Tesla improves financial product and lowers monthly payment(teslamotors.com) |
Tesla improves financial product and lowers monthly payment(teslamotors.com) |
What does "taking only gasoline savings into account" mean? Does that mean its not $580, its some other price but if you had a normal car you'd be spending X on gas and so our monthly payment is Y - X = $580?
Just tell me what the hell the monthly price is!!
Auto loan amount: $62400 (Cheapest option not including tax)
Auto loan term: 5 yrs
Interest rate: 8%
Monthly auto loan payments: $1265.25
Now this is a basic auto loan calculator. I am not factoring in tax incentivized discounts or overall savings per month on gas payments and no down payment. For now it's a number to start with.
Tool I used: http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/auto/auto-loan-calculato...
But they still pretend that you are saving time by not stopping for gas, and ignoring the 6-13 hours it takes to recharge for the 99% of customers for whom all their stops are not at a SuperCharger stop, and also ignoring the time spent driving out of one's way to find a charging station.
Accounting for that time, let's call it 100 hours a month since this whole page at Tesla is about making up numbers, at the new $50/hr, adds $5000 a month to the cost.
As long as Tesla is going to account for time one spends or loses as a result of refueling, the proper way to do this is to take all the time into account. Cherry picking one aspect of it is not honest.
As I've written elsewhere, they can't offer a real lease because they don't have the money to finance their customers, and no bank is willing to place a bet on the resale value of the car in three years (the end of typical lease periods). Tesla and Elon's guaranteed resale value is apparently not good enough for the bankers, leaving no choice but to offer more expensive financing options--real loans. For a variety of reasons, a loan is less risky for a bank than a lease.
EDIT: From the article '“We appreciate the feedback from a number of journalists and customers that the first version of our financing product wasn’t quite right,” said Tesla Co-founder & CEO Elon Musk.' Sure sounds like they're admitting it in a "we didn't really do anything wrong" kind of way.
Even though it's not an outright admission, it's still admirable.
So, if you make lots of $ per hour, they will claim that having a model S will save you time and so they added the money you would be making into the price?!?! that's just crazy!
specially when a gasoline/hybrid car you can get:
- 300miles per refil
- each refil takes 5min
with the Model S
- 200 miles (250 if you buy the expensive one)
- 4h refil / 1 hour refil (if you buy the expensive superCharger)
I don't think you have understood what a) the superchargers are and b) what the typical charging scenario is (overnight).
It's the future as long as the car you're driving is marginal.
Hybrids used to be allowed to use the HOV lane, then they became popular and got kicked out. If electric cars become mainstream enough, they, too, will be prohibited from the using HOV lane.
Being able to use the carpool lane is the main selling point for an electric car to me right now, but be aware that it might not last for more than a few years.
It is an interesting marketing/psychological move however. I imagine most people in the market for a Tesla are going to be well compensated, and as such, they will see the initial $50/hr, jack it up to what their going rate is (probably in the hundreds) and see the 'effective' costs of owning a Tesla drop dramatically.
There are good reasons for getting a Tesla, but those aren't ones I'd use.