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Comment by aliljet | Hacker News Reader

[edit to focus on pricing, leaving praise of Simon's post out despite being deserved]

Simon claims, 'Grok 4 is competitively priced. It's $3/million for input tokens and $15/million for output tokens - the same price as Claude Sonnet 4.' This ignores the real price which skyrockets with thinking tokens.

This is a classic weird tesla-style pricing tactic at work. The price is not what it seems. The tokens it's burning to think are causing the cost of this model to be extremely high. Check this out: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/grok-4/providers

Perhaps Grok 4 is the second most expensive and the most powerful model in the market right now...

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  > This is a classic weird tesla-style pricing tactic at work. The price is not what it seems.

How is that "tesla-style pricing"? When I bought my Tesla the price was exactly what they told me it would be. Contrast that with every other car I've bought new, especially the Ford Focus for which the salesman tried to haggle me for more options and told me he thinks we should raise the price a bit "to make sure it gets approved" as I'm signing the paperwork.

I've never had a clearer new car purchase than with my Tesla.

For the better part of a decade people have been buying Teslas under the promise that the cars would drive themselves better than their owner could, or would offset their cost by participating in a self-driving taxi service while their owners were not using them, none of which has come remotely true.

Tesla has sometimes presented the price with "gas savings" deducted from the price, in a slightly misleading attempt to get people to consider the total cost of ownership. I'm assuming that is what is being referred to.

>which the salesman tried to haggle me for more options and told me he thinks we should raise the price a bit "to make sure it gets approved" as I'm signing the paperwork.

If you're walking into a store to spend tens of thousands of dollars and manage to get bullied by the salesperson, it's probably a "you problem".

Tesla charges retail; that's it, it's no magic.

Sales bs seems standard with basically all car dealers except Tesla.

I "managed to get bullied"? No, I put the pen down and asked him to make a phone call and ensure it will be approved, whatever he thinks that means. Somehow the question of "it getting approved" was resolved without him ever making that phone call.

He probably thinks I bullied him.

This is a classic car salesman tactic. The idea is that a buyer that's completed paperwork will be more likely to agree to a last minute price increase "because my manager won't let me sell it for $X". It's a total bullshit move. It's so common it's even mentioned in the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Well, for instance, see https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18255252/tesla-german-regu...

Claude is #1 in how many tokens it produces. Grok 4 now comes in at #2

see the section "Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index"

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/grok-4

I agree about the pricing being... quirky. It consumes so many tokens for thinking (and the thinking is not optional) so a person thinking about just input/output could get burned.

μ$3/IT and μ$15/OT ;o)

Tesla focused its pricing on drivers of gasoline vehicles, and their gas cost savings estimates are actually quite low compared to the real savings you will achieve. It was annoying when you already drive an EV and are buying a Tesla though to have to uncheck the savings option to see the pre savings prices. They changed it now so by default it only includes the $7500 and no longer automatically checks the gas savings.

EV (133mpge) 0.045 cents per mile (Tesla Model 3 SR+ RWD) Gas (26mpg) 0.155 cents per mile (Subaru crosstrek)

Based on my experience I highly recommend everyone buy any EV if you drive an ICE vehicle. Even charging at DC fast chargers still saves money, but if you can charge at home, you are really missing out on savings big time and it's time to look seriously into it.

>their gas cost savings estimates are actually quite low compared to the real savings you will achieve

I ran the numbers for myself and they literally weren't. They overestimated how many miles/yr I drove and underestimated how much I pay for electricity. There's plenty of other reasons to prefer EVs, but if you live somewhere with expensive electricity then fuel cost isn't one of them. In the sedan world you're likely better off with a Prius but even small SUV are getting 30-40 mpg nowadays.

As an asterisk, I live in California where gas prices are ~25% above the national average but electricity costs are more like double/triple. YMMV which is why you shouldn't trust Tesla's numbers or anyone else's except your own

> but even small SUV are getting 30-40 mpg nowadays.

The Pacific Northwest begs to differ. With all the hills in Seattle my subcompact 1.6L Turbo barely got 20MPG driving around like a grandma.

Our electricity is cheap, but I drive less than 5000 miles a year so I'm not making the money back on my EV basically ever.

You should have gotten a used Nissan Leaf. Perfect in town car.

So you're an outlier who drives well below the average miles per year in the USA. Obviously this isn't going to work for every customer but it IS a conservative estimate for the average.

You're talking about cars right, not vehicles in general?

> Based on my experience I highly recommend everyone buy any EV if you drive an ICE vehicle. Even charging at DC fast chargers still saves money, but if you can charge at home, you are really missing out on savings big time and it's time to look seriously into it

In the US this depends on where you live. There are several places where home electricity is expensive enough and gas is cheap enough that a hybrid is cheaper.

I live in one of the most expensive areas (SoCal) and it's /still/ cheaper than gas.

There's a bit of an illusion here because gas prices take into account a tax for road maintenance, which EVs are currently avoiding. Eventually the system will have to catch up because road maintenance requires money.

While electric vehicles do cause more road wear, applying that tax to most consumer vehicles is the joke. Road wear is completely dominated by semi-trucks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

The simplest method is to raise the HVUT, but we have so much data, we could assess miles driven * axel weight and charge a graduated fee based on that.

The WA state tabs on my Leaf which weighed less than Volvo station wagon were literally 4x higher because of EV taxes.

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