- Before buying a Tesla, you probably have this perception
that they're really expensive,
that you're gonna spend a ton of money,
and it's probably just out of your price range.
Well, that may have been true a few years back,
but now with the Model 3 and the entire used market
for Model S and Model X,
things are becoming much more affordable.
But you still have to figure out what that monthly cost
is gonna be.
There are a few different categories and ways
to go about it.
That's what this video is meant to do
is to help walk you through all the different considerations
to figure out how much a Tesla is gonna cost you each month.
Let's go.
(light music)
Like I said, there are a few different categories of cost
that we need to figure out.
First, we need to figure out the price of the vehicle,
and if we finance it, what will that cost be,
as well as if we'd least it, what would that cost be.
Then we need to figure out charging, how are we gonna charge
or how are we gonna actually fuel the vehicle
and how much will that cost,
and then lastly, what is our insurance cost.
I'm intentionally leaving off a few categories here
that you may consider in the true cost of owning a vehicle
because what I wanna focus on solely here
is how much money you will actually spend each month.
In looking for a Tesla,
there are couple different places to go.
If you're going new, obviously you go to tesla.com
and just spec out whatever model you want.
From there, it'll give you the cash price,
the lease price if it's available for lease,
and a loan price if you can get a loan through Tesla.
Now you could also get a loan from another bank.
Often the local credit union wherever you live
will give you a better interest rate.
So, go explore that.
On their websites and calling them will give you
what your loan amount would be.
But here's one that I would price out
if I were doing it today.
I would probably buy for myself a Long Range Model S
if I were in the market for a brand new Tesla.
Pricing this out with just the white multicoat
that comes with it, the 19-inch wheels, the black interior,
no upgrade for the full self-driving,
just the built-in autopilot, it looks like my purchase price
would be just under $80,000.
If I were to lease this on a 36-month lease
with $7,500 down and a limit of 10,000 miles,
which honestly is pretty low,
I'm looking at around $899 a month,
so a pretty hefty price tag for my car.
If I wanted to get a loan for this from Tesla
with a 3.99% annual percentage rate on 72 months
and with $3,000 down, I'm looking at $1,223.
All in on the new side of it,
to me, that is a pretty expensive vehicle.
Honestly, there are so many used Model S's available.
I probably wouldn't do that.
If I were to find a Model S,
if I really were going down this road,
I would certainly be looking at the used market as well.
You can do that at tesla.com/used.
I would recommend focusing on battery mostly
like how much range you get out of the vehicle
and whether or not it has autopilot.
I think those are two really important features to focus on
if you're buying a used Tesla.
As well, you could do a Model 3 here.
What I want you to do for this step, just follow along,
is find the car you're interested in buying.
Figure out just as I did through the Tesla website
what is that monthly price gonna be.
Or if you're gonna get a loan from a credit union
or some other bank, go to their website
and all of 'em should have a calculator
for your auto loan payment.
Go figure that out and write that number down.
For me, I'm gonna use this 2016 Tesla Model S 85D
that I found for 46,900,
which gives me a monthly payment of $675.
The next category is charging.
Depending on where you live,
there are gonna be a lot of different things
that go into this.
I'm gonna use myself as an example
and mention other things that you may want to consider.
When it comes to charging, you likely are gonna have
some mix of supercharging, maybe some level two charging
like a destination charger,
maybe your work has a charger that you can use,
and charging at home.
All told, you're not gonna be doing it 100% home.
So, this number we're gonna calculate here
is gonna be a little different
than what you end up paying, hopefully less.
Now I didn't find a really good calculator online for this.
I think Tesla used to have one.
So, I ended up building my own.
I'll put a link to it down in the description for you.
Here is how to use it.
First, you start off with which model you're choosing.
This is important because it gives us
our watt hours per mile,
which is similar to the miles per gallon in a gas car.
Then you punch in whatever your current gas car is
or you would consider a comparable one for this analysis.
I have 32 miles per gallon here as a default.
Change it to whatever makes sense.
Then you need to figure out your electricity price
in the kilowatt hour measurement.
You can get this from your electricity bill
if you log in to whatever that is.
