Tesla stock is a wild ride. My second post in this series was about buying one share of Tesla stock right before the biggest market cap growth in the history of capitalism. It was fun to watch my little share bounce around on the wild seas of Wall Street, but I set a sell order for $0.25 more than my purchase price. My little experiment was just for fun and I didn’t actually want to lose any money. I guess I should have sold when it was up $300-400 because my sell order triggered last week. In fairness, the total market index fund that I prefer was also back down to around the same point as when I bought the Tesla share, but I’d rather have my money there long term anyway. So with that, I’m out of the Tesla stock game. That means no more disclaimer on my posts going forward.
In other news, it has been interesting to watch other car makers wake up to the EV market since we ordered our Tesla last fall. Ford appears to be leading the domestic pack and VW has been doing well in Europe for a couple years. Tesla has a big head start though and one of their key advantages is their charging network. Most of the time we’ll be charging at home, but if we go on a road trip, I don’t want to be nervous about charging. A global engineering accounting firm did a test of EV charging networks and basically concluded that if you have a Tesla, they are hands down the winners, but since they aren’t open to all cars from all manufacturers, they lost out in total score to the Electrify America network. (source data) The compatibility part is interesting from a business perspective, but from an ownership perspective, this report makes me feel good about our decision. There are plenty of other comparisons showing the impressive reliability of the Tesla network and I mentioned this in my original post about why we chose Tesla. The market is going to look very different by the time we’re ready to by another vehicle so who knows what we will choose at that point.
One of Tesla’s strengths is their battery technology. Companies have tried to make EVs for decades, but batteries were always the sticking point. Now that we have crossed an inflection point with the batteries, the EV revolution has begun. But it turns out that there other great uses for that same battery technology too.
A recent video from Wendover Productions does a great job of explaining the complexities of the electrical grid, but a quick summary is that today even though we have more renewable energy in use, things like wind and solar rely on natural phenomenon and make it difficult to match demand. So we rely on fossil fuel “peaker plants” that fire up quickly when demand is high. A more ideal solution would be to store energy, but that’s a challenge. This is where Tesla comes in.
Tesla provides a solution called “Megapacks“. These are effectively giant installations of their batteries that act as buffer for the electrical grid. Some of their installations provide over 1 GWh which is enough to power all the homes in San Francisco for 6 hours. So these projects aren’t generally going to power an entire city by themselves, but used in conjunction with other types of power, it can be that extra buffer under heavy load or when a natural disaster hits.
It doesn’t stop with giant installations though. Every time the power flickers at my house, I wish I had a Tesla PowerWall. These batteries sit on the wall of your house and are generally used in conjunction with a solar installation on your roof. If you have a lot of people in your area with these batteries, you effectively have a distributed Megapack. So Tesla is getting into the business of providing virtual power plants. Each homeowner can feed small amounts of electricity from their batteries back into the grid and get paid for it.
Electric vehicle batteries last a very long time. One Tesla Model S owner is closing in on 1 million miles with only one battery replacement (covered under warranty). But those batteries do wear out eventually. While they might not be up to the task of charging and discharging every day to move a car around, they’re still great for electrical grid use. There was a recent story about someone taking a battery out of a wrecked Tesla and using it in his house for 4 years.
When I read these stories, it’s hard not to think back to battery powered toys of the 80s. Fresh batteries would go into a tiny little device and wear out seemingly immediately. Dad got good at wiring power adapter jacks into all of our battery powered toys to avoid endlessly buying new batteries and we got good at figuring out how to adjust the wall wart to produce the right voltage for whatever we were playing with at the time. Battery tech has come so far that we’re now able to power hundreds or thousands of homes with it for hours at a time. it opens up so many interesting opportunities!
One of the features we really enjoy on our Escape are the driver memory buttons. We both drive the car fairly often and we are very different sizes. Hitting the memory button automatically adjusts the side mirrors and the seat. Since we use it so often, I’m very excited for driver profiles in a Tesla. When you get in, you select your profile and it will not only store the mirror and seat position but also the steering wheel position and countless other things like mirror auto fold, cruise follow distance, acceleration mode, steering mode (comfort/normal/sport), stopping mode (creep/roll/hold), seat heat, walk away door locks, navigation settings, temperature, air vent direction, and much more. Now these settings are also getting synced up to the cloud so even if you rent a Tesla, you can apply all your profile settings!
If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you know that one of my criteria whenever I buy a new gadget is whether or not it has an API that I can connect to. I want to have access to all my data! Today I have apps running that collect weights from our digital scale, temperatures and runtime from our thermostat, runtimes from our irrigation controller, the list of beers I’ve tried, how much water our house uses by the minute, how much power we use by the day, and a few other things. I used to log every trip we took in our cars too before the service that I was using died. So when I looked into an API for Tesla, I got excited.
Tesla doesn’t officially offer an API but there’s obviously one available since you connect to the car with your phone. There are a few popular services which let you use that API to get nearly endless amounts of data from your car. I’ll probably end up using TeslaMate but TeslaFi is an option if you don’t want to host it yourself. These services pull down all the data from the API and store it for you to generate even more charts than what the Tesla gives you by default. This YouTube video demos the capabilities early in the video and then goes into information about setting it up. He demos it in the browser inside the car but you could view the info from anywhere. Imagine having a log of everywhere you drove, how much energy you used on each trip, and details like how long the seat heaters were used on each trip.
