colej our choice to go to a Tesla was about math. 100 miles a day in commuting ( our average), at 3.8 cents per mile on the Tesla or .23-.26 cents on the Escalade.. saves me almost $20 a day in fuel x 5 days a week = $400 a month saved and that’s JUST our planned commute, nothing extra. If you take it a step further and analyze maintenance costs etc on top of it, the Tesla pays for itself. Now granted, that’s in comparison to an Escalade w 150k miles on it already, so the maintenance costs are not low, but I wasn’t adding anything extra in either. So if something breaks, then it’s a real fugg me situation.
We could have bought a lesser car, but we weren’t going to, so it’s fine to say you can buy something “comparable” for less, but that’s not true if you value performance or generally like to drive, there’s nothing you can buy for 45k that goes 0-60 in 3.5 seconds, has AWD and handles reasonably well. The fact of it all is, with the $7500 tax credit, the Tesla is priced very competitively in the market with any decent ICE car that’s remotely close to its class and it will whoop its ass in performance all day long. I’m not saying there aren’t cheaper ways to get around over all, there are less costly cars that get good mileage and probably make financial sense. That said, I’m not driving a Nissan Juke, not even going to consider it.