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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

The more I see stuff like this, the more I'm convinced that life is measurably better, less costly, less stressful and less complicated by owning something like a $9000 used Toyota Corolla.

Unless you have a truly ridiculously high salary/net worth and can afford to buy something like a model S plaid edition on a whim, for fun. At which point you're into the territory of people who do things like buy Nissan GT-R for fun and then pay aftermarket modification shops to make $65,000 of additional enhancements to them.

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Tesla was and remains a luxury car. I don't think the Model 3 changed that. It's competition for BMW or Mercedes, not Toyota. Luxury vehicles are notorious for their long-term dealer driven maintenance costs. What Tesla has over its luxury competition is likely more reliability and less of those costs. But the same "you have to get it done at the dealer and it's gonna milk you bigtime" philosophy seems to prevail.

I don't think it's intrinsic to EVs, is what I'm saying. But more to how Tesla has positioned themselves re: market segment.

e.g. the Chevy Volt is now in its 10th year and only now are people starting to have real difficulties with gen-1 10 year old Volts and battery packs and getting GM to service and replace them. Prior to that it was just smooth sailing. Most are not seeing serious degradation and the warranty has been excellent on them up to 8 years or so. A third party market is building up around older Volt battery servicing in some cities, despite not many Volts having been sold.

I think it's entirely feasible we will see the equivalent of a fully electric Toyota Corolla in the next 5-10 years. I don't think Toyota will make it though.

As a fellow "always going to buy a cheap but reliable older car" driver I can attest that it is in fact the least stressful car buying / owning experience ever. If you need a car for the actual "moving your body to and from places" it can't be beat.

* Parts are always available and inexpensive for the mass-market models and any repair ship can get you sorted.

* If I get into an accident the most I can ever be out is $8-10k but with depreciation more likely $4-5k.

* If they don't offer you 0% interest you just buy the car outright.

* Insurance is cheeeeap because the car isn't worth anything and it's not the kind of car anyone will drive fast or target for vandalism or theft.

* You can buy cars with high mileage and still easily get another 100k miles out of it. If the thing is a scrap heap by the end who cares?

I was this way until I got married and my neighbors wife nearly got killed in her ~2010 model lexus suv by an inattentive driver running a red light @45 mph t-boning the drivers side with 1 ton truck. She's lucky she wasn't seriously maimed and fully recovered. A 2020 Lexus might have avoided the hospital trip entirely based on the difference in crash tests for drive side impact. I'd rather my wife be in a at most 3-4 year old BMW, Lexus, Volvo, etc than a late model cheap car for the sake of my piece of mind alone.

I used to be in the camp of buy a cheap, old reliable car, until I realized just how much safer cars made in the past 5 years are vs the older ones. Cars are getting much safer, and I'll happily pay 5-10k more just for the insurance of reducing the chances of me being maimed or killed in an accident.

Yep, my wife rear-ended a delivery truck in our older Audi and totalled it -- with the kids in the car; everyone was OK, but after that she would not consider anything that didn't have collision avoidance systems and safety at least as good as the Audi we had. I'm glad she wasn't in our older Kia. There would have been injuries.

Exactly. Though I will say there are lots and lots of people who get cars they cannot afford or pay stupid money for ones, and there's way more of them then people who can afford more but choose the cheaper car.

Money well spent honestly. I've gotten in two accidents (one of them a t-bone) in cars made 2010ish and I thought they did fine both times with us walking away with minor bruising and a sore neck. But I can absolutely respect that.

This may be good advice today, but will it hold five years from now? Ten years from now? Eventually, the delta in death rates per mile traveled will be indistinguishable from zero - either because safety improvements will no longer be significant, or because we have gotten the death rate so low that the difference between it and zero will be negligible.

We're currently at a point where 15-year old vehicles have ~144 deaths per million registered vehicles [1], and 5-year old vehicles have ~40 deaths per million registered vehicles [2]. Sure, you may be willing to pay a premium to get 40 down to 10, but are you willing to pay as much of a premium to get that 10 down to 2.5? 2.5 down to 0.6?