Pretty much everything in a Tesla is connected into the computer. Even opening the glove box requires a button press on the screen. At first that might seem unnecessary, but when you go that route, it opens up a ton of new capabilities. For example, now you can set up a pin code that must be entered to open your glove box. Or instead of just having a button to retract your mirrors, because it’s hooked into that central computer, you can tell the Tesla to automatically fold your mirrors in or out as you approach or leave your home. The same is true for your garage door opener (if you add the Homelink accessory.) There’s a pedestrian warning speaker on the outside of the car, but you can play Spotify music through it while you’re washing the car. And since all of this stuff is controlled by a computer, you can do a lot of these things from the app on your phone too.
The phone isn’t just for running the app though. It can also serve as the key to get into your car. It connects to your car via Bluetooth as you walk up, unlocks the car, and lets you start driving. Just put your foot on the brake to “start” the car and you’re off! It takes “keyless entry” to a new level. There isn’t even a key! (There’s also a card you can keep in your wallet as a backup or you can even purchase a fob if you really want one.)
So yes, some of the scenarios are silly, but I love the open world of possibilities. Instead of trying to predict every button or feature that needs to be added, everything gets plugged into the central computer. If users want some new integration between components, it can be added in software and blasted out to everyone’s car automatically.
Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday! Let’s talk about range anxiety. It’s the most common topic when people hear that we’re buying an electric car. “What happens when you run out of battery?” When someone asks me that, I usually ask “When was the last time you ran out of gas?” And that can be followed up with “Would you have run out of gas if your car was magically filled up every morning when you woke up?”
Everything in the car is built to help ensure that you never run out of battery. If you set your destination, you’ll be automatically routed to chargers along the way if you’re even close to not making it. And if you ignore the warnings, the car will become increasingly annoying at reminding you that you’re making bad choices. Pretty much the only way you can run out of battery is to do it on purpose.
But ok, let’s assume that you are somehow out for a drive and you magically end up with no battery. Then what? The first step is to call Tesla Roadside Assistance. If it was a car issue, they’ll take care of you, and if it was your own mistake, they’ll still help you but you’ll end up paying the bill. The likely response is that your car will get put on a flatbed and towed to a charger. After a few minutes at the charger, the car can be unloaded and you’re on your way.
When our Escape had a dead battery in our garage, we had to get towed to the dealer and I realized that I didn’t know how to get it out of the garage onto the truck. It’s a keyless ignition system so how do I turn on the ignition to put it in neutral? I finally found a “brake shift interlock” that solved the problem. There’s a similar procedure for a Tesla. You need to charge up the 12v battery enough to power the screen so you can put it in tow mode. Then it can be pulled up onto the flatbed. There’s a procedure for getting into the frunk mechanically and getting to the 12v battery charge points.
EVs can generally be charged by generators too as long as they are a nicer generator that puts out a clean sine wave. You probably just need a few miles of charge to get to a real charger. As EVs become more common, there will be more roadside assistance vehicles driving around with this option.
So sure, it could theoretically happen. I could theoretically run out of gas too, but I don’t worry about that. If range anxiety was a real thing, I doubt that all four of Teslas cars would be in Consumer Reports’s list of the 10 most satisfying cars (and three of the top 4 spots are Teslas!) Want range anxiety to go away? Buy an EV.
Our upcoming Model Y, like all Teslas, come with some self-driving features but others are optional. The term “Autopilot” has a lot of features that may or may not be included with any given Tesla so in this post, I’ll try to demystify what they mean.
All Teslas come with Traffic Aware Cruise Control. This is very similar to what is found on a lot of other cars, though it’s fancier than cars that I’ve owned. When you engage cruise control, it will attempt to drive at the speed you’ve set. The max speed can be easily adjusted with the thumb scroll on the right side of the steering wheel. If a car in front of you is going slower than the max speed, it will follow at whatever distance you’ve configured. You can also configure the cruise control to always be set to X mph over the speed limit or X% over the speed limit. The cruise control will automatically adjust to the current speed limits. The car will automatically begin to slow down for situations like exit ramps (it uses the average speed of cars that have gone before you) or if someone pulls out in front of you. It will even bring you to a complete stop if the car in front of you stops. If you’re following a slow vehicle and you use your turn signal to switch lanes, the car will automatically speed up to your desired speed if no one is in front of you. I use cruise control a lot but frequently end up disengaging it to deal with traffic so I think I’m really going to enjoy this feature.
