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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to point out that the $35k is the full price, which goes down when additional discounts are applied. If you get the short range model with no options, it starts out at $35k, then goes down all the way to $24,950 after including the $3,750 Federal tax credit, $2,000 New York EV rebate (clearly it's geolocating by IP address here), and "$4,300 estimated 6 year gas savings".

OK, so that last bit is BS, and it looks like there's a hidden $1,200 destination and doc fee, so the actual real price including tax breaks is $30,450 in NYC. Still not bad at all!

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The gas savings is definitely shady.

But including the federal tax credits and destination fee is fair I think. As far as I'm aware, no auto maker includes the destination/docs/handling fee in the MSRP. The Tesla fee amount is comparable to other automakers also (it's on the high side at $1,200; but it's not too different from Toyota's $930 and Honda's $920). Presuming your location due to geolocation is a bit too far (but that's debatable) since they didn't disclose that immediately up front.

It's annoying that they don't make it more clear that's what they are doing, but the gas saving is a real thing. I used to spent $120 a month on gas, that went to $45 a month of electricity, then I got on a Time of Use plan where electricity is cheaper at night and now my monthly "fuel" cost is $15.

Yup, I was spending $400/mo on gas which is now close to $50/mo before you figure in oil change costs.

Quite a few cars/trucks run synthetic these days which can really start adding up.

Not really. Oil changes (in a car comparable in size to Model 3) cost me about 50 USD per 25000 km, or 15000 mi, indeed because the oil is synthetic and fulfills certain criteria. In any case it's a rather insignificant amount compared to fuel costs, especially with fuel taxes as they are. If oil change costs start to add up, there's a significant possibility of you doing something wrong (including the choice of vehicle).

Well first off I'd probably never run a 15k interval. Pretty sure that's beyond mfgr spec. We run 7k in our diesel on full synthetic. Stretching a maintenance interval seems pennywise and pound foolish.

You also have to consider how much your time is worth of you're changing it yourself to get that cost.

Either way it's an added cost(along with transmission, differentials, etc) that you just don't incur on EVs. Right now my maintenance schedule is brake fluid @40k and coolant @100k and tires, that's it.

You want to do oil analysis like the professional diesel mechanics do.

Most people don't need to change their oil anywhere near as often as the manufacturer specifies. Especially for large diesel engines, it's often fine to run them 3x-5x the interval, but you should do oil analysis and find out, instead of just using the rule of thumb ones the manufacturer gives you.

On my 2017 Prius oil changes are every 16000 km at the dealership.

Heh, my car is on a 18,000 mile interval for the oil changes. It will also adjust based on how you drive it, it only asked for it's first service at 19,000 miles.

But isn't it weird to just compare it to fuel costs and declare it's an insignificant amount? It's still 50 bucks.

But how much are you going to pay to replace the battery?

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/04/16/tesla-batteries-have-90...

"Actual Tesla owners report about a 5% drop in battery capacity by the 50,000 mile mark but after than, the rate of degradation drops considerably. On average, cars with 160,000 miles on them still have 90% of their battery capacity remaining. Projecting forward from the real world data available, a Tesla battery should still have 80% battery capacity after 500,000 miles of driving, the group claims. The vast majority of internal combustion engines would have stopped functioning long before then."

Assuming a conservative usage of 20k miles/year, it will take you 25 years to reach 500k miles.

There's tons of data on EV batteries from the past 5+ years. At least for Tesla, battery degradation is not a problem.

I'm at 85k miles and still going strong so I'm not worried.

The point is that's amortized over the lifetime of the car though, and isn't an up front savings like a lower cost would be. If you're taking out a 6 year auto loan then it's the same effect, but if you're taking out a shorter loan or paying cash it's not.

Is there a destination charge if you pick it up from the factory?

Yes. Federal regulations require the destination fee be separate but equal -- listed separately, but the same regardless of where it's bought (and the actual shipping cost for that particular car). So if you buy from the factory, you subsidize a buyer in Hawaii or Alaska, etc.

I still think that $30,450 overall is a good deal, and I'd go for that if a car made sense for me at all (it doesn't though, being in NYC). It's just purposely confusing the way the price is manipulated downwards using questionable-at-best pricing practices.

Gas savings will vary by where you live and whether you have cheap gas and/or cheap electricity or expensive gas and/or expensive electricity. Even with expensive electricity though it's still cheaper than gas.

I agree that quoting a single figure here is misleading.

Also, non other automaker sells their cars for MSRP.

Including the estimated gas savings is extremely misleading. I want to know how much the car will cost upfront, not how much I will save over some number of years.

