oh cnet cnet cnet this one's kind of a bummer because i actually like cnet i think they do
good work in a lot of ways i watched some of their tech stuff but this time they really missed the
mark in this latest article and video combo by the media giant cnet they spread some information that
isn't quite true and they even use a study that we've debunked on this channel from anderson
economic group that has strong ties to nearly every single legacy automotive company out there
anyways the cnet article is titled the real cost of electric car ownership estimating the
cost of driving electric is more complicated than calculating the cost of driving a conventional car
and as far as headlines go that's a pretty reasonable one i mean all of that makes sense
but then when we start hearing their analysis things hit the fan the first point they really
miss the mark on is about depreciation here i'll just let you watch the clip for yourself
for example subaru which isn't even known for electrified cars has an average resale value of 66
retained after five years according to car edge so if you bought a 35 000 new subaru the depreciation
will cost you 12 000 over the first five years or about seven dollars a day okay i'm gonna stop
real quick and say a few things first notice how they used subaru which according to their source
has the lowest depreciation over time meaning to represent gas cars they didn't choose average
depreciation of gas cars for the market they quite literally chose the manufacturer with the least
depreciation possible so right out of the gate we can see that they put gas cars in the best light
possible by definition because they chose the manufacturer who had vehicles who hold their value
best seems like a really weird choice to pick the best case scenario and not do the industry average
when the point being made is between gas cars and evs but they don't stop there let's check out the
rest of their thoughts on depreciation compare that to a tesla which car edge predicts will hold
just 58 of its value after five years and of course costs more so let's say you buy a sixty
thousand dollar model three that'll cost you twenty five thousand in depreciation over the
first five years that's about fourteen dollars a day or more interestingly nearly a hundred
dollars a week just about the same amount of money you're saving by not using gas and okay so there's
actually quite a bit to unpack there they're saying that if you buy a sixty thousand dollar
tesla model three then after five years it'll have depreciated by 25 grand which is significantly
more than the subaru the problem with their statement is that it's completely wrong they're
trying to prove evs depreciate much faster than gas cars which is the case with some evs but then
they use the tesla model 3 for their example and here's the facts the model 3 is a complete anomaly
when it comes to retaining value in fact it's been absolutely smashing records according to a study
from icars.com after three years the model 3 had depreciated on average only 10 percent now that's
only three years and cena is talking about five years but unfortunately the model 3 only started
being produced in 2017 so it's just now coming up on its five years birthday so it'll take a little
bit longer to get a good quantity of data to show depreciation over five years because the car is
just pretty new but even karen driver which has been notoriously hard on tesla wrote this article
saying the average vehicle coming off a three year lease has lost 52 percent of its value but a model
3 only loses about 10 percent once steady finds so not only does the model 3 depreciate much slower
than nearly every other ev out there but it also depreciates significantly slower than its gas car
rivals what these studies are showing is that cnet has it exactly backwards i went and looked
at their source which is car edge and that's where they're getting their estimates from and i'm not
sure how they're doing their calculations but it's clearly not in line with reality if you try
and buy a used model 3 you're quickly going to find out that they haven't lost anywhere
close to the 58 that cnet is using anyways all is to say while cnet is trying to use depreciation
as a reason not to buy a model 3 in their example the exact opposite is true there aren't any other
cars in the model 3's category that i could find that even come close to holding their value as
well as the three but what cnet is doing is even a bit trickier than that because they're comparing
all teslas to all subarus and not only does subaru have the lowest depreciation of any manufacturer
which is why they picked them and that's part of their bias but they also aren't comparing apples
to apples according to ic cars study luxury cars depreciate the fastest of any car category they
generally depreciate between 10 to 20 percent faster than their value-oriented brethren when
you look at the cars with the worst appreciations they're almost all bmws audis maseratis jaguars
and the likes so with that in mind tesla's not only an ev manufacturer but they're also
considered to be a luxury car maker for cnet who of course knows this to compare a non-luxury car