[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... (~2004 - 14.4 occupant deaths per 100,000 vehicles)

[2] https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-... (~2016 - 14 to 64 driver deaths per 1,000,000 vehicles)

The demographics of those who drive 15 year old cars and those who drive 5 year old cars are very different. I'd bet that the 15 year old demo contains more reckless/intoxicated drivers (i.e. young people)

Yeah. I bought a used Honda Civic. It had 38K miles on it. I did replace the battery - $140 with a 3-year unconditional warranty and 7-year pro-rated warranty, and oil changes - $50 including tire rotation and that's it. My last oil change was a year ago and it's about due for another. The parts are universally available, dirt cheap, capable mechanics abound, and the insurance is super cheap. It's the way to go for me.

If you are concerned about part and maintenance costs, then a car favored by tuners is a pretty good bet for repair. Its amazing the amount of parts you can get for the Honda Civic.

Given some of the manufactures are starting to sell crate electric motors, I am a lot more interested in the Ford F-150 Lightning and anything Honda builds than Tesla given the repair stories of time and expense.

> I'm convinced that life is measurably better, less costly, less stressful and less complicated by owning something like a $9000 used Toyota

It's not fair at all to compare any Tesla even to a 20 year old Toyota. The Toyota will embarrass even respectable, older car makers.

I don't know, I've talked to folks with telsas (model s) with > 300k on the odometer.

Nobody is writing news articles about people who drive their Teslas without any issues. I’ve had my model 3 for over 2 years, not a single issue, no oil changes, no maintenance done on it whatsoever. 25k miles.

Man that is sort of mind blowing. I would have thought there was often basic maintenance for .. something.

Shouldn't you have rotated your tires a few times at least?

If my calculations are correct, the tires have rotated approx. 5.45 million times.

"Rotating" as in mounting them on different corners of the car so that they wear evenly, I believe is what's meant here.

25k miles in two years is... not a lot of driving, at all. Even new ICE engines wouldn't need anything other than their oil changed.

A tire rotation would probably be a good idea, though.

You must be mistaken. Most leases are for under 10k a year. 12.5k a year will a] cost you significantly more on a lease (you won't qualify for the cheapo $99/mo leases) and b] will impact your insurance.

25k over 2 years is over-average at least. I did 15k/year but I drove 75mi/day back then (pre-COVID).

New ICE cars are lower maintenance, for sure. But they're nowhere near 0-maintenance like an EV. I've spent like $250 on maintenance activities on my EV over 4 years.

Not having to visit a dirty gas station or repair shop (the than tires) is quite liberating.

Even old ICE cars can do 25k miles no problem. I've taken my '04 4Runner from 170k to 200k over the past 2 years, only major servicing was the timing belt replacement (scheduled for every 90k miles, ~$2k).

I had to replace the O2 sensor too, but that was about $50 IIRC, and it took me 15 minutes in my driveway after O'Reilly diagnosed it for free using OBD2. No $3k/yr "Toolbox" sub required.

A 10k lease lets you drive upwards of 200 miles a week. That is doable if you have a short commute and / or never use it for day trips or vacations.

Live outside of a small bubble, and it adds up pretty quick... then again, leases aren't very popular around here.

Certainly an EV will have less maintenance, but even ICE cars have practically zero maintenance outside of the occasional 15 minutes at a quick lube oil change place before they hit 50k miles. Not having to fill the truck up with gas would be nice, if it could last a day logging in the forest on a single charge.

It's almost double the average distance driven in the UK [0].

[0] https://www.thinkmoney.co.uk/blog/what-is-the-average-miles-...

Found the HN user that lives in a flyover state. :)

Average yearly mileage is greatly affected by where you live. Someone who lives in a rural area is almost guaranteed to put far more miles on a vehicle than a person who lives in the city. It's the difference between a 15 mile trip to the nearest grocery store and a 45 minute commute on open roads to taking the bus to work and only using the car on some weekends.

When having Discount Tire repair a nail in my 1 year old Model Y tire, I asked if I should get them rotated.

They measured each tire tread and said they are wearing very even, and suggested I wait longer to get them rotated.

