Tesla improves financial product and lowers monthly payment | Hacker News Reader

Tesla improves financial product and lowers monthly payment

teslamotors.com

46 pointsPasanpr24 comments

FTA: "Those who buy the Model S electric car for personal use will now pay a monthly rate of $580 taking only gasoline savings into account."

What does "taking only gasoline savings into account" mean? Does that mean its not $580, its some other price but if you had a normal car you'd be spending X on gas and so our monthly payment is Y - X = $580?

Just tell me what the hell the monthly price is!!

Model S

Auto loan amount: $62400 (Cheapest option not including tax)

Auto loan term: 5 yrs

Interest rate: 8%

Monthly auto loan payments: $1265.25

Now this is a basic auto loan calculator. I am not factoring in tax incentivized discounts or overall savings per month on gas payments and no down payment. For now it's a number to start with.

Tool I used: http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/auto/auto-loan-calculato...

Apparently, one of their innovations is a longer loan term - it might be 7 or 9 years.

It means, "not including all that other BS we had in the last $500 price". Like claiming the entire car as a business tax deduction.

http://www.teslamotors.com/true-cost-of-ownership

I see that the default "What's your time worth" has been lowered to $50 an hour from the previous $100/hr.

But they still pretend that you are saving time by not stopping for gas, and ignoring the 6-13 hours it takes to recharge for the 99% of customers for whom all their stops are not at a SuperCharger stop, and also ignoring the time spent driving out of one's way to find a charging station.

Accounting for that time, let's call it 100 hours a month since this whole page at Tesla is about making up numbers, at the new $50/hr, adds $5000 a month to the cost.

As long as Tesla is going to account for time one spends or loses as a result of refueling, the proper way to do this is to take all the time into account. Cherry picking one aspect of it is not honest.

It's a bit of a stretch as most people probably don't consider stopping at a gas station as a major inconvenience. In Tesla's defense, they do not automatically include those cost options in the calculation (you have to check the box to include them.

It is an interesting marketing/psychological move however. I imagine most people in the market for a Tesla are going to be well compensated, and as such, they will see the initial $50/hr, jack it up to what their going rate is (probably in the hundreds) and see the 'effective' costs of owning a Tesla drop dramatically.

After you get one you'll realize that even thinking about a gas station is a huge inconvenience. If you use a Tesla for your daily drive it is basically like it runs forever.

Is thinking about getting gas a couple times a month actually worse than remembering to charge a Tesla every single night? What if you forget to plug it in? I'm skeptical that any of their customers are so inhumanly busy that the split-second it takes to think "Oh, the gas light is on" is actually worth saving. And those ten minutes per month spent getting gas are hardly such a pain that making certain kinds of driving much less practical is clearly worth the trade.

There are good reasons for getting a Tesla, but those aren't ones I'd use.

That strictly depends on usage. If you are just using it as a commute car, and presuming your daily driving is less than 200 miles, plugging it in overnight is still going to be much less time than stopping for gas.

The improvement in the monthly payment is achieved by stretching out the loan period to be greater than five years. How much greater than five years, they don't say. Seven years? Ten years? How much extra interest does one pay on such a loan?

As I've written elsewhere, they can't offer a real lease because they don't have the money to finance their customers, and no bank is willing to place a bet on the resale value of the car in three years (the end of typical lease periods). Tesla and Elon's guaranteed resale value is apparently not good enough for the bankers, leaving no choice but to offer more expensive financing options--real loans. For a variety of reasons, a loan is less risky for a bank than a lease.

they don't do a lease because they would lose the tax incentives

Not at all--the leasing company (a separate shell entity or a bank) takes the tax credit because they bought the car. This is how both of my electric vechicle leases have worked. The leasing company then passes on the savings in the form of lower lease rates.

I'm impressed that Tesla has admitted that they were a bit misleading with the first announcement/offering.

EDIT: From the article '“We appreciate the feedback from a number of journalists and customers that the first version of our financing product wasn’t quite right,” said Tesla Co-founder & CEO Elon Musk.' Sure sounds like they're admitting it in a "we didn't really do anything wrong" kind of way.

Even though it's not an outright admission, it's still admirable.

I love Tesla and I love Elon Musk. I'm going all in on TSLA stocks ahead of their quarterly earnings. Financial YOLO.

Kicking myself for not grabbing it while it was in the $30's. Still probably a good buy, but I would recommend at least leaving some money aside for Ramen noodles and rent, just in case it blows up.

hahaha "[for high paying jobs] Tesla financial calculator makes it easy to factor in the value of time saved by being able to use the carpool lane or avoid trips to the gas station"

So, if you make lots of $ per hour, they will claim that having a model S will save you time and so they added the money you would be making into the price?!?! that's just crazy!

specially when a gasoline/hybrid car you can get:

- 300miles per refil

- each refil takes 5min

with the Model S

- 200 miles (250 if you buy the expensive one)

- 4h refil / 1 hour refil (if you buy the expensive superCharger)

These things are not included by default. Check the box if you value your time.

I don't think you have understood what a) the superchargers are and b) what the typical charging scenario is (overnight).

My comparable in luxury and performance cts-v only gets 175 to 200 miles per tank of nearly $4 a gallon premium fuel. Electricity costs $0.08 per kwh here. The model s (a car I am seriously considering would save me about $260 a month in gas. Add that to my $700 a month lease payment and it's roughly equivalent to the cost of a model s with the caveat that I'm on likely to leave town (which is fine we rarely drive my car out of town opting to take my wife's equally thirsty jeep).

You never have to "refill" a Tesla in the conventional sense if you charge it overnight like your phone. Also, HOV lane is awesome. It is the future. Also, if you switch to an E-9 plan (in CA) your overnight charge costs $0.03/kwH so that is essentially 1 gallon of gas in cost = 500 miles of travel.

> Also, HOV lane is awesome. It is the future.

It's the future as long as the car you're driving is marginal.

Hybrids used to be allowed to use the HOV lane, then they became popular and got kicked out. If electric cars become mainstream enough, they, too, will be prohibited from the using HOV lane.

Being able to use the carpool lane is the main selling point for an electric car to me right now, but be aware that it might not last for more than a few years.

it's great if you NEVER drive more than the daily limit. And for 12yr olds that aren't allowed to sleep out of the house. :)

But I have to wait for the gas to refill, the car can charge itself overnight.

It looks like a great car, has plenty of power, range etc, but I still think its too expensive to be a no brainer.

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