All Teslas also come with Autosteer. After the cruise control is engaged by clicking down on the right stalk, clicking down again will enable autosteer. Autosteer is recommended to be used on highways and interstates, but it can be enabled on almost all roads. This is a differentiator from systems like “Blue Cruise” which only work on specific roads. The autosteer system does what it sounds like: it steers the vehicle for you. We tried this out on our test drive and it was creepy and awesome at the same time. You must keep your hand on the wheel at all times and give it a little tug every 30 seconds or so to let it know that you’re still paying attention. If you really drive hands off and ignore what’s going on, you’ll get progressively stronger warnings until the system disables itself. (Drunk drivers have found themselves pulled over on the side of the road automatically.) The system isn’t perfect but from reading reviews, people almost unanimously agree that it reduces stress especially on long drives. You don’t realize how much effort it takes to just stay in your lane for hours at a time until you don’t have to do it anymore. I don’t know how much use we’ll get out of this feature around town, but it makes me excited to take a road trip and let the car handle a lot of the driving for me.
There are other features like Autopark, Lane Assist and Collision Avoidance Assist which have multiple options that can be configured. For example, maybe I just want a chime if I’m drifting out of my lane in most cases, but if I’m drifting into oncoming traffic and a collision is imminent than take over and get me back into my lane.
The next big features is commonly referred to as the Full Self Driving (FSD) beta but it includes things like Navigate on Autopilot, Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control, and Smart Summon. These features are not enabled by default and currently cost $10,000 extra. Smart Summon tells your Tesla to move to your location. It will exit its parking spot and come to you. I could see this being a fun party trick but the car moves too slowly or gets too confused in busy parking lots to be useful. The first two are the ones that are making all the news. With these features, you can get in your car, pick a destination, and let your car drive you there. You are still responsible and need to have your hands on the wheel but it will change lanes, make turns, and stop for traffic signals. The $10,000 price tag is hefty and most buyers do not opt for it, but Tesla is now offering a $200/month subscription service to temporarily enable them. This works because all the cars have the required hardware in them.
The Full Self Driving feature is still in beta and honestly, it’s probably a poor choice of name. This is generally considered to be a Level 2 self driving feature. The levels range from 0-5 and at level 2, there’s still a lot of responsibility on the driver. Tesla is furiously working to move up the levels, but for now “full self driving” is aspirational.
Waymo is one of the leaders in this space. They’re probably a level 4. If you’re in Phoenix, you can call a Waymo self-driving taxi to your location, get in the back seat, and then proceed to your destination with no human driver. (If you’re intrigued by this idea, check out Malcom Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast episode titled I Love You Waymo.) It’s only level 4 because it works in a ring fenced area of Phoenix. You can’t tell it to drive you across the state, but like Tesla, they’re working hard to improve.
The tech side of this is amazing. Tesla has billions of hours of driving footage form their cars and they use this to train their models over and over again. They’re building their own supercomputers that specialize in these types of computations and employ armies of the smartest AI engineers. They held an impressive AI Day event in August and you can either watch the full event or get a 19 minute version of it.
While the tech and the enormous amounts of computing power are exciting to me, I’m also excited about the safety aspect. While it’s uncomfortable, the safety records of these systems already put humans to shame. 80-90% of people think they are an above average driver so it’s no surprise that people think they’ll drive better than a computer, but if you’re in that camp, watch that AI day footage and tell me that you’re processing that much information about your environment every second without a single lapse of attention. With so many Teslas on the road, there is already plenty of data to show how much safer it is to let computers drive. As of April the NHTSA says there is an accident every 484,000 miles, but if you’re driving a Tesla with Autopilot engaged, there’s only an accident every 4,190,000 miles. It’s not a totally fair comparison because there are some situations where Autopilot won’t engage, but still, they are approaching 10x better safety than humans. It doesn’t stop there though. Tesla is continuously improving and pushing out software updates on a regular basis to all the cars. They track the accident rates and it keeps going down as they improve. The computers have a lot of hubris to overcome, but the data is on their side.
So while it seems futuristic to have a car steering for you, the future is now… and Tesla has been doing it since 2015. With the rate at which they are progressing, it’s not hard to imagine that by the time I’m retired and too old to drive safely, I won’t have to drive at all, but I’ll still be able to get around.
Before we decided to order the Model Y, I spent a lot of time researching the charging options to understand what kind of work would need to be done in our garage.
Teslas come with a mobile charger which fits in a small bag. It has a standard 110v plug adapter and a 20 foot cable. On the Model Y, that’s good for about ~3 hours of range per hour. That’s not something that you can rely on for regular usage, but in a pinch, you could use it to get enough juice to make it to a regular charging station.
When we had the transfer switch installed for our generator, I had the electrician add a 220v 20 amp breaker for the table saw. That circuit will give us ~14 miles of range per hour. That’s probably the minimum I would be comfortable with, but it’s easily a workable situation. Our typical daily usage will be around 80 miles per day and we are done driving around 4pm in the afternoon. So by 10pm we would have already recovered what we used during the day. My current plan is to install the NEMA 6-20 receptacle between two of the garage doors and have a hanger there for the cord. The only downside to this plan is that it will be on the same circuit as the table saw. Ideally the Tesla would have a dedicated circuit, but for now, my plan is to disconnect the charger when I’m woodworking.
If that gets annoying, the next option is to have an electrician come out and install a subpanel. Our current panel is so full that we cannot fit another 220 breaker. The subpanel would give me room to add a 50amp line with a NEMA 14-50 receptacle. That would bump us up to 29 miles of charging per hour.