Likely something a dealership wouldn't have recommended during an oil change of a vehicle purchased from them ;-)

I do need to replace our cabin air filter. Likely sooner than typical, since we've driven on a number of very, very dirty roads on camping trips.

No other serious maintenance in sight! https://www.tesla.com/support/car-maintenance

Also brake wear is lower because of regenerate braking.

You can lower break wear if you drive a manual ice car too. On my stick shift for a freeway off ramp I only hit the brakes when going from 5mph to a complete stop at the end, the rest of the time I smoothly downshift and let the engine brake the car. There is just no chance a tesla that weighs twice as much as my manual little honda is wearing the brake pads less.

I routinely go entire drives without touching the brakes at all. Have you ever test driven a Tesla before?

Nobody's writing new articles about people getting their Toyota's parts replaced either, because there's a robust marketplace of parts and service providers that can get the job done.

What's remarkable about Tesla (but should be entirely obvious) is that given their small market share relative to ICE vehicles, this marketplace doesn't really exist. Your options are to 'wing it' with DIY or somewhat iffy greymarket fixes (such as the one described here), or deal with Tesla, which from an outsider's perspective seems to have some severe quality and customer service issues when it comes to maintenance and repairs.

> which from an outsider's perspective seems to have some severe quality and customer service issues when it comes to maintenance and repairs.

From another outsider's perspective they have these same issues when it comes to just getting you a decent car in the first place. Some big tech influencer was posting on Twitter the other day about how he was accepting his new Model Y even though it was a piece of crap, because he was worried he'd get an even worse piece of crap if he sent it back based on photos he'd seen from other Model Y owners. Seems real cool...

Ouch, don't write that stuff.

That might be relevant for the overall reliability of Teslas, but it's not relevant to how enjoyable the experience is of getting work done on a Tesla.

The article isn't really about regular maintenance or other Tesla cost-of-ownership issues. It's about older Teslas that are out of warranty and the sometimes extremely high repair costs that come with battery replacement and repair, which are especially expensive due to Tesla service practices (replacing the entire battery).

It seems like Teslas (and other EVs) have a different typical cycle of costs than typical ICE cars. In the ICE world, maintenance and repair costs start fairly low, then become moderate, and eventually moderate to high ("I'm tired of throwing a couple grand at this car every 6 months, I'll just put that towards a new car", says the American consumer). EVs start with incredibly low cost maintenance, then continue with incredibly low cost maintenance, and then even more low cost maintenance ... until WHAM! the battery bill hits.

This isn't really a surprise to folks who have been paying attention to electric cars, but as more and more people go EV, it seems newsworthy to point it out, as well as to encourage Tesla to play nice with third-party repair shops.

I think the "wham!" battery bill is an outlier for telsas. It's more normal to have a gradual range degradation. I've seen cars with > 300k on the odometer that work fine.

Yes but my point was that situations like these are the exception not the norm, usually these batteries degrade slowly and you should be able to get at least a few hundred thousand miles out of them before it needs to be replaced (assuming you took care of it properly).

I think reasonably most modern regular cars would also do 2 to 3 years or even more without any maintenance.

Except engine oil changes, of course. But those take 10 minutes and $50/year.

The unfortunate thing about oil changes is unless you're DIYing them or have a reliable mechanic overqualified for oil changing, every one is a risky diceroll of some oil changing lackey putting their ham fists on your vehicle and wrecking something.

From cross-threaded drain plugs to unnecessary access holes cut in aero panels out of laziness, there's enough examples out there to be concerned.

Very true. I don't know why more cars don't have top-side oil filters, because it would make DIY oil changes so much easier.

Even when I lived in an apartment with no garage, I could easily change the oil in my car (mk4 VW Jetta TDI) out in the parking lot. I use an oil extractor to suck it out the dipstick hole, and since the filter is front and centre, I don't need to get under the car at all. In fact, I've never removed the oilpan drain plug.

I've never had an issue taking the car to a place like valvoline where oil changes are their bread and butter. I've only heard of that sort of stuff happening at dealerships where they might have highschoolers working above their heads in the maintenance department.

