Tesla Model 3: True Cost of Ownership (Final Breakdown)

one of the promises of electric vehicles is that they will be cheaper to own and operate than their gas counterparts it's what i sold my wife on when we got our first tesla just over four years ago and it is essentially the idea behind this channel how it all started when i was talking about saving money by owning a tesla it's something that i think we all love to hear well today i'm here with a special story after selling my tesla model 3 i have a final cost breakdown for you everything i paid every dollar that went into that vehicle and what the net result was let's go [Music] when i bought my model 3 in january of 2018 i paid just under sixty thousand dollars for it this includes the base price of thirty five thousand dollars the long range battery of nine thousand dollars the premium package of five thousand dollars and at the time enhanced autopilot of five thousand dollars plus the destination doc fee which is about a thousand dollars giving me a total for the car alone of fifty five thousand dollars then you add the sales tax and other fees for the state of california and you're just at fifty nine thousand eight hundred sixty six dollars in total in addition to the cost of the vehicle i've had some repairs and maintenance i've had to do my wife hit a pothole once and it blew out a tire which cost us about 200 to get repaired then afterwards we found out that something punctured the radiator inside of the car and that cost about 500 to fix and i scraped the side of a curb once because i foolishly lowered my car and this costs a 700 insurance claim i also did some modifications to my model 3 some of which cost money and others that were gifted from sponsors in total these cost me about two thousand two hundred and fifty dollars between the automatic trunk the tow hitch ceramic coating and the custom wheels so adding all that up everything i paid basically for the car the repairs and any modifications was 63 536 dollars and so when i went to sell it i thought it would be a breeze i thought everyone would just be dying for this car and that's kind of because that's what the internet told me was going to happen check out this article here saying that they hold their value better than the average car or this one about the model 3 how they lead the value retention or how about this one from clean technica where they're actually gaining value on credit karma so what happened when i went to sell it well first i posted it on the facebook marketplace and crickets basically no one responded except for maybe some dealers that were trying to lowball me so they could resell it so i pulled it off there and then i put it on a different website called tread tred.com that a friend of mine had suggested it was a cool service but still crickets so i lowered the price then i lowered the price again and then i lowered the price again until i finally sold it so overall it took me about four months to sell my model three which was a lot longer than i thought it would take granted there was a pandemic that was kind of happening right when i listed it but still i thought it would have been something that a lot of people would have really been itching for considering there weren't a lot of used ones out there and tesla was asking a really high premium for even these used cars that were similar to mine and in the end i sold it for thirty seven thousand five hundred dollars which gives me a depreciation of seventeen thousand five hundred dollars which doesn't include the maintenance repairs or the customizations i did just the actual purchase price of the vehicle and this is actually better than i anticipated now it still feels like a big loss considering i paid almost 60 000 or over 60 000 when you consider all the mods i did to it but it actually turned out to be a lot better than it kind of seemed initially now tesla didn't really help with this because they kept lowering the price they did it several times they actually raised it back up a couple times pissed off a bunch of people but really it was just a confusing mess in terms of how tesla is handling the pricing now you can get a similarly spec'd car compared to the one that i was selling for 47 000 so you know the 55 000 i paid for mine was a lot more than what you can get an actually even better car today for so none of that really made sense it definitely did not help when it came to reselling this car so for depreciation that was seventeen thousand five hundred and for insurance i spent three thousand two hundred forty two dollars which was across two years and eight months with an average of just over a hundred dollars per month and for the tax credit situation back in 2018 i had some different things happen with my taxes that prevented me from getting the 7 500 tax credit so that was a bummer but what i ended up with was the 2500 state rebate in california so still not a bad deal i already mentioned my repairs and maintenance but the total there was 1 411 for taxes and fees i paid eight hundred sixty six dollars my financing was pretty cheap for the loan with just over two percent interest i paid in total one thousand one hundred seventy eight dollars in finance charges and for fuel this was actually a pretty difficult one to pull together because you have super charging some of it's free some of it's not you have destination charging some of it's free some of it's not when i am home charging which is what i do most of the time the rate changes depending on time of day i have kind of a rhythm of that but overall it was really difficult to come up with but here is my best guess for exactly how much i paid for charging so as far as supercharging goes i spent just over 214 dollars this is because when i got my model 3 in january of 2018 the free credits for super charging didn't exist yet they were still working on the roadster program and model 3 referrals didn't count until much later so none of that really added up to anything and i had to pay for supercharging during that time now i have built up a bunch of credits through the referral program and i don't have to but during that time i spent 214 dollars on supercharging a lot of which was me traveling around doing experiments with the car and so then at home i'm averaging nine cents per kilowatt hour for when i charge and that's super off peak time and i get about 4.3 miles per kilowatt hour adding all that up that's a whopping 458 which gives us a total of 672 dollars in fuel across two years and eight months of driving with almost 23 000 miles driven now this is nuts and it even shocked me when i was pulling together the data and running the calculations i had to check it a few times ask some friends to check it but that is one of the huge benefits of owning an electric vehicle especially a tesla is that you can fuel it essentially for really really cheap here let's look at a bmw 3 series for comparison just to see what a kind of a regular gas car would cost if i were driving a bmw 3 series with an average miles per gallon of 31 for 22 700 miles in san diego with an average gas price of three dollars and 46 cents per gallon i would have paid 2 53 adding up the rest of the categories for the bmw 3 series i get 37 282 for the true cost of ownership across three years this is compared to what i actually paid for the model 3 at 26 369 and you'll see that i saved almost eleven thousand dollars by going with a tesla seriously these cars are a really great value and i haven't even mentioned things like autopilot which is second to none or other cool interior tech features or even the fact that you're reducing emissions and helping fight climate change all of which just adds up to be a really great value and a really appealing proposition which makes sense why the model 3 is selling like crazy here in the us and abroad now let's throw some other cars in here just for comparison a mercedes-benz c-class comes in at 43 932 the acura ilx is a pretty good deal at 28 762 and the lexus is clocks in with 41 376 dollars and lastly just for kind of comparison here a honda accord across three years will run you about twenty four thousand five hundred nine dollars according to edmonds so it's a bit cheaper than the model 3 but far less awesome of a car and way worse specs so when it comes down to it the model 3 is a great bang for your buck and if you want to see where it started off for me check out this video over here of my delivery which was just a great experience and i've had such a wonderful time sharing this with you i hope you guys really get a lot out of it leave me a comment down below let me know what you guys think and always don't forget when you free the data your mind will follow i'll see you back here in the next one

Channel: Ben Sullins

Views: 413,242

Keywords: tesla model 3 cost of ownership, tesla model 3, tesla, model 3, tesla model 3 cost, elon musk, cost of owning a tesla, model x, model 3 cost, model s, tesla motors, tesla cost of ownership, cost, model 3 cost of ownership, tesla model 3 review, tesla model s, electric car, tesla model x, tesla review, model 3 review, ev, how much does a tesla model 3 cost, car, tesla cost, tesla model 3 cost of charging, electric vehicle, teslanomics, review, electric

Id: -4WyxHZrYVg

Length: 8min 22sec (502 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/GLOBALSHUTTER]

Starts at €49,000 in my country, after all incentives