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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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