.6 cents per mile. My Model 3 Long Range has 77kWh usable and gets about 3.7 miles per kwh, my electricity is 15 cents per kwh (until i get solar next year), so $11.55 to fill up and drive 285 miles (so 4 cents per mile).

    Yes the accord got about 90 miles more range, but cost 3 times as much to fuel and that range only matters (to me) on road trips, and my range has yet to be an issue in my model 3.

    In fact I’m going on a 6 hour drive next week and according to ABRP I’ll only have to make one 10 minute stop halfway to charge in order to get to my hotel (where I can charge up for free)


  • Here’s my answer for this (with data!): For the month of July, I charged 440.0 kWh. I averaged 94% efficiency while charging, so the chargers actually used 469 kWh. There were 35 charges, for a total of 66 hours spent charging. My total electric cost is 15 cents per kWh (my plan doesn’t have peak/off-peak). I did no charging at superchargers in July.

    In that timeframe, I drove 1314 miles. 355kWh were used while driving, giving me an average efficiency of 3.7 miles per kWh. You’ll note that I used 85 fewer kWh driving, that’s because thosed 85 kWh were used to precondition my car, keep the AC running while I’m in the store or on a bike ride, etc. Super wasteful, but it’s so cheap that I can’t help myself).

    So to break it down: 15 cents per kwh * 469kWh = $70 to charge, $12.75 of which was just used for climate control while not driving.

    My last car was a 2016 Honda Accord Touring V6 which, in my area and with my driving style, averaged about 22mpg (lots of steep hills, 85mph driving, and stop and go traffic. I live 15 miles from town by interstate and town has lots of traffic).

    According to AAA, the average cost of gas in PA is $3.87 (I know that price changes, but the math gets harder if I look up the price of gas each time I would have had to fill the tank so I’m just taking the current avg). 1314 miles / 22mpg = 59.7 gallons of gas * $3.87 = $231.

    For extra fun math, looking at purely fuel costs, the Accord would cost 17.5 cents per mile to drive (not including the fact that I’d need an oil change every 4 months, transmission fluid every year and a half, etc).

    My current car at current electric rates costs 5.3 cents per mile to drive.

    Additionally, i’m planning on getting solar in a year or two, which should bring my cost down to effectively zero. AND, we can charge for free at my wife’s work when she’s in the office (as well as at the park I bike at), but she wasn’t in the office at all in July; we both worked from home full time last month.

    TL;DR: my Model 3 Long Range costs about a third as much per mile to drive as my similarly sized Honda Accord did before I sold it







  • Underwater means that I owe more on the car than it’s worth. I bought it at $52K with a 15K downpayment, and at this point I owe $33K on it. Carvana estimates it’s worth $30K, so if I totaled it tomorrow, my insurance company would give me $30K, but then I’d be on the hook for the other $3,000. So gap insurance takes care of that. In fact, my gap policy says that if I total a car two years old or newer, they’ll pay it off and get me a brand new one as a replacement, and if it’s older than two years, they’ll get me one a year newer.

    So I’m paying $8/month for the peace of mind that I don’t have to worry about out owing money in the case of a crash.

    Obviously when I bought the car, I wasn’t expecting Tesla to drop the price so much and crater the used market




  • My battery health has gotten awful recently too. I’ve got a series 5, so yes it’s 4 years old, but I genuinely only get about 12 hours of battery life these days. I went through and uninstalled every single app I don’t use, but it’s still awful.

    Love everything else about it though, so I set a slickdeals alert to hopefully pick up a cheaper series 8 sometime between now and when the series 9 launches