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Comment by lallysingh | Hacker News Reader

Weekly I put $90 in the tank. Charging 100kw I believe would cost me $15. That figure seems about right.

yes but it's not "saving" anything. You are still spending the money on the price tag.

Except that, if you own the Tesla long enough, the savings per month will eat up the difference in cost between the Tesla and significantly cheaper cars.

Yes, but you are still paying $x. It's not savings and they should not mislead people in this way. You can have the _actual_ cost posted _and_ your "potential savings" but they should be separate.

FWIW: I've owned a Tesla for 6 years now and I'm pretty sure I still spent more than I would have buying like a Prius or Volt or one of the other hybrid vehicles I was looking at at the time.

Appliances with better energy efficiency don’t get to advertise a price different from what’ll ring up at the register just because they’ll cost less in electricity over time.

Cost of ownership is real but advertising a sticker price and including the difference in maintenance as part of that sticker price is just bad math.

Should cheaper ICE cars subtract from their sticker price the potential investment earnings of the money that you save versus buying a Tesla? Obviously not.

They don’t actually advertise that as the sticker price, for one thing: the page clearly states what the price is and gives you the option to switch to sticker price.

Secondly, I think the selling point of EVs is the TCO, even with today’s relatively expensive EVs, significantly less expensive all-gas cars end up being cheaper (and the Tesla is more appealing to me than hybrids, which frequently feel bad as someone who really likes to drive). But, it makes sense to me for the landing page to instruct the users about this (like Energy Star appliances do): the UX design might not be the best here, but it’s pretty hard to get all the way through the Tesla sales flow without being told clearly what the actual cost is.

My brother spends $100 a month to charge his Tesla at home. I fill up my hybrid less than once a month at about $40.

Without actual miles driven it's impossible to make a meaningful comparison. My wife spends less on her minivan than my EV - but she's not driving to work every day (and she prefers to drive the EV when she can).

Call me crazy but I suspect you and your brother drive a different amount. $100/mo in a Tesla I ballpark at driving 1900 miles per month, so you're probably driving less than him, unless you get more than 150mpg in your hybrid.

That's pretty good ballpark. His electricity rate matters too, but I'm about $100-120/mo and average just under 2k miles.

He has a 5 mile commute to work. I figure at the most, he drives twice as much as I do, but that would still be less for gas than what he is paying.

All I'm saying is that Tesla claiming you are going to save $100 a month in gas is based on a whole lot of assumptions. It's not money in the bank.

I spend $15/mo to charge my Tesla.

I spend about $20/month to charge mine at home and drive about 700 miles/month, unless I go out of town.

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