Cost of Operating Model S

[boonedocks]

I know there have been many threads of how much electricity costs to operate the Model S and how much to expect your bill to go up. I have a little different take on cost to operate and wanted to share.

I live in Atlanta and drive on a long stretch of expressway were we have a PayPerUse lane called PeachPass. It saves quite a bit of time in heavy traffic and can the price changes accordingly. I use it every day and have since it opened. In Atlanta, the PeachPass lane and the HOV lane are open to BEV free to use and in the HOV lane a single occupant may drive in it.

My power company is Jackson EMC and we have an EV tariff rate which I also take advantage of. So are the interesting numbers. For last month, and for the last 3 months almost the exact same #'s here are the results (keep in mind I did not take delivery of my Model S until June 2015 and these #'s are from March 2016):

Cost of electricity per day March 2015: $9.60
Cost of electricity per day March 2016: $9.83
So for 31 days I paid $6.90 in extra electricity charges from the same month a year ago.

PeachPass fees for March 2016: $96.41 which is charged and reversed daily for their accounting

$96.41 - $6.90 = I netted $89.51 in the PLUS in the month of March.

Just wanted to share another way of looking at cost of operation.

 

[Hrhkee]

Nice. THANKS

 

[Tomasz]

Since you've taken HOV lane/pass saving into account there are some other pieces of information that you need to count:
- tags/registration difference - (I don't know how it works in GA, in Iowa it's based on MSRP and age) between your old car and new car (or between your new Tesla and any other new car you'd drive)
- insurance difference
- financing cost difference (if any)

In my case switching from what I currently drive to Model S is going to come down to about $900/month loss. But I'm not doing that to save money, I'm doing it to drive electric.

 

[Manzacoty]

That's nice you live in a state that offers those incentives. Here in Texas we don't get much (really anything). Our power company is a co-op and we can't use different retail plans like some other parts of Dallas.

I did tak to the co op and they will be rolling out a time of use program which will hopefully help the costs out a bit.

Even without the time of use plan. I'm only paying a couple extra dollars a day to operate the Tesla.

 

[Xminus6]

Nice. You haven't even added in the cost of your time.

 

[CmdrThor]

Comparing your cost of electricity in 2015 to 2016 isn't a very good way of figuring out how much the car used. You could estimate by using the energy used by the trip meter, but that doesn't account for vampire losses and charging inefficiencies. If you have a service plan you need to add $0.04 per mile for service, I would estimate another $0.04 per mile or so for tires, and depending on your configuration around $0.50 per mile or so for depreciation (probably closer to $1 per mile for brand new vehicles, drops substantially after that). Electricity is a fairly small portion of the operating costs of the car.