Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Used Tesla Pricing

I know Teslas are very fashionable, and as urban commuters, very sensible, but looking at used Tesla pricing tells me several things:

1. Looking at all used Teslas in the U.S. on cars.com, most are well above $100,000.  You can buy a lot of gas for the $80,000 difference between a Tesla X and a similarly used BMW SUV.

2. The number of miles on many of these used Teslas tell me that either buyers are discovering that they do not make much sense, are too expensive to own, or are not great cars.  Even a $99,990 2016 Model X has only 1289 miles.

Yes, they go like a bat out of hell.  But running A/C (really mandatory here in Boise in summer, or you ruin the seats with melted driver residue) drops the range enough that they are pretty well impractical to anywhere that doesn't have a charging station.  So you better plan on two cars: a Tesla and a conventional car as well.  Unless you are a progressive, who has that kind of money?

This 7/11/17 [Canadian] Financial Post points out what absurd hype this all is:
Going by the ballyhoo, you’d think EVs were an unstoppable juggernaut. But it’s one that has yet to even get started. In his 2011 State of the Union address, then president Barack Obama predicted one million electric cars on the road by 2015. Four years later, there wasn’t even a third that many. California offered so many different subsidies for electric vehicles that low-income families could get rebates of up to US$13,500, but it still isn’t even close to reaching its target of having zero-emission vehicles make up 15 per cent of California auto sales by 2025, being stuck at three per cent since 2014. Ontario’s Liberal government last year announced to much laughter its plan to ensure that every family would have at least one zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) by 2024, and Quebec made a plan to make ZEVs worth 15.5 per cent of sales by 2020. Let’s see how that’s going: Currently, ZEVs make up 0.16 per cent of new vehicle sales in Ontario and 0.38 per cent in Quebec....
Not helping is that environmental claims about environmental cars are falling apart. In June, Tesla was rocked by a controversial Swedish study that found that making one of its car batteries released as much CO2 as eight years of gasoline-powered driving. And Bloomberg reported last week on a study by Chinese engineers that found that electric vehicles, because of battery manufacturing and charging by fossil-fuel-powered electricity, emit 50-per-cent more carbon than do internal-combustion engines. Still, the electric-vehicle hype not only continues unabated, it gets bigger and louder every day. If some car company figures out how to harness it, we’d finally have a real automotive revolution on our hands. 
Why the hype?  Electric vehicles are one of the sacraments of Gaea-worship.  Hat tip: Small Dead Animals.

4 comments:

  1. You can buy a lot of gas for the $80,000 difference between a Tesla X and a similarly used BMW SUV.

    Heck, you can even afford to maintain a used X3/X5 for that kind of money.

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  2. Having not owned a Tesla, I can't comment on them, but having owned a Nissan Leaf EV for nearly 4 years, I can comment on EVs in general:

    The climate control (heat or cool) can drop the range up to 20% or a bit more, depending on the temperature differential between out- and in-side.

    Personally, I love the quiet, smooth, shiftles ride, coupled with the instant torque and response to the pedal. Not having to fuel it is wonderful: it takes 15 seconds or less to plug it in, another 15 seconds or less to unplug it in the morning.

    An EV won't work for a primary car for most folks, but can easily perform as a second vehicle or substitute for a boat, etc.

    Did I mention that they're fun to drive?

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  3. At a 300 mile range and recharging stations that take less than 10 minutes and present along most Interstates every 250 miles, they make sense.

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  4. I agree with CC's "make sense." Electric cars are mechanically superior, by a lot, to IC cars... EXCEPT for the need to recharge, and the cost of the batteries.

    Solve those and almost everyone would be driving them.

    Here in AZ, climate control is really critical in summer - when you get into the car the temperature is likely >120F, and any surfaces in the sun will burn you if you touch them. A robust AC is required then, and that can eat up 5kW.

    ReplyDelete