Neat vehicle and woo for the Delorian style gull-wing doors on it. That said, while I do enjoy what Tesla's doing and the way they innovate, I'm not overly interested in their vehicles until Possibly the Model 3 is launched and gets a few years into it's cycle. $35,000 starting, dropping to closer to $20k or less for used models a few years after, is far more in my price range that interests me.
Electric cars always cost more than people want to pay. Their maintenance seems to be much less though, excluding the battery. But to reduce co2 is going to cost something in terms of life style nd this will be only a part of it. But hey! Is it so bad to drive a Smart electric instead of a Jetta and a Tessla instead of a Mercedes or Porsche?
Well, as a relatively new owner of an Electric Car...that's just not true.
Now for me, the cost of a
NEW electric car was FAR more than I would've been willing to pay for one. However, when it came to a used vehicle, it was not.
I've recently purchased a 2013 Nissan Leaf. I'd recognize at the start that the car isn't for everyone. When I first came upon it myself, I didn't think it was for me. It showed up in my searches repeatedly as the only vehicle at various dealerships that was in my price range and contained a number of convenience features I wanted. So then I started to look at my typical driving patterns and realized an 80 mile charge would actually work perfectly fine for me. Then I test drove the thing and found myself pleasantly surprised by how smooth the ride was and that it wasn't any less, if not a bit more, powerful than my wife's old civic. Then I began researching the cost to charge it and compared that to the costs of what I normally spent on gas and oil changes (and what I'd spend roughly looking at the next closest car I was likely to buy). By the end I was shocked, but happy, to be walking out with a Leaf.
For me, it works wonderfully...and that's despite finding out that the 240 volt plug in my garage that I *THOUGHT* I had was actually miswired by the old home owners and is attached to a 120 v breaker. Still, I plug it in when I get home most nights and unplug when I leave. Or I can go a few days without plugging it in and hook up at work, though that's a bit more expensive. So far it's seemed to have increased my energy bills about $30-$40 a month. Considering in my old Taurus I was putting in about $20 in gas a week at least, it's been nice.
For me, the electric car thing wasn't about the environment, it was about financials and comfort. I got some neat features like a 360 camera (nice for my horrible parallel parking self), heated leather seats, nav system, integrated garage door opener, Bluetooth, automatic LED Lights, XM, digital speedometer (I like seeing the specific number), etc along with the lower usage costs. And at the front end, I wasn't paying a premium. Why?
For the same reason I'm interested in the Model 3 a few years after it's out. EV's currently are being sold new with a pretty hefty hike to their cost as it relates to a comparable non-ev vehicle. However, it seems...at least in the DC area...that the depreciation of the EV
initially is much higher, until it reaches a point where it sort of levels out with a comparable vehicle.
So say you have two vehicles, an EV and a non-EV. The new EV is $30,000 and the new non-EV is $20,000. Lets say after two years, the EV has lost $15,000 of it's value while the non-EV has only lost $5k. Now they're both priced at around $15,000, and at that point they start to depreciate at a more even level.
That seems to be the trend that I saw as I began looking at leafs. So I ended up getting a 2013 leaf, with under 10,000 miles on it, for about the same price I would've gotten a comparable non-EV that wouldn't have a number of the same features and had about 20 to 30 thousand more miles on it.
So long story short....they don't always cost more than people want to pay