For me, it's SDG&E.
Go to your bill details.
Usually in there, it'll tell you the different rate.
Now a lot of companies, this isn't that well-known,
a lot of companies offer time-of-use rating
where they will actually give you a discounted rate
at certain times of day when you can charge your car
and use that instead of the overall rate, the average rate.
In California where I live,
we have this EV time-of-use rating system from SDG&E.
I go to their website.
I see that in this category
of what they call super off-peak charging
just starting at midnight,
the rate per kilowatt hour drops to nine cents.
That's a great deal.
Now I'll talk about solar in a second,
but what you need to do now is go find that rate,
whatever it is for you.
If you have the option to get a special rate,
go look at that.
Search it out with your power company
and put that number into the calculator.
Next, we'll do price of gas.
Maybe you know what that is
and you can just punch the number in
off the top of your head,
but you can also use different websites to find this.
So, we have a AAA website that has this
as well as GasBuddy,
which is meant to help you find the cheapest gas.
They show all these kinda rates
and they can kinda localize down to your area.
So, punch in the average price of gas in your area.
The next input we need to figure out charging
is how many miles you drive.
I've defaulted this to 1,300 miles,
which is on part with the average in the United States.
Of course, every person's situation is different.
So, make sure that this mirrors
whatever it is gonna be for you
'cause this obviously is a key factor
in figuring out how much money you're gonna spend.
Then once you have all those details plugged in,
you will see the results down below.
For my example here where the price of electricity
is nine cents per kilowatt hour,
the average price of gas is $3.78,
the gas car we're comparing to get 32 miles per gallon,
say a Honda Civic or something,
and I am looking at a Model S,
my total for the month is around $44.50,
the gas would cost me $153.60,
giving me a savings of 71.1%.
Pretty good deal.
Now if you are getting a Model 3, just select that model.
If you're getting a Model X, select that one.
But make sure also to update the miles per gallon
to the comparative vehicle.
So, if you get a Model X,
you're looking at a bigger car,
not a small coup like a Honda Accord or something.
So, make sure that just those are commensurate.
That way, the comparison is valid.
Also, on the bottom,
you'll notice that the watt hours per mile,
I didn't have you input because a lot of these calculators
I've seen online just use these kind of numbers
that were generated in a lab,
something that isn't actually reflective of reality.
Well, here, through Tesla,
I'm able to pull the anonymous driving data
of thousands upon thousands of Tesla owners.
So, when you see that you click the Model 3
versus Model S versus Model X,
it tells you how many driving trips are included
and then what the median watt hours per mile is.
Now the median is good versus the average
because you could have things skewed heavily
one way or the other.
So, the median is kind of a nice way
just to filter out all that extra noise
and find out generally what's closer to reality for you.
This is where we pull that number from.
It's not something that was just thrown out there
from an engineering team.
This is real-world data that's being used
to power these numbers.
Let me talk real quickly about solar.
Now if you have solar already, you probably know this stuff.
But if you are buying an EV,
quickly you'll realize that getting solar on your home
actually makes a lot of sense
because you're using a ton more electricity.
As well, after 2019, the federal tax credit for solar
starts to reduce.
It starts to phase out.
So, if you're on the fence about it now,
you don't have a whole lot of time
to really figure this out.
The way I would recommend doing that is going to EnergySage
and plugging in your info
and having solar installers bid on your project,
giving you all the details before you actually talk
to any salesperson.
I personally used EnergySage
and then I became a partner of theirs
because I love what they do.
They present to you all the bids and everything
in kind of a really nice laid out dashboard
that shows you the facts
before you get all the marketing pitch
and start being talked into things you probably don't need.
Definitely check out EnergySage.
I'll put a link to them down below.
Use this to figure out how much money
you could actually save by going solar.
With that information, you can then back into how much
per kilowatt you would spend and update this calculator
to figure out a more true charging cost.
For example, I was able to determine
that my per kilowatt hour cost is around seven cents
versus the nine cents that the utility is charging.
Now I got this by taking the total cost of my system,
which was $14,779, dividing that by the warranty
of 25 years, giving me an annual cost of $591.16.
