Recently I saw some people in the local area complaining on the Internet about Teslas. A few people repeated lots of silly arguments, including the “it’s way worse for the environment, look it up!” and “it’s as expensive as gas” tropes.

I decided to look at the costs of the car as it’s four years of ownership in a few days. Here’s a few ways I looked at the car. I am comparing this to the costs of the BMW X5 we have. While I haven’t driven it much lately, I can tell you what gas and tires for that thing cost.

215.5

I’ve been traveling a lot in the last couple of years, and that means that I am not the only person driving the car

Tire Costs

This is roughly what I wrote on Quora, using a few cars for comparison. I’ll use the current cars, and our old Prius, to compare costs. I’ll use the average cost of gas in Colorado, which is around $3.50/gal. I’ll use my cost of electricity, which is around $0.14/kWh.

MPG

Using my cars for comaprison, here are the efficiencies I’ve seen.

  • 2010 Prius: 47–48mpg (call it 47.5)
  • 2012 BMW X5 35i - 23–24mpg (call it 23.5)
  • 2022 RAM 3500 diesel - 14 mpg

This is the RAM without towing. Towing trailers is usually down in the 8-10mpg range or less. This is also the summer efficiency for the Prius. In winter that’s down in the 43mpg range, but Colorado has lots of warm winter days, so in a colder climate, it’s likely less. I’m sure the BMW is worse in winter, but I’ve tended to only track the long term mpg, not summer/winter.

Costs to Operate

This ignores maintenance, and is only the cost to go a mile. I’ll assume these prices for now:

  • Gas - $3.20/gal
  • Diesel - $3.50/gal
  • Electricity - $0.14/kWh

I’ve seen better and worse and fuel is going up now as we approach summer. I’ll use these numbers for now.

Using these figures, I get the following costs per mile:

  • Prius - $0.7
  • BMW - $0.14
  • RAM - $0.25
  • Tesla - $0.037

These show the Tesla being roughly half the cost of the Prius, and much less than the other cars.

The Model Y is still the best car I’ve owner.

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