The TRUE Cost of My Tesla Ownership

EVS are always praised about being cheaper to own over the long haul you know it's a bigger upfront investment but it will eventually save you money and I've even heard people say that EVS will start paying for themselves after a certain number of years and I wanted to put that to the test by calculating my own data based on ownership of this model 3 and comparing it to my old Hyundai Sonata so keep in mind there's a lot of variables and of course the comparison would be very different if I was comparing buying a forty six thousand dollar EV like this one to a forty six thousand dollar gas car but I've run into a ton of situations where my friends and other community members are interested in buying electric vehicles but before they have never bought brand new cars and an electric vehicle is the only new car they would consider buying because of the lower cost of ownership and I hope in today's video to open up some things that you may not be looking into as to why EVS may not be quite as affordable as you think they are so I'm not going to start with the obvious one of just comparing electricity to gas because I talked about that in my model 3 review but I'll get more into that later let's talk about something that I don't think gets talked about enough Insurance sure this changes a lot depending on the person but I'm going to be using myself as an example for this video we have pretty cheap insurance on both of our cars like the cheapest we could go for which basically means that yes if I'm a bad driver and do something wrong then I'm gonna have to pay pretty high deductibles but because I've never caused a car accident and I'm a pretty chill driver with a pretty high safety score not that that matters here in the state of California on our old Hyundai Sonata it only costs us 35 a month through Geico to have like legal insurance which where we live you are required to have car insurance like most of the world whereas with Tesla we are using Tesla insurance we were able to get the best rates through Tesla but unfortunately they're not allowed to use real-time driving behavior as a way to lower your insurance premium so even with pretty high deductibles and not necessarily the best coverage if I do something wrong we have to pay a lot of things out of pocket in the event of a collision but we got our Tesla insurance down to 81 dollars in 22 cents a month so still over twice the price of the insurance of the old car which you know makes sense it's a much more expensive vehicle it should cost more to insure but easily something that I think gets looked over when people are always comparing gas to electricity costs and another huge one at least where I live in the state of California is the price of registration so it costs us almost a hundred and thirty dollars a year to register our old Hyundai Sonata which basically just means it's legal it can drive on city streets and I'm actually grateful this is the one thing the California DMV does pretty nicely they have a calculator for new vehicle purchases where you can put specifically what the model year is if it's an electric car a hybrid or a gas car and you can say when you bought it and what the vehicle's price is and they will basically tell you what your annual registration cost will be and I was pretty surprised by how mine was and hopefully the calculator is wrong it should also be mentioned that the registration pricing might go down over the Long Haul but as of right now they are close to charging 570 dollars a year just to register this model 3 in the state of California which some of you may be wondering why the heck does it cost like four times the price to register an electric vehicle compared to an old gas vehicle well as it turns out California actually gets a lot of their road maintenance taxes through the price of gasoline so if you buy an electric vehicle that's no longer paying for gasoline they attached those road maintenance taxes to your registration which feels a little messed up because that's like a flat fee whereas people who are driving a lot more with gas cars are going to be paying more for that road maintenance tax and those people tend to be you know hurting the roads a little bit faster although I guess that argument could be shot both ways because electric vehicles tend to weigh a lot more than gas vehicles so maybe we should consider ourselves lucky that they're not taxing by the kilowatt hour quite yet but still for monthly just registration alone that works out to around 11 a month for the Sonata versus 47 a month for the model 3. now there's other fixed expenses here in California that we have to do doesn't matter how much we drive things like Smog Checks have to be done every other year although that typically for me ends up being around 40 bucks so less than two dollars a month in the Long Haul not a big deal but also oil changes are still a thing with the Hyundai Sonata at least you're supposed to do them on average about twice a year depending on how much you drive and depending on where you go it may cause something different I assumed around thirty dollars each time you do it because for some people it's more if you do it in the shop but we like to do it ourselves for cheaper so I thought thirty dollars was kind of a healthy average so basically it means sixty dollars a year just goes towards oil changes on the old car works out to about five bucks a month so if we're just comparing the fixed monthly cost of these two cars and we're not talking about like electricity or gasoline costs this is literally