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.
Well, if you need a new car, you need a new car. And at that point, yes, you pencil out the various estimated coats of ownership and you buy what makes sense for you. I guess I was reacting to what someone else above accurately characterizes as “impulse buying,” i.e., the mentality of “gas is crazy expensive so screw it I’m buying an EV.”. I for example don’t need a new car. I have two vehicles, one with 45k miles and one with 70k. Neither is at the end of its useful life. Let’s say Dementia Joe’s bass ackwards policies are costing me an extra $1500 per year. As much as I dislike doing so, it makes more economic sense for me to pay the damned extra $1500 than to spend $50k on a Tesla. If I keep my $50k and invest it, my average return might be 10% or $5k which more than pays for my costs of owning my gas guzzlers
Just out of curiosity I started looking into miles/kWh for Teslas, which led to a chart on energy costs of a Tesla vs. some representative ICE car they had chosen.
Ultimately, it would take the energy savings of the first 100,000 miles to pay for the installation of the home charging station.
“I have no idea if a Tesla could be driven that hard and if the battery pack would last through it.”
One of my friends drove a 2014 Tesla S until trading it in last year. Daily driver, a minimum of 60 miles. He was still getting 80% charge on that battery. He traded it in for a 2021 Model S in order to get upgrades that aren’t possible on a 2014.