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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

I justified the lightning purchase to my partner by pointing out having an equivalent whole house battery backup in Tesla power walls would be more expensive than the truck

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Have you tried supplying power to your home yet?

Shhh, his wife might read this.

My only fear is that when I pass away, he'll sell my telescopes for what I said they cost. Jk jk, he bought me my most expensive one

We've not hooked up the transfer switch yet but we have ran a lot of extension cords during an ice storm last year and kept all our aquariums going, all 700 gallons of them

If you’ve had it for that long without installing the crucial part of what you described above as a major selling point, I think that would have been useful to volunteer in the original comment lol.

The extension cord thing was interesting too, but “I sold my partner on a feature that turned out to be more trouble than it was worth to set up” is super relevant to discussion!

We haven't needed to yet. Our primary concern are those aquariums and it worked wonderfully for them when we needed it. Much better than running through over a hundred dollars a day in propane to keep them running, and the truck parks in an insulated garage so no cords to a generator through a window letting the cold in

Trick is the power wall will be there in 10 years. The truck may be traded in at 4. Car trade in speed is what makes that math not work.

so the power wall can't be traded in and doesn't move. Still seems more useful.

Trading in your new car at 4 years old sounds like bad math no matter what car you buy.

Have you seen the prices of pre-owned Honda/Toyota sedans that are less than 5 years old? There are absolutely cars out there where trading in your new car after 3-4 years can make sense depending on the cost of the car, the depreciation curve, and whether you want to always be driving a relatively new car. Of course it's almost always going to be a better value proposition to drive the car for 10 years if you can, but that can still depend on depreciation.

The math doesn't work when you calculate the same thing based on buying low mileage used cars or leases.

You're throwing large amounts of equity away every 4 years.

Also electric cars get killed on the depreciation curve.

    > Also electric cars get killed on the depreciation curve.

I have heard this a couple of times now, and I believe it. Is the cause battery wear or pure demand (buyers don't want used EVs for various non technical reasons)?

In California, at one point, you could get a few thousand rebate, if you were in the Central Valley, and additional few thousand rebate. Some local cities gave rebates on top of that, and the federal tax rebate on that. Buy a $45k Model 3 and get back $13k-$15k just for buying it. Rebates like that are going to play havoc with resale values. On top of that, new Tesla's went down in price over the past several years. I think as these incentives taper off we'll see more of a stable drop off.

I think buyers just understand the value of a battery that they've cared for and babied compared to a battery with unknown history.

Low mileage used cars don't come with a warranty, or probably have a more limited warranty if they're CPO.

Leases can be better, but again they are usually better choices in high depreciation scenarios (like luxury vehicles or EVs, as you point out), not low depreciation scenarios.

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