maker like subaru to a luxury eb maker like tesla well that's just a bit suspicious also notice that
they use 30 000 for the subaru cost and 60 000 for the tesla cost and because depreciation is
a percentage of course the larger sticker price will lead to more depreciation in the dollar
amount there are so many factors that come into play in calculating accurate depreciation rates
but even with this short look we can see that cnet isn't doing their due diligence when it comes to
representing reality for their viewers that being said if you're someone like me who not only cares
about depreciation of your assets but also cares about appreciation of your assets then i highly
recommend checking out this video's sponsor masterworks i'm heavily invested in renewable
energies and ev companies as you probably know if you watch the channel and given that's most
of my portfolio i decided it was time to diversify at least a little bit i'm not going to recommend
a product or company that i don't approve of so i did my research and decided to put my money where
my mouth was and i made my own personal investment with them before making this video masterworks is
a sort of hybrid between an art collector and a tech platform but the short of it is that they
give you the capability to invest in contemporary blue chip art like picasso banksy monet and a
bunch of others what really piqued my interest is that in the past 25 years contemporary art prices
have been outperforming the s p 500 total return by 164 averaging 14 annual returns if a low risk
investment is outperforming the s p 500 over the long run i'm interested and what's even crazier
to me is that the last 25 years have been a bull run for the s p which makes masterworks portfolio
even more impressive other than the solid returns in the past contemporary art pricing has a
low correlation with stock and bond pricing which is helpful for managing volatility and so it's
extra helpful for me if you're interested i've got a link in the description for how to invest
you can sign up in less than 60 seconds but i want to be clear this isn't investment advice
no returns are guaranteed and always do your own investment research so all right cnet seems to be
missing the boat with regards to depreciation but what about the rest of their points they go into
talking about the fact that electricity prices vary much more than gas prices from state to
state and even time of day and that is completely true and while they're clear to bring up the ways
that evs may be more expensive than gas cars they don't mention in the video the fact that evs cost
significantly less to maintain versus gas cars in fact recently ford themselves came out with
this statement how much lower are the scheduled maintenance ownership costs of the f-150 lightning
the f-150 lightning is expected to offer a lower total cost of ownership among f-series trucks with
a 40 savings in scheduled maintenance versus a gas-powered f-150 over an eight-year 100 000 mile
period and overall fuel costs will also be lower on average 40 savings on maintenance is absolutely
huge according to aaa the average yearly maintenance cost for a vehicle is 1200 bucks
meaning that an eevee could save you nearly 500 a year in maintenance alone but cnet completely
fails to mention that in their video now they do say in their article that evs don't need as
many fluid changes or break services which is true but they don't say how much money that's projected
to save the car owner in the long run and that's something that's really important to note anyways
their last point they quote from a research group called anderson economic group and this one
kills me the study they bring up from anderson is very misleading so much so that i made an entire
video debunking their findings by showing how they cherry pick their data to make evs look even worse
than what's actually true they include assumptions like that ev owners will charge 40 to 70 percent
away from home which is much more expensive despite all the data pointing to the fact that
actually ev owners only charge between five and 15 percent of the time away from home they also took
gas prices from 2018 where they were incredibly cheap and took electricity prices from 2021
when electricity was much more expensive and they gave no justification for why they took
prices that were from different years all of their decisions just so happen to point in one direction
that eevees are more expensive versus gas cars but when you actually dig through their data
and their assumptions you can see that they are clearly operating with a bias and i don't want to
spoil the video that i made because i would love for you to watch it i'll leave a link right up
here but let's just say that anderson economic group also has some very close ties to nearly
every automotive giant out there not exactly an impartial judge when they're being paid by legacy
otto anyways while i appreciate cnet taking the time and talking about the real world eb cost it
seems to me that they're not actually trying to get the truth out there instead they're pushing
some sort of an agenda and i'll let you be the judge on what kind of agenda that is alright peace