Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!
The updates on the Tesla have certainly slowed down, but it doesn’t mean my love for that car has changed. We just crossed our four year anniversary so I’ll give an update on the stats.
The obvious first stat to talk about is the price of gas. Shortly before we got the car, I wrote an app to track the daily price of gas at the 5 stations closest to us so that I could get an accurate “what if we had bought an internal combustion engine instead” metric. I also have a detailed record of the odometer so I know the calculation is very specific: “We drove 100 miles when the cost of gas was X”. Anyway, you can see the historical cost per gallon below. The average has been hovering around $5.70 during May.
That high cost per gallon really ramps up the savings calculations. The cost of electricity has gone up a few cents since we bought the car but we’re still coming out way ahead.
We just crossed 85,000 miles on the odometer so putting all that together, we have saved $15,492 by buying electricity instead of gas. At current gas prices, we are saving about $24 per 100 miles.
Another huge win is that we have spent a total of 0 minutes in the service center. The only maintenance costs have been one set of new tires (we’ll have another set due in the next 10k), wiper blades, and wiper fluid. There was a flat tire or two as well but we get those repaired for free.
So at this point, I’m declaring that we have financially broken even on the extra cost of buying the Model Y (at nearly its peak cost) versus buying the Ford Escape that we would have gotten instead. It’s impossible to know how much service costs would have been on the Escape up to this point, but looking at historical data from our previous Escape, comparing with online averages, and noting that we’ve almost made up the entire cost gap just in gas savings, I think it’s a pretty safe statement.
It will be very interesting to see what happens after we move to Minnesota. The math completely changes: gas prices are much lower, electricity costs are a bit higher, and the cost of a Model Y has come down relative to an Escape. The exact math on that needs to wait until some point in the future when we want to replace the current car, but there’s also a factor of how much we love driving this car, having zero maintenance, and having a “full tank” every morning when we wake up.
Even talking about a trade-in is premature as I hope to keep it for much longer, but if we do trade it in for a new model, I will be excited for the newer self-driving hardware, the screen in the back for Elijah, and various other smaller upgrades. A major downside is that the newer cars don’t come free with Autopilot like ours does. It makes sense from a business point of view since Autopilot gives me a huge percentage of the benefit of the Supervised Full Self Driving $99/month subscription. It would feel like a huge loss, but not enough to justify the $99/month.
So until something changes, we’ll keep racking up the miles and enjoying the savings!