It’s tempting to do the subpanel now. 1) There are some federal and Washington state tax breaks for installing home charging equipment. 2) It opens up the possibility of some other things I want to add to our panel like a whole house surge protector and per circuit usage monitoring. 3) It would be good to have at resale time. But for now it’s a chunk of money that can wait until we have the Tesla in the garage and decide that we need it.
There’s one other home charging option and that is the Tesla Wall Connector. It’s a dedicated Tesla charger and, when connected to a 60amp circuit, it will provide 42 miles of charging to the Model Y per hour. That charger maxes out at about 48-kW. For comparison, a Tesla super charger peaks at 250-kW which results in 150 miles of range in about 15 minutes. If we somehow forget to charge up the car and don’t have enough juice to get through our day, we’re less than 3 miles from the nearest supercharger.
So for today, all I’ve done is order the NEMA 6-20 charge adapter. They have been out of stock for months but recently became available. I ordered one already to make sure I’m not stuck when the Model Y finally arrives. I will need to run some cable and add the new receptacle too but that will be a fun project as we prepare for the arrival of our new car next summer.
Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday! At the bottom of my incredibly long post about why we ordered a Model Y, I included the disclaimer that I own Tesla stock. One share to be specific. Buying individual stocks is a no-no for me. It’s a losing game. (If it was possible to be good at it, the game wouldn’t work.) But it felt like if we were going to own one of their cars, it would be fun to own a share of their stock. It’s a lot less dorky than buying a hat.
But as it turns out, through a lot of luck, I purchased the stock right before it went on the biggest run in the history of the stock market. (The green dot below is where I purchased.) Fortune.com did an article about how in 12 trading days, Tesla added more market cap than any other company in the history of capital markets. I bought the stock on October 15 and in the next 12 days, Tesla’s stock went up over 45%. The first jump came after they announced their Q3 earnings. Then a few days later Hertz announced that they were purchasing 100,000 Teslas for its rental fleet. That will mean Teslas make up 20% of their entire fleet. And all of those Teslas will be purchased at full price just like the rest of us. Yesterday it went back down because Elon announced that he’s selling a chunk of his stock either as some combination of freeing up capital to pay some of his taxes or to appease people who think rich people don’t pay enough.
The percentage increase isn’t a record, but Tesla was already so highly valued that this represented almost a $400 BILLION increase in the market value of their company. Tesla is now worth more than a trillion dollars making it one of 7 companies in the trillion dollar club.
For comparison, let’s look at the market value of some other car companies you might have heard of:
Ford: $77 billion
General Motors: $85 billion
Daimler: $93 billion
Fiat Chrysler: $64 billion
Toyota: $292 billion
Volkswagen: $87 billion
Tesla is at $1.15 TRILLION. That’s almost twice as much as all those other car companies combined.
Is it justified? Who knows. They keep raising prices and the order list keeps getting longer. They’re building out new factories, securing lithium deals in huge quantities to make batteries, and opening up their charging network to the world. Yes, their valuation seems very high right now, and I expect that at least some of the other car companies will eventually catch up, but they’ve got a long way to go to catch Tesla and it’s not like Tesla is resting on their laurels.
This feels like the time I walked into a casino, put $20 on red, won, and then walked out with my winnings… except I haven’t walked out yet.
Welcome to Tesla Tuesday! We’ll see how long the series last but there are a few things that might be interesting to share so I’ll put them up on Tuesdays.
Last Tuesday was the very long post about our rationale for ordering a Model Y. One thing that wasn’t in there was any mention of federal tax incentives. D.C. has been kicking around so many different options for most of this calendar year, that we made our purchase assuming that there won’t be any savings when we take delivery. Teslas don’t qualify for any of the current federal tax credits because Tesla has sold too many vehicles. The only thing we get here in Washington state is no sales tax on the labor for installing chargers in our homes.
Some of the variables in the proposals are caps on the MSRP of the vehicle, caps on the salary of the purchaser, whether or not unions were involved in the assembly of the vehicle, how much of it is made in America, how many EVs the company has sold previously, and differences in how the money is given back (tax credit, point of sale, etc.) These things change dramatically with every iteration so I don’t get too invested in any of them, but the current bill would give us between $7,500 or $10,000 back as a tax credit. It’s notable that this is currently worded as a non-refundable tax credit which means that if your tax bill is less than the credit, you don’t get the difference back in cash.
This whole thing is obviously fraught with politics. Plenty of union lobbyists are working to keep Tesla from getting any benefit. Additionally, each side of the aisle has their own views on government spending combined with thoughts about whether an incentive like this actually drives EV adoption and whether or not that’s good for the environment and/or for our citizens. I have my own thoughts about how the government takes my money and uses it, but whether I would personally vote for it or not, you can bet that if they’re handing out money, I will be taking advantage of it. Until then, I’m not holding my breath and I’m prepared to pay the number on the screen when we clicked Order.
Tyla and I are now the proud owners of a Tesla… order. Yep, we’re jumping into the battery powered vehicle game, but there are so many other orders in right now that the currently estimated delivery date is May.
