It has been quite a while since my last Tesla post. Part of it is because we’re just chugging happily along with our car, saving money every mile and ahead of schedule with my cost saving estimates. We have about 64,000 miles on the car now and at this rate we’ll hit 100,000 miles in early 2027.
But probably the bigger reason I haven’t written anything is because I don’t even want to acknowledge the drama Elon. Everyone has their thing and if your thing is cheering against Elon, go for it. I’m not accusing or defending him, but I also don’t pretend that every company I give money to has perfect human beings working for it or leading it.
So the news here is that there isn’t much news. I still enjoy driving the car and if it got totaled tomorrow, I’d probably buy another one.
As I mentioned previously, our electricity rates are increasing, but our power company is also rolling out some interesting programs to help people save money and reduce load on the grid. I recently enrolled in one called “PSE Flex“.
There are multiple ways to enroll:
They send you a message before a “flex event” and ask you to reduce your power consumption. You get paid $1/kWh that you save and $15/year just for being in the program.
If you let them remotely adjust your smart thermostat, you will get $40/year.
If you let them control your EV charging, they will give you $0.50/kWh saved during Flex events.
If you have a battery storage system, you get $500/year if you let them use power from it during Flex events.
I signed us up for the first item and after one month of usage, I’m very happy to report that we’ve already saved the initial $25 sign up credit plus an additional $43.21! There were nine Flex events in those 30 days. I don’t know if that’s normal or if it was ramped up because of the very cold weather we had. Either way, that’s a pretty significant savings.
As someone who spends a lot of time with “big data” I immediately had questions when they said they would credit me for power that I didn’t use. How can you measure something that doesn’t happen? They obviously had to guess and I have two ideas about how they are guessing:
They look at how much power I used during the same timeframe in the days leading up to the event.
They look at how much power I used in the hour before and the hour after the event.
They’re probably doing some combo of this but from my experiments, the second one seems to be the stronger signal. And with a giant electricity storage device sitting in my garage (the Tesla), I can really take advantage of this. I make sure to charge the car for the hour before and the hour after the event and whenever I’ve done that, they’ve said that I’ve saved roughly the kWh that I would have used if I had kept charging that whole time.
In most places, you power is coming from a mix of powerplants. You can see where our power is coming from by looking at the Bonneville Power Authority charts: BPA Balancing Authority Load and Total VER. Most of our power comes from hydro. That green line is wind and solar. Coal/natural gas and nuclear are at almost exactly the same level.
I had a hard time understanding why we were having Flex events when we weren’t also having peak power consumption periods. While they probably do have Flex events to reduce peak power usage, there is another reason: it can be cheaper to pay you to $1 kWh to not use power than it is for PSE to BUY the power! There’s a great explanation of this scenario in a Reddit thread but as a very quick summary, the price that PSE pays per MW can fluctuate from $40/MWh on a normal day up to $2000! Those of us on the west coast can see minute by minute pricing on this website: California ISO Price Map
I’m sure the whole story is way more complicated than what I’ve understood so far, but for now, I’ll be very happy if I can keep saving $40/month on my power bill!
In the last post in the series, I gave an update on our Model Y’s efficiency and our continued progress towards having this car be cheaper than the gas car we would have purchased instead. Today I’m here to report on a bit of a change to those calculations. Our electricity price has increased by ~20% this year and next year they’ll go up again (~5-10%).
PSE prices are increasing because of state regulations which are requiring them to get rid of coal and natural gas plants. Voters want more wind and solar but not nuclear. This is being demanded at such a rapid rate that PSE needs to raise costs to cover the change.
This slows things down a bit, but the bigger factor in determining how much money we are saving is still the cost of gas. The change in electricity cost means that our electricity cost per mile* goes up from $0.034 to $0.041/mile. Our gas cost would currently be $0.19/mile. A gallon of gas going down by about $0.20 would be a bigger hit to our savings per mile than this electricity cost increase.
This price increase also led me to do a better job with the previous price increase that had happened in January of 2023. My old calculations had ignored the lower prices for the first half a year that we had the car. After improving the electricity cost changes in the model, we’re at $10,628 in fuel savings after 57,600 miles.
