Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

It's impressive, really. This is the year that I've really started to see Teslas around here (Boston- there's a showroom in the Natick Mall). On the one hand, the car is risky: expensive battery, limited range / charging options, luxury car service cost. On the other, they found a niche: the coastal rich who are willing to use them as their daily commuting car.

They are cheaper than Maseratis, which I've also been seeing a lot of lately. When looked at this way, people are willing to take the risk on the cheaper car. Even so, if car sales are a zero-sum game, I think BMW is the one being hurt by them the most.

View on HN

> luxury car service cost

I was under the impression that they have less service costs due to fewer moving parts. Or maybe it comes out all the same since there's less to service, but when something does need servicing it's more expensive than usual.

Tesla charges $600 for their annual service, or $450 if you prepay four years in advance. This is a bit high, especially considering that they do very little. However it's not mandatory, especially the first year.

What's likely to be cheaper is long-term repair costs. No muffler replacements, no leaking head gaskets, no timing belts making an attempt at freedom.... But whether that actually works out remains to be seen.

They actually do an impressive amount that they don't have to (my dad is a Tesla fan/early adopter and has a Roadster, Model S and probably will get a Model X eventually).

When he took the Model S in they added that metal plate to the bottom (from that one crash that got a lot of press), swapped out all the door handles for new ones because people online complained that in rain sometimes the old ones wouldn't retreat into the car and changed a few other things I'm forgetting (at no cost).

I can't really think of another car company that proactively adds a bunch of stuff to the car for free as a part of routine maintenance. Of course this is in addition to all of the over the air software updates too.

In all fairness, most of that is warranty repairs. The initial door handles, for example, had reliability problems worse than your dad saw, which meant all of them ended up being replaced. (My car ended up having one replaced twice, because apparently the new version also has a problem, albeit more minor.)

Adding backup lines to the backup display, on the other hand, to 2 year old cars, that was unusual. It was purely a software upgrade.

Tesla has a couple options with notoriously pricey long-term maintenance: air suspension and tires on the 21" wheels.

True, but if you choose those (really unnecessary) options you should know what you're getting into.

Air suspension is unnecessary? Seems useful for a car that benefits from a low drag coefficient.

The efficiency gain from lowering the suspension on the highway is pretty small, to the point that it's really tough to measure. It might be a few percent at best, so in the neighborhood of 10 extra miles on a 100% charge, if that.

All that long-term stuff is real, for sure, but mostly in the 7+ year range. I'd love to have a car where the the engine didn't start disintegrating part by part at the 10 year point, but I'm afraid with an electric I'd just have swapped alternators and water pumps for a decaying battery.

Battery longevity and replacement cost is a huge question mark right now, for sure. The data so far looks good (degradation is below what's been predicted) but trying to look 10 years out for a car that started shipping in 2012 is tough.

> No muffler replacements, no leaking head gaskets, no timing belts making an attempt at freedom

FWIW I've only ever changed the oil on my 2006 Ford Focus.

You should have at least had transmission oil changed, fuel and air filters changed, brake pads and rotors (I count this because the brakes on an electric car driven by a normal person will last 150,000 miles or more), and probably new spark plugs by now.

How Many miles have you done?

You better change at least the timing belt, transmission oil and sparks plugs if you hope it to keep running well into the future.

I've heard this said, but I don't believe it. Teslas have many of the things that normally break on cars: tires, rims, brake pads / rotors / calipers, suspension, wipers, windshield, wheel bearings, AC.

Tesla does not have a transmission, so there's one thing. Also no muffler / exhaust system.

Tesla does not have an IC engine, but what's likely to fail on an IC engine? A bunch of things that fail often are cheap ($100 - $200): starter battery, ignition coils. Some wear items are often more expensive because difficult to replace: timing belt, water pump, alternator. It's possible but rare that you could have something really go wrong: cracked cylinder head: maybe $2000.

Now what does Tesla have? Electric motor- maybe same failure rate as an alternator? High power electronics- maybe same failure rate as something like an ignition coil? Battery- very expensive wear item.

Consumer Reports and Edmunds are reportedly unimpressed with the reliability on their 30,000 mile tests. More problems requiring service than most cars.

Brakes are used far less in a Tesla than a normal car. Regenerative breaking means they wear very slowly. Besides tires, I have yet to pay anything for servicing my Teslas — combined 36k miles on them. The electric motors have MTBFs in the 100s of thousands of miles.

As in any modern luxury car, the parts most prone to failure are the 'luxury' features like powered accessories, air suspension and electric systems. Tesla has plenty of those, if not more than a comparable competitive products like let's say a Mercedes S class or Audi A8. Even though the latter have also engines and transmissions that can fail they usually don't and it's fairly rare to have those replaced or repaired (at least in the first 5-10 years/100k miles as these cars are usually not owned for longer than that by their original owners).

On the one side, yes. On the other though, the battery will need to be replaced after 7-10 years of service; that's going to be a very pricey affair, and right now I think that it'll seriously affect the secondhand market in the next couple of years, and/or the Tesla's resale value. You know, like electronics which become obsolete / too expensive to repair for most people after at best five years.

Tesla is warrantying the battery for 8 years, so the earliest you would pay for a battery replacement would be the 9th year- but they might very well last much longer.

An important thing to note is that a lot of countries - esp. in Europe - heavily subsidize pure electric cars (and low-emission cars to a lesser extent) thanks to CO2 emissions laws / targets.

I live in the Netherlands; for lease cars, you as an employee need to add a percentage of the car's value every year as income (because the company pays for your lease car, so it's part of your wage, etc). For regular gasoline cars, that percentage can go up to 25%; for purely electric cars, it's 0% (or used to be anyway, I'm not up to date on current laws). Doing all the maths, a Tesla can be half as expensive - or even less - than a similarly-priced petrol car.

Anecdotally the reason I've heard a lot of execs switching their 7/5-series Bimmers over to Teslas, is that they can use the HOV lanes at any time. Around here that can save up to an hour of commute.

While the subsidies aren't nearly as extensive here, you do get a credit. There's also free charging stations in most of the suburbs, so electrical cost is near nill if you plug in all day at work, and your car is pretty much always fully charged.

But all that is dwarfed by the opportunity cost of the time highly paid professionals were sitting in traffic.

Instantaneous torque from startup also makes it feel blazing fast (the torque-curve is very different in IC vs. electric engines.)

In Denmark a Tesla is about the price of a BMW 5-series or an Audi A6 due to the tax structure.

The tax exempt for the electric cars is ending this year though and will not be renewed in its current form.

I wanted to purchase either Tesla or 5 Series BMW in 2014, I picked a BMW at the end.

I went for a test drive and while in terms of ride quality Tesla is not far behind BMW but in terms of interior comfort and quality BMW is miles ahead, Tesla inside looks and feels like a Toyota or Nissan, I doubt anybody who likes Bimmers or Mercs for their interior quality will go with a Tesla, nevermind Maserati, and if Tesla decides to make interior better - it will certainly raise the price a lot which will make it even less comparible.

I think it's unfair to compare Tesla to Maserati (Ghibli), BMW or Mercs, I think Tesla is not for somebody who otherwise would have purchased Maserati or bimmer, but for those who otherwise would have purchased Toyota or Lexus and saved up a bit and went with Tesla instead.

> I think BMW is the one being hurt by them the most.

Well, I've also seen plenty of BMW electric cars on roads these days. I believe it is their i-series of cars. http://www.bmwusa.com/bmw/BMWi

They're not just the coastal rich. I've seen a couple of them around my city in the Midwest - with a population in the area of roughly 200,000.

They've even got them here in Canada! Victoria BC of all places.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com