It’s Electric Boogie Woogie Woogie!
Our Escape has around 95,000 miles on it. It should have more life in it, but we haven’t had the best relationship with it and it’s giving us more and more reasons to worry about it’s longevity. So we went car shopping and landed on a Tesla Model Y. Specifically, here’s what we ordered:
Model Y Long Range Dual Motor All-Wheel Drive
Deep Blue Metallic Paint
All Black Premium Interior
Five Seat Interior
Autopilot
There was a lot of research between “Hey, let’s buy a car” and “Hey, let’s get a Tesla.” So this post will get long, but I’ll go through a bunch of my questions, and if you have others, feel free to shoot them my way. Even though I will cite many references along the way, I’m not going to take the time to cite everything. I’m not here to convince you that you should do this too. This was a way to help me go through all the questions I had and organize my thought process. But if you’re EV curious, I think some of this will be helpful to you too.
How far does it go on a charge?
For me, electric vehicles were synonymous with “range anxiety”. But battery tech has improved rapidly and the Model Y that we ordered has an estimated range of 326mph. We rarely go more than 100 miles in a day (average is 80 on school days) so even if we keep our battery charge between 20% and 80% for maximum battery lifespan, we still have double what we need.
Are there chargers near me?
The short answer is yes, but we’ll rarely need them. We’ll only use chargers on a road trip, and when we’re on a road trip, the Tesla charging network is pretty hard to beat. The Tesla website shows all of their super charging stations. On top of that, Teslas can be charged at regular EV charging stations too.
This video shows an example of taking a Tesla, a Mustang Mach-E, and a gas car on a 1000 mile road trip. I’m sure not every trip with a non-Tesla EV would be that frustrating, but it certainly gives one example of how Tesla’s vertical integration is a bonus for owners.
How long does it take to charge?
If you stop at a super charger, you can get 30% battery life added in 9 minutes. 80% takes around 30 minutes. At home, it will be slower and it depends on the circuit that you’re charging from. The Tesla site has a handy chart that gives an estimate of the mileage gained per hour of charging. We’ll have a NEMA 6-20 adapter which means that our Model Y will recover our ~80 miles per day in 6 hours. Thankfully I had a a 220v 20amp circuit put in for the table saw and since I use that very infrequently, I’ll share the circuit for now, being careful to unplug the Tesla when I’m woodworking. We might add a dedicated higher-amp circuit in the future but that will likely require a subpanel so I’m not eager to jump on that project.
From my research, it seems like non-EV owners think about how long it takes to charge the battery and EV owners remember how long it used to take to fill up with gas including the drive to the gas station. EV owners comment on how every time they walk out to their car, it’s full. It’s like having someone stop by your house every night and fill up your cars with gas. There’s no waiting for the battery to charge because it usually happens when the car is in the garage and you’re doing other things. Assuming that a night of charging will refill what you used during the day, the only time you care about charge speed is when you’re on a road trip.
How much does it cost to charge?
The Model Y comes with a 75kWh battery. We pay $0.10/kWh so even if we charged it from 0-100% that is $7.50 (plus some lost electricity to heat, etc). Or if you’re trying to compare with gas prices, our Escape averages around 23mpg. It would cost $0.53 in electricity to power the Tesla for the same distance as a gallon of gas in the Escape.
What kind of maintenance is needed?
This is one of my favorite parts. There’s so little maintenance to be done. We’ll still need to buy new tires and maybe a bit more frequently since the car is heavier than a gas car, but other than the scheduled maintenance list is pretty bare. I thought electric cars went through lots of brakes, but the opposite seems to be true. When you lift off on the gas in a Tesla, the motors reclaim the energy meaning that you generally only use your brakes to stop the final few mph or in a panic situation. So we’ll need to replace our cabin air filter, rotate the tires, and that’s about it. It sounds like tires might need to be replaced more often but it’s hard to tell if that’s because the car is a bit heavier or because people like to experience the acceleration.
Which kinds of cars are better for the environment?
I almost didn’t include this in the list because my motivation is mostly monetary. But I did look into some of the claims that electric cars are worse for the environment than gas cars. It doesn’t take much looking to realize that electric wins out pretty easily. Even if the battery pack needs to be swapped out, the old one is mostly recycled. I’ll leave the rest of this to a short video and you can do your own research if this is a big point for you.
How would we take road trips?
I don’t know if I could make the EV leap if I didn’t have a second car, but we’ll still have the truck. I’m hoping to keep that around until it’s dead. Even with the extra gas price, we do love the extra room and easy packing for road trips. So if we ever need to take a trip and don’t want to mess with charging, the truck is our go-to vehicle anyway.
While driving, Tesla keeps an eye on your battery levels and where you’re planning to go so it can suggest charging stops. Their website has a similar trip planner. A long cross country trip adds up to a lot of stops, but when’s the last time I was more than 300 miles from home? So in almost all cases, a road trip would mean a stop for 20-30 minutes (or a couple 10 minute stops) to get us comfortably back home.