So while the cost increase is annoying, it doesn’t dramatically change the math. It does increase my desire to have solar panels on the house though. The math on that just doesn’t work out super well in the Seattle area though. It would be a neat feeling to generate my own power to fuel our car!
*Yes, I’m also factoring in service costs, depreciation, insurance, registration, etc in the total cost per mile. This post only focuses on the fuel costs.
Tesla usually just makes updates as they are available. They don’t wait for specific model years and the main things stay the same from year to year giving them good cost efficiency since most parts are compatible for many years in a row. However, they have been “refreshing” the cars in their lineup and the most recent one was the Model Y. This features larger changes with more incompatible parts between the two versions. Here are some exterior pictures of the new Model Y:
What do I think? I generally like it. I think the continuous front and rear headlights look nice. I think my biggest visual complaint is that the space below the rear taillight looks odd to me. I believe that the license plate mount is in the black part very low on the car. I have yet to spot one in person so we’ll see what real life looks like.
Feature improvements include a rear 8-inch touchscreen, better acoustic glass treatment, ventilated seats, an updated sound system, and new suspension. None of those are game changers but I’d be happy to have all of them.
I’m curious to see what this does for resale prices on the older models like ours in a couple years. I wonder how much of a difference there will be between the two models.
We aren’t itching to trade ours in for a new model though. The logic behind this purchase was largely about price efficiency so trading in the car now wouldn’t make sense. For those following along at home, we’re at 56,600 miles with $9089 in estimated fuel savings to date. Factoring in registration fees, service costs, estimated resale, etc, this puts us within a few pennies per mile as our old Beetle and still on track to beat our old Escape even ignoring inflation.
In December, EV and hybrid vehicle sales hit another record (this happens regularly because the numbers keep growing.) 8.9% of all vehicles sold in the use were battery electric and 10.6% were hybrids. EV skeptics sometimes will brush aside those numbers saying that people are dumb once but won’t be fooled twice. But check out this study of over 23,000 EV owners which states that 92% of battery electric vehicle (BEV) owners would buy another one and 4% would switch to a plug-in hybrid. Now, I take that with a grain of salt given that this group specifically exists to promote EV ownership, but we can at least take away that maybe there are a lot of people who really do love their EV and would not want to go back to a gas engine.
I often think about this for our situation. We’ve already put 55,000 miles on our Model Y in just 2.5 years of ownership and it is a perfect fit for our situation. In these posts, I repeatedly refer to making the switch because it was going to save us money over a Ford Escape. I do not mean to imply that it would automatically save everyone money over a Ford Escape, but in OUR situation, it’s a great fit. I would definitely replace it with another EV and it would probably be another Model Y. The price has come down since we bought it so the math is even easier. The only difference is that if we replace it after our son moves out then I might consider downsizing to a Model 3 instead of the Model Y, but we’ll probably want to replace it before then anyway given the 20,000+ miles/year that we’re putting on it.
But we also own an F150. Would I replace that with an EV if it died? Probably not. It is still nice to keep one foot in the gas world. We drive it very infrequently and only use it when the other person is already using the car or when we need the utility of the truck. But it’s still nice to know that we could use it if the EV wouldn’t quite work yet. For example, we’re planning a trip to Yellowstone, and it has been nearly impossible to find a convenient AirBNB with a good charging setup. I’d have to rely on the supercharger right outside the park. With the amount of driving we’ll be doing in that giant park, that might still be a place where we prefer to have the truck with us.
I suppose the skeptics would disagree, but I believe that the EV scenario is only going to get smoother and simpler from here on out. We intend to keep that truck for a very long time so maybe in 10 years the pro/con list will look a little different, but as of right now, we’re already in the “yes, we’d replace our BEV with another BEV” camp.
As you know if you’ve read these posts before, I have a lot of data and math about the efficiency of our car. Our purchased was because I believed we could tie or beat the price of the internal combustion car we would have purchased instead (a Ford Escape.)
I’ve had to update my calculations a bit. Since mid September (right at the point when our main warranty expired), the car stopped going into sleep mode. That means we lose a couple percentage points on the battery charge overnight. It’s not a huge deal and I imagine that many people don’t have their cars configured correctly to go into sleep mode anyway so I’m not expecting any major impact. If it was still under warranty, I think I’d press them for a fix, but I’ve had a couple (free) chats with their service team and they agree that it’s not worth looking into.
