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Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

"Tesla offers free electricity to most of its Model S and Model X customers while paying almost $1 per kilowatt hour to produce it, Morsy said. That amounts to a subsidy of as much as $1,000 per car in 2017."

I realize that most people believe that Tesla and Uber will be able to continue subsidising their operations indefinitely, but it makes me very nervous.

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I do not believe this is true at all. A lot of people do not supercharge their car often because it is super inconvenient. You need to wait at least 30 minutes to get over 50% charge. One of the great things about electric cars is that you can charge them at home just like your phone and never need to worry about “do I need to fill up to get to work?” You only need super charger when you are on road trips. So most people use superchargers only once or twice a year.

According to /r/teslamotors this perk is worth less then $1000 for the total lifespan of the car for most users (there are a few taxis which use significantly more but not normal users). This is not a lot of money considering the car starts at $70k, can easily go up to $120k and maxes out at about $260k.

Edit: the price per kWh is also wrong. Tesla currently sells electricity for an average of 20¢ kWh to consumers which do not qualify for the free super charging perk and they have said they will sell it for 7¢ to semi truck customers. So we can assume Tesla pays between 5¢ and 15¢, depending on the location and whether they have solar and powerpacks installed.

Supercharging for free is really a gimmick and free advertising for them because a lot of people who buy such expensive cars value their time above what it takes to recharge it every week. The only reason Tesla built supercharger is because they wanted to enable long distance travel for electric cars.

Ya, my home bill is 13 cents per kwh. I can't figure out why it would cost Tesla $1.

As for the super chargers, I'm pretty sure you can no longer use a supercharger for free if you live nearby it. You are only allowed free usage when travelling.

As for the solar panels on the charging station, that sounds almost useless. Like putting a little solar panel on the sunroof of your model s.

I can't take this author seriously. There is no way that Tesla is paying $1/kw. That is way past the retail rate, and I bet that they are paying much less than the retail rate in many of their markets.

Yeah, that's definitely bullshit, esp considering residential power in the PNW is $0.07/kWh.

Residential power is often cheaper than commercial (at least, small scale) in practice. One reason is that commercial folks pay surcharges for power factor.

For example, in San Jose, CA, the average residential is ~$0.156/kwh

Commercial is $0.1408/kwh [1].

If you operate at a 90% power factor, and are surcharged the other 10%, ...

[1] https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/california/san-jose/

But yeah, at Tesla's scale, it should not be $1/kw.

I could believe that to be the all-in cost for a supercharger or something weird like that.

Because they should be paying close to the industrial rate, if not lower.

Nope. Electricity for residential use costs more than electricity for commercial use, which costs more than electricity for industrial use. A fast-charging truck stop is most similar to industrial use, since it involves a lot of power at a single location, and probably also can give the utility at least a few minutes warning before ramping up to full power. From the Energy Information Administration: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Not only does Tesla negotiate their electrical rate, they use PowerPacks at several supercharger sites to shave peak load to reduce and/or eliminate demand charges.

They would if they were pulling straight from the grid. Go to your power company and ask how much it would cost to surge a mega watt of power at peak times. Those kinds of surges are really expensive to handle. Of course Tesla uses storage and solar to smooth their demand so that they can pay normal rates.

$1/kwh is a joke price. Peaking natural gas plants run at 20 cents/kwh on the high end. You can go buy a honda gas generator from home depot and run it for 1-2k hours and pay less than that per kwh.

I get your point, and you are probably right somewhere in the country. Having said that, we have industrial plants around here with similar issues, and I'm confident that the rates that they pay are vastly lower than even the $0.07/kwh that Tesla is talking about.

$1/kwh is an extreme outlier and essentially pointless to talk about. There are lots of other options at that price point.

The quote is wrong.

First of all, supercharging was never 'Free' - it was a $1,000 addon option (at purchase, or $2,000 later) for a long while before finally being made standard. (The hardware was integrated into all models shortly after launch, but cost money to activate)

Secondly, they killed the unlimited free charging program for new cars as of this year. (April, I believe was the cutoff for delivery of vehicles with unlimited supercharging)

The motivation for killing the unlimited free charging program seems to be partly people who would never charge at home, instead always charging at superchargers and often leaving cars parked for hours in busy locations, and the increasing commercial use of the supercharging network (by taxi companies).

How much does it cost to use now?

I got a new Model S in October and it came with free supercharging for life, because I had a referral code from another Tesla owner.

I am shocked to see this number. It seems insanely high. Is it really possible they pay anywhere near that for electricity?

Perhaps it includes a portion of the capital cost for the chargers along with the associated operational costs?

That must be the case, but we don't know what numbers they used to come to this cost. The number was just thrown out there without anything backing it up and is an order of magnitude off from what would be expected.

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