Let’s use Cannon Beach, OR as an example since that’s one of the longer trips we’d make. The trip planner says we would stop in Kelso, WA for 25 minutes on the way there and 35 minutes on the way back. But given how often my family needs to stop at the bathroom, I could easily see turning that into a few 10 minute stops along the way. But again, if we’re going to Cannon Beach, we’re probably taking the truck anyway.
How long does the battery last?
I thought battery packs would degrade pretty quickly, but Tesla warranties them for 8 years or 120,000 miles, whichever comes first with minimum 70% battery retention. That 70% number looks scary, but remember that’s the warranty line. If you look at actual data, Model 3’s and Model Y’s (similar battery packs) are going 400,000 before they hit 20% battery degradation. So even if the number is somewhere in between, it’s far enough out that by that point I’ll want newer battery technology anyway.
Does it drive itself?
Sort of. Let me break it down.
Drive it yourself like a normal car.
Engage cruise control. It is a “Traffic Aware Cruise Control” so the car will automatically slow down if someone pulls out in front of you, etc. You can adjust how closely you want to follow other cars on the highway if the car in front is going below your set speed.
Engage Auto Pilot. At this point, the car will steer for you too. Think of it like cruise control that includes both speed and steering. It will stay in the lane and adjust speed as necessary but you still need to change lanes, stop for stoplights, etc. Some people have described it as driving with a new teenage driver. You need to pay attention and it doesn’t always anticipate things until after the point where you get a little nervous. You still have to pay attention and the system will warn you and disengage if you’re not attentive, but it takes a lot of pressure off once you’re comfortable with it. This comes free with every Tesla, and it works on almost all streets, not just on “mapped roads” like most other car makers.
Full Self Driving. This option costs $10,000, not because it adds any hardware to the car, but because of the feature that it unlocks. With this option, you can tell the Tesla where you want to go and get end to end automated driving. It will stop at stoplights, change lanes on the highway, navigate to your parking spot, etc. This is also the feature that enables things like “summon” where your car will come to you in a parking lot. I love this tech and the incredible effort that’s going into it behind the scenes, but it’s too much money for me right now. Plus, we will have the option to subscribe on a monthly basis for $200, so maybe we’ll try it out at some point. The feature was very recently released in beta to a wider group of people, but it’s not something you can just jump in and use immediately. You still have to get selected for the beta based on your driving safety.
What’s the cost comparison between an electric car and a internal combustion car?
This is the big one. Aren’t Teslas for rich people? Is an EV really cheaper than a gas powered car? For me, it’s close enough to a gas car that it’s hard to say for sure. If I take a serious look at gas cars, I think we’d probably end up with a nice version of a Ford Escape. Pricing that out, the Model Y is about $20,000 more expensive. Let’s compare the two cars for a lifetime of 8 years because that is how long we’ve had our current Escape. The mileage numbers now are significantly different because Elijah goes to school 20 miles away (80 miles per day.)
At 18,000 miles/year and an average gas price of $3.50, the Escape would use about $22,000 in gas. (That gas price feels conservative to me if we’re talking about eight years but let’s go with it.) The Tesla would use $3,300 to go the same distance. We’re already in the same ballpark.
In the last 8 years, our Escape has cost us $4059 in service. The web gives numbers of $800-$1000/year for service on a gas vehicle but that is probably more true for cars when they are out of warranty. Estimates for Tesla service/year is in the $300-500 range. The exact numbers are difficult to pin down here, but the Tesla likely is coming out at least a couple thousand ahead here.
Now for a really difficult one: resale. How much is that car worth after 8 years? Fast forward 8 years into the future and my opinion is that it’s going to be a lot more expensive to drive a gas vehicle as the switch to electric has really intensified. The market for gas vehicles will be dropping, but even ignoring all that, the resale values for Teslas is stronger than for Escapes.
Even if I take somewhat skeptical estimates in favor of gas vehicles, I at least end up with a comparison that is pretty even and the longer I drive that electric vehicle, the more the scales tip in its favor. The up front price tag looks huge and I have a hard time paying it, but if my experience is like most other people, it will pay off… and I’ll be having a lot of fun driving the electric vehicle while it’s paying off.
How do updates happen?
The car downloads updates frequently. Updates can include anything from new functionality in the infotainment center to better range through improved battery management or even adjustments to airbag deployment algorithms to make the car safer. It’s not like the cars we are used to buying that rarely, if ever, receive a software update.
And the exciting thing about Tesla building an EV from the ground up is that seemingly everything is connected to the computer so when someone has a good idea bout a new feature to add to the car, it’s just a software update. For example, the Tesla has folding mirrors. And the Tesla has GPS. That’s not unusual… but you can program your Tesla to automatically fold in the mirrors when you get close to your garage and unfold them after you leave. Or how about that reverse warning speaker that’s on the bottom of the car? They released an update so you can play Spotify from it while you’re washing your car or at a tailgate. The possibilities are endless.
Can I watch video on the big screen in the car?
Yes. You can watch Netflix, YouTube, and other providers while the car is parked. And remember that this is all battery power. So if you’re waiting to pick your kid up somewhere, you can be sitting there with the heat or AC on, watching a video. It’s not like the old days where you’d be freezing or sweating because it wasn’t worth running the engine just for climate control and entertainment.