After the big storm, the cell connection from our car didn’t work for a week. It had been long enough that I thought all the area towers were back up and it still wasn’t working, so I scheduled an appointment. I decided I’d have them diagnose the sleeping issue too. But the next day, our cell connection was working again so I canceled the appointment.
Our car has actually gone to sleep a couple times in the last few weeks so who knows, maybe it will come back again, but for now, that efficiency gain I had been getting from our new tires is now roughly being offset by this lack of the low power sleep mode overnight.
We’re still on track to break even around the 100k mark but this is the point where one big repair bill could set us back. For now, at 54,000 miles, that service total is happily sitting at $0, we’ve already spent $8600 less on electricity than we would have on gas, and our total cost per mile for the Tesla is less than for our F150.
Yesterday I posted about our experience getting through the big storm, but I didn’t say anything about what it was like to own an EV during that time. You know why? It was … completely uneventful. If I had it to do over again, I would have been smarter about charging the car before the outage, but we entered the outage with around 65% and still had over 50% when it was done. We didn’t change anything because we had an EV. If we need to charge it, there were still plenty of superchargers in the area that were open and functioning normally. I heard about some lines during peak times but I wouldn’t have had a problem going during a quiet time.
Could I have charged it from the generator? Theoretically… maybe. The generator puts out 3.5kW which is roughly how fast I normally charge the car, but as I mentioned in my post yesterday, our generator doesn’t have an inverter and I’m not sure I want to risk hooking the car up to it. It would also be hugely inefficient versus just driving to a supercharger
Having an EV in a situation like this will hopefully be a big benefit going forward. Some EVs support standards that let you hook them into your house panel giving you a day or two of power before you have to recharge. That sounds a lot better to me than running a generator. Unfortunately Tesla isn’t on board with that yet.
Earlier this year, we replaced our OEM tires with Hankook iON evo SUV tires. Efficiency and longevity were two big analysis points in my research. I can’t speak to longevity yet (though I’m tracking tread depth with every tire rotation), but I can give an update on efficiency.
First of all, I’ll say that it’s quite difficult to get objective research about efficiency. So many of the random posts online do a very poor job of analyzing the data. For example, they’ll make a post of their efficiency after 100 miles or they’ll show a month of snowy winter driving compared to the previous 2 years of all-season driving. To avoid some of these issues, I’ve waited until we had 10,000 miles on the new tires before making this post.
Over 40,000 miles with the original tires (Continental ProContact RX), we averaged 262 Wh/mi.
Over 10,000 with the new tires, we’ve averaged 259 Wh/mi!
The tires area already performing slightly better than the OEM tires and that’s even when they’re relatively new. Over time, traction decreases but efficiency increases due to less rolling resistance.
A lot of the recommended tires for this car are high performance which makes sense because the cars can be driven hard. However, we are more interested in overall efficiency and those high performance tires can easily use 10% more energy. This makes a big difference over time, or even on specific trips where you’re pushing the limits of your range.
I’ve been running the TeslaMate service since the first day we got our car. I have data points from our cars complete life at a resolution of multiple data points per minute. There are dozens of sensors recorded in every data point. It’s a mountain of data and the TeslaMate dashboards do a great job of making use of that data. For a data nerd like me, it has been amazing.
One of the key takeaways I get from it is the ability to get an extremely accurate measurement of what a gas car would have cost me because I take my daily miles and the cost of gas at the local gas station every day. I can compare that with my energy cost and voila, I know my savings over the life of the car.
There are also some fun aspects like seeing a map of every road we’ve ever driven, calculating exactly which counties we have visited, knowing our longest stint without stopping for the bathroom, and the list goes on and on.
But for the last week I’ve had the data logger turned off. It’s gotten to the point where background work of keeping it running, making sure the data is backed up, etc just doesn’t feel worth it anymore. Plus, our car has never done a great job of falling into its low power sleep state and I wonder how much of that is related to TeslaMate (even though the devs say it’s highly unlikely to matter.) The Tesla app has slowly improved over the two years of ownership to the point where, other than the data logging, all my scenarios are covered by the app.