The first and only time I used such a place, the Jiffy Lube in Pacifica off Skyline, the smell of burning oil graced my driving experience for the better part of a week afterwards.

You see, I had brought quality Mobil 1 full synthetic oil in quart bottles, which the career oil changers didn't seem to understand how to pour without spilling everywhere. Pro-tip: the offset spout is supposed to be at the top, not the bottom orientation.

Oil changes are inherently a probable interaction with either children or clowns. And I'm saying this as someone who did oil changes as a summer job, back before I had a driver's license. The things I've seen... I pity the fool who relies on random third parties for maintenance. EVs are a potentially huge improvement in this department.

To be honest, you showed up with some weird bottle the people working there probably have never used and you got the expected results. You do something like that with anything and it would probably result in the same sort of situation. I've never had an issue. I know how to change my own oil and still pay people to do it. Not worth my time when its so cheap to have someone else do it in 15 minutes while I sit there looking at emails. I can get any expert or schmuck or handy relative to work on my car for a range of competitive prices. Legally I have to pay tesla $22,500 to replace a battery. Not much of an improvement for the consumer.

> you showed up with some weird bottle

There's nothing weird about a 1-quart bottle of Mobil 1, it's the same basic form factor retail oil quarts have been sold in since they stopped being steel cans, i.e. before most Jiffy Lube employees were born.

The problem isn't the bottle, the problem is a combination of carelessness and incompetence. Which is what you're going to get with a high probability at these low-level positions, good luck with that.

Even without oil changes. Modern cars are amazingly reliable. I believe you could drive most of them to 50k km or even more without doing anything, but filling gas and washer fluid. Wouldn't do them much good in long term, but it is possible.

I know a guy that went 40,000 mi never changing the oil on a brand new Mazda 3. Eventually the engine started to fail. Amazingly Mazda replaced the engine for him, but cancelled his warranty after that.

He sold Mazda's for a living and literally had no idea the oil needed to be changed....

Wow that’s crazy, I tell my gears getting sluggish when they shift after ~5k miles but I drive aggressively and floor it often.

That is what happens with electric cars, they are maintenance free, for most people.

That was the main reason car dealers did not want to touch an electric car, they make more than half of their income from the repair shop, and they know with electric cars that business is mostly gone.

New business will be created, though. Changing the batteries, balancing them when dead, putting a new technology when batteries improve,or improving the driving assistant will be necessary.

Thats kinda the story of me with my ICE cars too. Oil changes take 15 minutes twice a year and its a drive through where I don't even have to exit my car. I make up for that time and more with the savings from it only taking sixty seconds to juice up the car.

I've also owned cars for a long time, from new to 300k miles, and typically the expensive fixes that start to creep up are due to components wearing out. Things like rubber seals in the suspension, brake lines rusting out due to the salt used on the roads or a manufacturing defect leading to premature rust, electrical harnesses needing replacing. I don't think electric cars are immune to these issues since they have nothing to do with the powerplant, usually that part of the car is bulletproof in my experiences if you buy from reliable manufacturers like Honda.

After years of headaches, my criteria for buying a car includes that it must have a huge after-market for parts and that I can bring it to pretty much any shop and get it fixed. Corollas fit that bill perfectly.

Did you drive a last gen Tesla and an used Toyota recently? I have and I bought a Tesla.

It also makes life much less pleasurable.

Realistically speaking, there's 6 things my life I might have to randomly spend $22k on: my house or my family (5 of us). Adding another thing to that list would make my life much less pleasurable.

But to each their own.

Your life must be pathetically short on pleasure if the choice of car substantially moves the needle, make some effort to diversify your sources of pleasure away from powered wheelchairs.

Eh, if you spend a lot of time driving, a quieter car with extra safety features can make those parts of your life more enjoyable.

Avoiding driving altogether should be step 1, though.

I don't know, there seems to be a lot of people who enjoy cars -- whether for looks, sport, status, collecting, fixing, restoring, etc. I don't think it's particularly surprising if I were chatting with folks at a party and someone would mentions cars as a hobby of theirs.