even if we didn't drive our cars at all it just relied completely on public transit the Sonata costs 52.85 a month just for it to sit there whereas the Tesla costs 128 dollars a month in 64 cents again just to exist not accounting for any electricity even if you had free solar panels put on your roof and all of your electricity was paid for for free just the two vehicles existing it costs about 75 dollars more a month just to own the model 3. now the good news is most people do Drive their cars so by driving the Tesla a lot more than we did our old Hyundai Sonata because electricity is cheaper this is when the savings start to kick in so according to Tesla's own calculator which is not very accurate I account for that later in the past four months of ownership of this model 3 it says I've saved about 669 dollars so if we extrapolate that throughout the year it's around two thousand dollars in gas savings and that's again with our current driving habits which we've actually been driving a lot lately with road trips and visiting friends and family and I do personally expect that my 7 000 miles within four months is gonna be pretty accurate of 2 what my model 3 ownership is going to be like because there's some other road trips we're planning that are going to be even further than what we did in the last four months and I don't feel like there was an extremely high or low amount of driving to account for in the past four months so I do notice that Tesla's own gas saving calculator tends to round up compared to what the price of gas is in my area they're using an average based on all gas prices in California where I live gas prices are not as bad as they are in the Bay Area or in SoCal so I assumed that they are rounding up on an average of about 20 percent I thought that seemed a little bit Fair based on what gas prices are where we live and the fact that when you do those big road trips depending on where you go gas may be a lot more expensive than what it is for me locally or it may be cheaper depending if I'm road tripping out of state so 20 percent seemed like a reasonable Roundup for the Tesla calculator which means according to Tesla I'm saving about 166 dollars a month in gas but to me a more realistic number based on their gas prices is being rounded up is about 132 dollars so that's the number I'm using for the sake of the video which if we attach that to the total fixed monthly expenses that this car adds on top of our old vehicle which means that even if we got rid of the Hyundai Sonata and didn't own it anymore didn't pay for anything we would be saving about 56 dollars per month just by owning a model 3 instead of owning our old gas car not particularly great I mean hey 56 bucks a month is something I'll take it but I definitely don't think all of these things get accounted for when people are considering buying EVs and there's other things that I don't have enough data for to report on yet like tires for example we didn't really follow the recommended amount but typically for traditional gas vehicles you're supposed to replace the tires about every 50 000 miles and rotate them between five thousand to Ten Thousand Miles Tesla tires do need to be rotated just about as regularly as a typical gas vehicle but most people online are saying that Tesla's because of the higher weight wear out tires faster so but that's again dependent on how harsh of a driver you are and which Tesla you get and which tires you get but if we assume on average that with your EV you're going to be replacing the tires every 30 to 40 000 miles whereas with your old gas car you could go from 50 to 60 000 miles that means the tire maintenance for the EV will definitely be higher not to mention you need more specific tires for your Tesla than you do the traditional tires on an old gas car because it's a lot lighter and there's just a lot more infrastructure and tire options to choose from with those older vehicles so I didn't even factor in all that because there's so many variables and I don't have as much experience yet with tire rotations and tire Replacements on my current car but accounting for everything I did track this means that on a yearly basis driving the Tesla should save about six hundred dollars a year so if I kept and owned this car and didn't have any major issues with it I would save about twelve thousand dollars over the course of 20 years which is a very long time to own a vehicle for most people but I do think the lithium-ion phosphate battery pack will last about that long hopefully longer of course I would love to go past 20 years but even if we subtract 12 000 in gas Savings in total ownership from the original price we paid for the vehicle it means that buying this car is about the equivalent of buying a 38 000 car that I guess would have just had traditional gas but again if I would have bought a 38 000 gas car I wouldn't have all of these fuel cost savings that are making this vehicle cheaper to operate in the Long Haul and the registration would still be high on a new gas vehicle as well probably not as high as an electric vehicle because of those offloaded road maintenance taxes but these numbers are all going to change depending on where you're watching in the world what the registration costs what the insurance costs are in your area and my point is not to say that like you shouldn't buy an EV because it's going to be pretty expensive to own my point is there's a lot of variables that go into the cost of ownership and it's not just fuel cost versus electricity costs and I hope you guys can look this stuff up in your