The infotainment unit also includes built in Spotify (though you need to connect to your account). You could still pair your phone via Bluetooth if you want, but you can also just have the car use it’s own cellular connection.
The cellular connection for the car costs $10/month and enables traffic display on the screen along with video and music streaming. Alternatively, you can tether your phone via WiFi and let your car use your phone’s internet connection without paying the $10/month to Tesla. I wasn’t thrilled about this fee, but we already pay for Sirius so we’ll drop that and add this for a few bucks more. Or maybe we’ll get to the point where we always pay for unlimited data on our phones and then we can drop the Tesla subscription and use tethering instead.
Does Tesla accept trade-ins or offer financing?
Yes! Tesla does offer financing, and for trade-ins, you get a quote right from their website. So just like any other car dealer (at least in our state), that means you pay less sales tax on the new car. The quote isn’t good forever so you need to keep updating it while you wait for your car to arrive. On delivery date, you drive in your old car and drive out your new car. Or you can sell the car to Carvana, CarMax, or a local dealer. So far, all the online sales sites have given me similar estimates. I’ll check with my local dealer when the actual delivery date gets closer. They’ll have to be significantly more than what Tesla offers since I’ll be saving on sales tax if I trade it to Tesla too. And if you’re wondering, Tesla immediately resells the cars unless you’re trading in another Tesla.
How long does it take to get a Tesla?
Tesla offers shorter waiting time for higher margin vehicles, but if we order today (October 2021), the default Model Y has an estimated delivery of August 2022. If you pick any upgrades on the Model Y, then the estimated delivery date is May 2022. These dates are due to some combination of extreme numbers of incoming orders and supply shortages.
On a side note, this article from Fortune is an interesting read about why Tesla isn’t as impacted by the chip shortage as other car manufacturers.
Why Tesla?
I said “Tesla” a lot in the answers above, but why not another EV provider? Ford is coming out with the Mach-E and the Lightning. Nissan has had the Leaf for years. Chevy has the Bolt. Volkswagen seems like they’re a pretty strong contender in the EV market, so why not one of those?
Longest history
Tesla has been building electric vehicles for a very long time. The first Tesla roadsters were sold in 2008, and they aren’t moving at a slow pace. Some of the big automakers scoff at them and say building a electric car is a lot harder than making some batteries and motors. That’s true and Tesla has had their struggles, but build an electric car is also a lot harder than building a chassis and suspension. The big automaker have a long way to go to catch up in battery technology and production, and even though they have a lot of factories built already, EVs require a lot of new materials to source, particularly for batteries. Will they be able to find enough materials to make use of their big factories?
And of course it’s not like the big car companies are immune from quality problems either. Ford mocked Tesla for the recall for the glass roofs that could come off in some circumstances and then had to eat crow when the Mach-E had the same issue.
Car and Driver did a 1000 mile comparison of EVs from all the companies and Tesla didn’t just take the top spot, they took the top THREE spots.
Safest
When you look at a gas powered car, they have a giant engine block under the hood which isn’t very good at absorbing impact. EVs have huge amounts of crumple zones in the front and back. On top of that, Tesla has tons of data about every accident every one of its cars has been in. They use that data to continuously refine their models and they can even improve the safety of the car through over-the-air updates. The Model 3 was the safest car ever tested by the NHTSA and if you watch the video linked in the previous sentence, you’ll hear them say that the NHTSA requirements are just a drop in the bucket compared to the real world situations that they are testing.
Most popular
The Model was the first EV to sell 1 million units and the Model Y looks to be on pace to hit get there even faster. Europe is much farther down the EV conversion road than the US, but over there, there are more Teslas sold (15.3%) than diesels (13.8%). Yes, you read that right. 15% of all cars sold in Europe in September were Teslas. The Model 3 was the most popular car (not just EVs) sold in Europe in September. In Norway, 80% of vehicles sold are electric and over half of those are Teslas. Globally more Model 3’s are sold than other cars in its class like BMW 3’s, Mercedes C-Class, and Audi A4.
Anecdotally, driving around this area, we average seeing about one Tesla per minute on the roads and there are more and more sold every day. It took us a month and a half just to get a test drive! Demand is through the roof in our area. (In fairness, our first test drive was scheduled right at the end of Q3 and Tesla made a huge push to deliver EVERYTHING to help their numbers so we had to reschedule.)
Highest market cap
There’s generally something to the wisdom of the crowds and the stock market has given Tesla a higher market cap than all the other car makers combined and they are currently one of the few companies in the world to be valued at over a billion dollars. Hertz recently put in a $4.3 billion order to make 20% of their fleet be Teslas. All this investment doesn’t mean that Tesla is definitely going to win, but it’s a positive sign.