I think your charge could be leveled against most hobbies, especially collectibles. It seems a bit mean-spirited.

Sometimes people enjoy things you don't.

Clearly you've only tried crap cars.

> Clearly you've only tried crap cars.

Clearly.

I don’t understand sentiment.

I’m in the $9k used car camp. How much pleasure do you derive from your car? For me driving is somewhere between absolutely miserable to slightly uncomfortable and the things that determines where my experience falls outside factors such as how much traffic is on the road, how far do I have to be, how much of a hurry I am in, and how long I’ve been in the car. I’ve driven all sorts of things: trucks, suvs, sport cars, luxury sedans, jeeps, and the economy sedan. As long as I trust the reliability and the AC/heat is working none of other aspects of a car make it more or less pleasurable for me. Driving sucks hard stop.

The total cost difference between a base model Tesla and my $9k sedan is about $25k, and having an extra 25k in my brokerage account at my age reduces my estimated retirement age by 1 year. With the opportunity cost in mind owning a Tesla would actually reduce my overall pleasure from life.

What am I missing? How are people getting so much pleasure from their cars? Do people actually like driving? Do you live in a place with no traffic and perfect roads?

Some of us get pleasure out of acceleration and 'sportiness' in our vehicles. And also creature comforts inside the vehicle. Maybe I'm a victim of marketing. But I feel like if I'm going to be spending thousands of dollars, I want to feel like I'm buying something ... fun?

That said, my "sporty" car is a Chevy Volt in sport mode, not a Tesla Model S Plaid. I'd still like to be able to retire someday.

I used to be exactly like you. I drove mid-price cars (around 10k) and was 100% miserable. I could drive shorter distances around town, but I was completely worn out after 200-300km of continuous driving. When we got wherever we were going, I needed to take a good 30-45 minutes to rest my brain.

I bought a Hyundai EV about a year ago and I actually kinda like driving now. The electric drive train is somehow more logical to my brain. I tell it to go faster and it does without any fuss or noise. No switching gears manually or alternating engine RPMs from the automatic gearbox.

The best part is the lane keeping assistant and smart cruise. When I'm on a bigger road with proper markings, I can just lightly hold the wheel and the car does the annoying minutiae of driving.

Now I can easily drive 400km+ in a single day and not feel completely drained afterwards.

Something about the need to slightly manage the steering wheel every second while also maintaining a safe distance to the car in front of me drained my brain. I was unable relax at the wheel. Now I can focus on actually following the traffic around me.

I guess the question would be, if I have a $9000 toyota corolla with comfortable seats, good tires, the AC blows cold, the cruise control works properly, etc...

Would I gain what I subjectively consider to be $45,000 worth of additional comfort and pleasure by buying a model 3? Or $85,000 of comfort and pleasure by buying a model S?

If you think about the math of what one actually pays for a car like that it becomes much easier to stomach.

At the end of the day you still wind up with an asset that was 85k. If you bought say a 3/4 year old car and bought wisely, it will have minimum depreciation. So while you are certainly out more money, it's not like you've lost 85k, it's more like 10-30. Whereas you probably are only going to be able to sell your corolla for let's say 4. We're now talking about the comfort/pleasure of ~25k, but the cost between the vehicles of between 9k - 85k. Let's say you have this car for 5 years, the difference in ownership is 4/5k per year. If you can afford this, even if I'm off by a factor of 2/3, it's really not that bad.

At the same time, used cars are ones that have already taken that depreciation hit and prices eventually plateu (or even inflate regardless of condition if its a desirable car like an old porsche or a 2000s toyota land cruiser). I bet you could drive a $9000 used corolla for three years and sell it for $9000 afterwards, and it would have to be close to death for that car to ever be worth less than $5000, which is like the baseline for a used car without major mechanical issues.

as a data point I know somebody in Canada who bought a 12 year old mazda3 with 230,000 km on it for $3500, drove it in BC for two years, and sold it for the same they paid for it.

by far their biggest cost was the liability insurance.

try living in a small town with a bike.

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