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Comment by radium3d | Hacker News Reader

Tesla focused its pricing on drivers of gasoline vehicles, and their gas cost savings estimates are actually quite low compared to the real savings you will achieve. It was annoying when you already drive an EV and are buying a Tesla though to have to uncheck the savings option to see the pre savings prices. They changed it now so by default it only includes the $7500 and no longer automatically checks the gas savings.

EV (133mpge) 0.045 cents per mile (Tesla Model 3 SR+ RWD) Gas (26mpg) 0.155 cents per mile (Subaru crosstrek)

Based on my experience I highly recommend everyone buy any EV if you drive an ICE vehicle. Even charging at DC fast chargers still saves money, but if you can charge at home, you are really missing out on savings big time and it's time to look seriously into it.

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>their gas cost savings estimates are actually quite low compared to the real savings you will achieve

I ran the numbers for myself and they literally weren't. They overestimated how many miles/yr I drove and underestimated how much I pay for electricity. There's plenty of other reasons to prefer EVs, but if you live somewhere with expensive electricity then fuel cost isn't one of them. In the sedan world you're likely better off with a Prius but even small SUV are getting 30-40 mpg nowadays.

As an asterisk, I live in California where gas prices are ~25% above the national average but electricity costs are more like double/triple. YMMV which is why you shouldn't trust Tesla's numbers or anyone else's except your own

> but even small SUV are getting 30-40 mpg nowadays.

The Pacific Northwest begs to differ. With all the hills in Seattle my subcompact 1.6L Turbo barely got 20MPG driving around like a grandma.

Our electricity is cheap, but I drive less than 5000 miles a year so I'm not making the money back on my EV basically ever.

You should have gotten a used Nissan Leaf. Perfect in town car.

So you're an outlier who drives well below the average miles per year in the USA. Obviously this isn't going to work for every customer but it IS a conservative estimate for the average.

> Based on my experience I highly recommend everyone buy any EV if you drive an ICE vehicle. Even charging at DC fast chargers still saves money, but if you can charge at home, you are really missing out on savings big time and it's time to look seriously into it

In the US this depends on where you live. There are several places where home electricity is expensive enough and gas is cheap enough that a hybrid is cheaper.

I live in one of the most expensive areas (SoCal) and it's /still/ cheaper than gas.

There's a bit of an illusion here because gas prices take into account a tax for road maintenance, which EVs are currently avoiding. Eventually the system will have to catch up because road maintenance requires money.

While electric vehicles do cause more road wear, applying that tax to most consumer vehicles is the joke. Road wear is completely dominated by semi-trucks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

The simplest method is to raise the HVUT, but we have so much data, we could assess miles driven * axel weight and charge a graduated fee based on that.

The WA state tabs on my Leaf which weighed less than Volvo station wagon were literally 4x higher because of EV taxes.

You're talking about cars right, not vehicles in general?

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