Car buying experience
We walked into a dealership twice and walked out on our own time without anyone making us feel awkward or pushing a sale on us. When we finally decided to order the car, my biggest decision was whether to place the order from my phone or my computer. The car buying experience is magnificent compared to the hassle of haggling with a dealer on price, trade-in, warranties, and financing. The experience inside a Tesla store isn’t an accident. It’s a careful ballet to make sure they don’t cross into illegal territory by talking about sales. This video does a good job explaining the laws around dealerships and why they continue to exist for other car manufacturers.
American made
Everyone likes to say they are American made but the reality is that today’s cars are global creations and some percentage is done in the US. Tesla takes two of the top three spots for being most American made.
Why the Model Y?
The price of the Model 3 is what sucked me in. Back then it was under $40k. The comparison to a gas power car gets REALLY easy at that price point. But then I started thinking that I would like to have all wheel drive which bumped up the price. Then I started looking at the size difference with the Y and thought about how much we’ve enjoyed the space in the Escape. So we bumped up to a Y (which is currently only sold with all wheel drive so that works out.) The Model 3 and the Model Y are very similar in construction so most of the benefits I had found of the 3 generally apply to the Y as well. It was hard to swallow a sticker price that high but I kept reminding myself that I was optimizing for the total cost of the vehicle over its lifetime… and I was getting really excited about owning a Tesla after doing all the research!
Why choose those options?
There aren’t a lot of choices to make when ordering a Tesla, but we decided to pay extra for the blue paint instead of the default free white color. There are so many Teslas around here that it’s nice to not have the default color and we both really liked the blue. I’ve always wished we had paid for a nicer color on the Escape so this time we’re just going for it.
We were very close to paying for the 20″ black rims and the tow hitch too but decided against it in the end. The black rims look fantastic but tires are more expensive for it and it’s a lot of extra money for something we could change later if we wanted to.
The tow hitch was a similar cost decision. Tesla will add the same thing for us later for just a little bit more money or I can install an aftermarket hit myself for ~$600 cheaper. I don’t see us ever towing anything with it, but it’s a great place to add a bike rack. I’ve already thought about adding a tow hitch bike rack to the truck to make packing for trips easier, and the receiver is the same size on the Tesla so one bike rack would work on both vehicles.
What could go wrong with this plan?
The biggest concern I have is that my math is wrong. Predicting the future of gas prices, how long a car will last, and how much service it will need is pretty flaky. I spent a lot of time debating whether we should try to push the Escape into the 160k-180k range or take advantage of the high resale rates now and dump it. In my research, there appears to be a big drop off in the longevity of the Escape in 2013 (our year) when they switched to the new Ecoboost engine. They made some goofy design decisions in the first years after the switch that are giving people fits. I’m not a mechanic and maybe it would still be cheaper to keep it even if we had to replace the transmission or the engine. I will probably always wonder.
From the political angle, there is lots of news about Tesla’s self-driving features, especially with the recent appointment of a very anti-Tesla NHTSA senior safety advisor. Tesla is taking a different approach to a lot of things so it’s not impossible that some laws could come down that crack down on the features that we already paid for (like Autopilot.)
I’m also assuming that by the time we are ready to sell this car sometime in the 2030’s major car manufacturers will either have stopped producing gas vehicles or the end is near (for most common consumer situations.) I’m expecting tax penalties for gas vehicles and Washington state has already said they want to be one of the first to implement those. So if we were to buy another gas car today, I would buy it with the knowledge that I probably won’t get much for it when I try to resell it. Or maybe they’ll be hot commodities if it’s hard/expensive to buy new ones. If any of that doesn’t pan out and this EV thing dies like it did last time then I made a bad choice.
When I was in high school, I read a book with survey results from a bunch of people who were self-made millionaires. (I think Chris Hogan’s Everyday Millionaires book is a similar, but updated, book to whatever I actually read.) That book from the 90s said that a huge percentage of self-made millionaires had never bought a car for more than $30,000. Obviously that needs to be adjusted for inflation now, but that sentiment has always stuck with me. Cars are generally a terrible thing to spend money on. Investing the same amount of money as a car would have a huge positive impact on retirement. So buying any new car is a huge decision for me and even more so when I’m paying more up front and hoping to recoup it over time.
Another big issue is that Tesla could fail. If they go down the tubes, I don’t expect the government to come bail them out. They clearly have no problem with demand for their product, but if they can’t ramp up their supply side, the whole thing could come crashing down. They have two giant new factories coming online in Berlin and Austin but there will have to be more in the works too since the lead time on a new factory is so long.
Yet another risk is that our current car could die before we get the new one. What do we do if we have to put another grand or two into the Escape before our Model Y is ready for pickup? If we really get into a bind, we can cancel our Tesla order and choose another route. The lead time on the Tesla is one thing that makes this a challenging decision.
I have spreadsheets and lot of tossing and turning behind me. From this long post you can see where we landed on the decision. If you remember my F150 purchase post, you know that I heavily analyze all this stuff. This Tesla decision is definitely skewed toward the fun/luxury side but I also don’t think it’s a gratuitous or ostentatious purchase. Maybe it’s a couple years early to make the jump to EV, but in 3-5 years, I think this decision will be much less surprising or difficult. I’m willing to lean towards the future even if I can’t say with 100% certainty that this is a cost effective decision today.
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