And how do they determine the savings? If I am cross-shopping with a Chevy bolt, there won't be any gas savings... Surprised they put that on their, it really negatively impact my view of Tesla.

Did you look at the site?

It lists 35k up front, and then lists estimated payment after incentive secondary.

Sure, and that is still very misleading because they are bundling gas savings along with government incentives that you will get upfront. I expect the cost after estimated savings to be the actual cost I pay upfront, not the savings over some car I would never buy in the first place, and I don't think you should ever mix upfront cost with long term savings when listing prices. Very misleading.

They are underplaying this aspect of saving on the petrol. If we were in 1973 then it would be different, in today's world we are a Trump brain-fart away from a 1973 situation, for instance in Venezuela and what would happen if the Chinese and Russians decided 'we aren't playing any more'?

Sure the U.S. is now god-blessed with the fracking miracle but the gas savings is also an option to be independent of the big oil companies. That could be worth more than $$$ to prepper-mentality Americans.

The prices didn't even go up that much in 1973 but a lot of queues and rationing went on. The 55 mph speed limit came in. It was not happy times.

If Tesla were a bit more frank they would mention this independence aspect, as it is they don't want to scare the children. Nobody knows what petrol prices will be next month so there is no way anyone can put a figure on savings. That said there are plenty of people who have swapped to Tesla and have the electricity bills to prove that the advertised savings are real.

> after including the $2,750 Federal tax credit,

Small typo: $3,750

Thanks, fixed.

For the record, the federal tax credit becomes $1,875 on July 1st, and $0 on January 1st 2020.

Including the credits in the price used to be pretty shady, since you had to have a sufficient pre-credit tax liability to actually get the full benefit of the credit. (The EV credit is non-refundable, meaning that if you don't have a tax liability, you don't get anything from the credit.)

But the Trump Tax Bill lowered everyone's refunds (largely because the IRS lowered withholding during the year), so more people have a year-end tax liability, and those that did before the TTB now have a larger tax liability, ultimately meaning more people can now theoretically benefit from the credit.

Eligibility for tax credits is unaffected by witholding rates or how large your end-of-year refund or liability is. And anyone who can afford a Tesla is sure to be paying enough income tax to get the full value of the EV credit.

I love being told how taxes work by people on the internet....

I do this for a living. I have plenty of clients who saw little to no benefit from the EV credit because their tax liability was not large enough.

Shouldn’t you have shown them how to incur a liability (retirement account conversions) then so they didn’t lose out on an otherwise non refundable credit?

Why would tax liability matter depending on withholding or refund size? Credits work against tax liability independent of how much was withheld.

Exactly. If it's only an edge case where your customers can't benefit (some retirees might have insufficient taxable income, but that's about it), it's fair to include it.

If you're retired, you'll do a Traditional->Roth IRA conversion to generate a tax liability for your EV or rooftop solar install.

Is there sales tax?

[Deleted]

You just described a deduction.

A credit is literally cash (assuming you have enough liability to cover it).

Certain tax credits apply even if you don't have enough liability. Like if you owe zero taxes for the year for some reason they will send you a check for the full credit amount. Not sure which category the EV one falls under though.

Yea your correct, theres refundable and non refundable tax credits, most are of the non refundable variety. It appears the ev tax credit is non refundable.

[1]: https://www.libertytax.com/tax-lounge/electric-car-and-vehic...

[Deleted]

"A tax credit reduces the taxable amount of income you owe taxes on"

is not the same thing as:

"Tax credits reduce the amount of income tax you owe"

The former is a deduction. The latter is a credit. It's really that simple.

You appear to be conflating a credit with a deduction.

A deduction reduces the amount of income thats taxed. So for example if you're in a 25% marginal tax bracket, deductions are worth 25 cents on the dollar.

A credit reduces the amount of tax you owe, dollar for dollar. In addition, some credits are refundable, meaning that they're allowed to make your tax liability negative for the year, so you get benefit from them even if the credit is more than the taxes you would otherwise owe.

And to be clear, when I talk about the "tax you owe", I mean the total amount of money you need to have paid the IRS by April 15th, including payroll withholding, estimated tax payments, and so on, and not the size of check you need to mail to the IRS in early April.

That’s a tax deduction. A tax credit of $X really is $X off your taxes owed.

> clearly it's geolocating by IP address here

so you can use a vpn/vps/etc to get the rebate?

You get rebate from your state not Tesla.

Pretty useless if you aren't going to pay NY taxes, right?

Different places have different rebates. One should not assume your location has none, although that’s certainly possible.

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