area so that you're not not overwhelmed when you do finally get the car and you get really excited and pumped for all the money You're Gonna Save and then there's registration fees show up and you're like oh my god what the heck am I doing ultimately like we did all of this math and I'm just detailing it to you now because we have a bit more actual ownership data to report on but me and my wife were well aware when we were buying this vehicle that it was not necessarily going to be that much cheaper to own and operate than our old gas car we bought it not because we thought we were gonna save so much money on it it was because we knew that okay we're going to be spending hundreds of dollars a month on gas and oil changes and registration and smog checks anyway we might as well put that money towards a vehicle that we really like and enjoy where we're not penalized for driving great distances you know with a gas car when you do the road trip the cost of ownership goes up a lot with the Tesla it does go up with supercharging fees a little bit but not nearly to the same extent which makes me feel more comfortable with driving it a lot which I guess allows for a lot more freedom plus I prefer the convenience of plugging in and charging from home rather than having to run the Aaron of stopping at the gas station all the time so I do think there's a lot of advantages and benefits to owning EVs and yes even in California with all of our crazy fees it is technically cheaper on a monthly basis it's just probably not as great as Tesla makes it sounds on their website but there's a lot of variables that I can't even know because they're future based right like some things that we can't account for over the course of 20 years of ownership is what's going to happen to the price of gasoline or the price of electricity you know in our area we're seeing gas prices drop a lot so that's eating into our gas savings already they could continue to drop or they could Skyrocket again kind of the same story with electricity it's like 25 cents a kilowatt hour where I live which is pretty expensive but if my electricity provider gets more greedy in the future and decides hey we can't keep up with all these charging EVS they could decide to raise rates as they have in the past so that could eat into our gas savings too but on the argument against keeping our gas vehicle our Sonata is about to turn 16 years old and after 16 years there might be a lot of issues it could have the transmission go out it could have of head gaskets that need to be replaced there's overall just so much more moving parts and on the rare occasion that I do start up the engine I can tell that the starter is not working properly so we may run into more internal combustion engine issues in the future with that car and maybe the engine could be so banged up that it's not even worth servicing and then we have to scrap the car and then buy a whole new one and then you would have to factor that into the total cost of ownership of an Eevee as well but you can apply that same sort of logic towards the Tesla Teslas are not completely free of service either and because this is a much more expensive vehicle like if the windshield cracks or breaks that's going to cost a lot more to replace than it will on our old gas vehicle or if we get in a collision with the Tesla we're gonna have to pay a lot more and wait a lot longer for service than we would our old gas car because it's a lot easier to work on older gas vehicles just because there's so many options there's so much infrastructure built in for them whereas Tesla and mobile service not so many options and definitely not as cheap and I didn't even begin to factor in like the price of premium connectivity or if in the future sure you want to subscribe to full self driving beta I already subbed for one month so I didn't factor that into my cost of ownership also the 12 volt battery when you need service in the future that's a problem with the old car and the new one hopefully the lithium ion 12 volt battery in my car lasts a bit longer than the lead acid battery in the old gas car and ideally the lithium iron phosphate battery won't need any service but there's always a chance something could go wrong with a high voltage battery outside of warranty and if that needs to be replaced basically throughout any chance of owning an EV being cheaper than a gas car so there's a lot of variables and I hope you guys can look into them before you buy your next EV because I just know that some of you are used to buying 50 60 000 cars and it's no big deal so you don't think about the cost of registration or insurance but there's a lot of people that I've talked to that want to buy Teslas or want to get into EVS that have never bought cars this expensive before and there's a lot of other fees that come along with that that you just need to account for so hopefully that was a bit insightful for you guys feel free to let me know if there's other things or other unknown expenses that I should be accounting for with EV ownership as well down in the comments below and thank you to everyone on patreon supporting this channel directly and seriously helps us out a ton as does just watching these videos so thanks again have an excellent rest your day [Music]

Channel: Tailosive EV

Views: 15,801

Keywords: Tesla, Electric Vehicles, EV, Cars, Elon Musk, Model 3 RWD, Cost of EV, Cost of Ownership, Model 3 Ownership, Tesla Model 3 Ownership, The True Cost, The truth about Model 3 Ownership

Id: wyla7mRY0bc

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 27 2022