Furthermore, I’ve noticed that while I initially learned a lot from the data, it’s not really teaching me anything new now. I’ll still keep track of daily gas prices and even with fewer recorded mileage checkpoints, I’ll still be able to get a very accurate estimate of our total cost savings. Barring a major repair bill (so far our total is still $0), I’m highly confident that this car will end up being cheaper than what we would have got instead. I liked having the data to really prove it to people who don’t believe me, but meh, it’s not my job to change their minds, and if they hate EVs, my data isn’t going to convince them anyway.
As a data hoarder, it’s hard to let this go, but I’ve gotten to the point in life where I feel the need to simplify. Some of that is physically getting rid of stuff and some of that is letting go of commitments and projects. Maybe this is a healthy step in the right direction, or maybe I’ll reget it in the future! I’m going to leave everything hooked up and I’ll turn it on every once in a while so I still have some data points, but for the most part, this will free up some head space.
Every Tesla comes with “Autopilot” which I roughly explain to people as cruise control for steering. It will keep you in your lane, keep you at the speed limit unless traffic slows, etc. In contrast to other car manufacturers, this works on any road in a variety of conditions.
There’s a step up from Autopilot called “Full Self Driving (Supervised)” which expands the capabilities to give you end to end self-driving. It will navigate, obey stop lights and stop signs, change lanes on the highway, etc. All Teslas are capable for this, but you must pay a $12,000 fee to enable it. As you can imagine, very few people are willing to pay that much, so they also offer a $200/month subscription that you can turn on and off. That was almost low enough to get me to try it out on our big road trip, but it was still too much to justify. (As I was working this draft, Tesla lowered the price to $100/month!) So I was happy when Tesla gave all Tesla owners a free month of FSD in April! We’ve put over 40,000 miles on our car without the FSD package so it has been interesting to see the differences.
The obvious question is: is it worth $12,000? And to that I immediately say “Nope.” It’s certainly more than a party trick, but I cannot fathom paying that much for it in my current situation. I’d probably pay $1000-2000 for it, or I would pay a bit more if the FSD capabilities stayed for future Tesla purchases.
With that said, this works shockingly well. Elijah’s school is 18 miles away and I literally had it drive us from our driveway to the school parking lot without me ever disengaging it. This included a mix of interstate, two lane highway, and side streets in rush hour traffic. This feature is no joke.
Note that they make it clear that you are still responsible for the car. You have to always keep your hand on the wheel and be ready to take over if something is incorrect. Once you’re in the car, it will scream at you and even pull over and stop driving in the extreme case where you really stop paying attention.
It’s not all roses though. While it will get you there safely and legally, it does make some awkward decisions. On our road trip to Oregon, it would change lanes when I would have been more polite and waited for a bigger gap. Or if someone is waiting to pull out of a side street in slow traffic, I might tap the brakes a bit to let them in. Or if the speed of a side street was 35, it might not speed up to 60 on the highway until the end of hte onramp. There are a few tuning options and I found “chill” with “minimal lane changes” to be closest to my driving style. I preferred it to be dumber and let me hint at things like lane changes (by turning on the turn signal.)
The FSD package also includes a couple extra goodies.
Automatic Parking – As you drive through a parking lot, it will see open parking spaces. You can tap one on the screen and it will back into the spot. This does work but sometimes it takes a couple attempts to get in straight. I would expect it to just nail it on the first time, especially in a wide open parking lot.
Smart Summon – Let’s say it’s raining when you come out of the store and you’re debating running to the car. With Smart Summon, you just press a button on your phone and your car will come to you. This only works on private roads and it drives awkwardly slow, but it does work. It’s a bit creepy to see your big investment driving itself with nobody behind the wheel. This one definitely feels like a party trick, but supposedly there is an improved version coming which they call “Actually Smart Summon”.
So yes, this technology is mind-blowing. I have no doubt that this will work flawlessly in the future. But for now, I’m quite content with the default Autopilot capabilities. The price for the full package is very aspirational right now. However, now that the monthly price is $100/month, I’d strongly consider doing that for a long road trip.
Here’s a short demo of it in action in our car. If you get bored with the regular driving part, you can skip towards the end to see the self-parking and the smart summon features in action.