Then I saw that my solar system
was generating 8,510 kilowatt hours each year,
or last year it did anyways. (laughs)
And then diving those two numbers
gave me just above 6.9 cents per kilowatt hour,
so I'm calling is seven cents per kilowatt hour.
If I plug this number into the calculator,
you see that my savings actually increased quite a bit
from 71% to 77.5% and the total electricity cost per month
is $34.60, so about 10 bucks cheaper than before.
The next thing to look at is insurance.
Tesla just recently started offering their own insurance.
Now I don't think you're actually able to get a quote
unless you have an account, but I went and did that.
For my Model S, it was $120 a month.
For my Model 3, it was 133.
So, both of those are quite a bit more
than I currently pay with Farmers.
With Farmers, I have three cars, I have my house,
and I have life insurance.
Now I've been with them for a while.
I have direct deposit or automatic debit.
So, I get a lot of discounts and things.
So, I would call your insurance provider.
Go to their website or go to the Tesla website.
See if you can do it.
For me, it makes me log in,
but maybe they'll change that
by the time you're watching this.
Also, you can get one at Esurance.
I'll put a link to that down below
and figure out exactly what your insurance cost would be.
For me, since I already have this set up here,
I'm gonna list it as $120, the quote that Tesla gave me
as if I were buying this brand new.
All that's left to do now is add all this up
to figure out that monthly cost.
If you recall, we have the $675 payment for the car,
we have $34.60 for charging,
which includes the cost of solar, we have $120 in insurance.
This gives us a grand monthly total of $829.60.
So, $830 a month is a fair amount.
It's not definitely on the cheaper end.
But if you were to compare this
to some of the other vehicles out there in this category,
remember we're getting the Model S here,
I think you'd find that with the reduced cost
of maintenance and repairs, this actually isn't that bad
because you're saving 77% on fuel,
insurance is gonna be very subjective,
and the payment really is gonna be the same
'cause it's just a loan.
So, it just varies on the price of the car.
So, if you bought another gas car
for the same dollar amount, I can guarantee you'd be saving
quite a bit of money here.
Now this number for you is gonna be different.
The point of this video and the point of that calculator
I built was to just help you figure that out,
to help you figure out exactly how much you're gonna spend.
The thing I would never recommend anyone doing
is getting in over their head when it comes to a vehicle.
Vehicles depreciate.
They're not like things like you live in.
They're not your house.
They don't go up in value.
They're not an investment.
So, if this number that I showed you here is way too much,
way more expensive than you're willing to pay, that's fine.
Find one that is.
For example, on the very low end,
you can lease a Model 3 for 399 a month.
And then if you add in $133 for the insurance
that I just mentioned from the quote from Tesla,
and $26.50 for charging,
which is what it would come out for the Model 3
using the same seven cents per kilowatt hour
that I figured out before.
You're looking at $588.50.
Still, it's not a cheap car,
but if you were to take a similarly priced gas car,
say BMW 3 Series, and run all these numbers,
you're gonna find that you're spending quite a bit more
on fuel and maintenance and everything else.
This is just a tool for you to help figure out
exactly how much you are going to spend
when you buy your first Tesla.
Hopefully this will just kinda remain
as a reference point for you.
That way, you can explain these things
and make sure that you're not just overextending yourself.
Let me know in the comments.
If there's any pieces I missed here,
I'll try to update that calculator as best I can
to keep it fresh for you guys, so it's useful over time.
Of course, share this video with anyone you know
that is curious about how much it may cost
to, say, charge their Tesla each month.
That's it for now.
I hope you guys enjoyed this.
Don't forget, when you free the data, your mind will follow.
I'll see you guys back in the next one.
(light music)
Hey, thanks for watching this video.
I hope you got something out of it.
I hope that tool helps you figure out the true cost
you're gonna spend on charging your Tesla
as well as all the other stuff that I mentioned
on how to figure that out.
Now if you wanna join the community,
chat with folks like me daily,
ask more questions of people and get better insights,
consider joining us at patreon.com/teslanomics.
I hope to see you there soon.
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