You’re paying $30 more per week for gas, so go out and order a $60,000 electric vehicle. Makes total sense. Ha.
For some people, making that political statement is priceless.
For most of us, we would have to weigh the capital cost of the car, vs. costs of gasoline and maintenance on the car we already have, to decide if such a move makes dollars and cents.
But for some people, making the political statement regardless of dollars and cents, is what motivates them.
Me as an example…. Before I retired, a job I had had me commuting 120-150 miles per day with occasional day trips out of town that would 200-300 miles. Driving that kind of miles per day on Gawd Awful Atlanta interstates and city streets, I put a premium on stress reduction and a cushy cabin so drove my Lincoln most of the time. This was a actually my midrange vehicle with respect to cost to drive. My Xterra Offroad was quite a bit more to operate on fuel and maintenance. My son's souped up Civic hatchback was the least expensive to drive but looking up at the underside of a semi truck while sitting with your butt 12 inches above the pavement was not all that comforting.
So…. Let say I was still making this commute at today's costs…. A Tesla would cost me something like $120-150 less per week. 52 x $120 = $6240 per year and let's just SWAG it to $7000 per year to account for weekend use around town and miscellaneous.
If I kept the Tesla for 10 years, that would be about $70,000 cost savings if the cost differential stayed the same. I have no idea if a Tesla could be driven that hard and if the battery pack would last through it. The Lincoln went through my driving then a couple of years of my son's before it left the family at 180K miles. I also wrapped up about 170K miles on the Xterra and 10K miles on the Civic rice burner.