This is the big thing here. The people that are looking at the cost of supercharging as simply the cost of fuel are shortsighted and not seeing the full picture. You are paying for the ability to travel long distances and subsidizing superchargers to make traveling long distances easier. It's not just about the cost of electricity, it's the infrastructure which contains factors such as convenience and expansion that are impossible to put a price on. I think the $2000 price point is a good deal, all things considered.
-
Want to remove ads? Register an account and login to see fewer ads, and become a Supporting Member to remove almost all ads.
CuriousG
Active Member
First of all, this was posted March 16th, 2015. Secondly, this was all before Model 3 was unveiled. No one anticipated the demand of this car until the pre-ordering process began - not even Tesla. Lastly, you take a reddit article that has their own heading and take it out of context. The Youtube video is titled: The Future of Transportation. The exact quote is follows unless there's another place where the million cars is mentioned:
In the future I think it will make sense to phase in some kind of financial transaction here but it's going to take time. And for the beginning a million cars this is a viable way to do it.
You can accomplish this in any way you'd like from a financial perspective. You can sell electricity at "cost" and then a portion of your SC access fee pays for the equipment, or you can just sell electricity at a price that takes the infrastructure into consideration.
The infrastructure is an asset for Tesla and should be seen as one. If Shell wanted, they could also charge a $1,000 access fee, and then sell gas a bit cheaper because the "cost of asset use" isn't built into the cost per gallon any more.
The current setup works fine when dealing with folks at a higher income level, but not all of your customers will always be that way. My guess is that SC access will start to change with the Model 3, because they're moving into relatively lower income levels. I know that for 99% of my driving, I don't need a supercharger. I will struggle to pay $2,000 or whatever it is to get access. Instead, I'd much rather buy charging access in 24 hour blocks, which is probably enough for a year for me.
Would you be OK with paying ~$30/charge? An average charge is 30 minutes, so a 24 hour block of Supercharging time would cost $1,440.
I'm really enthusiastic about getting this car, but it the cost is really going to be $2500, I'll need to really evaluate whether this is the right car for me. While this will not be our family trip car (that most certainly will be our Honda Odyssey), it would be nice to have the option to take it more than 100 miles away before needing to turn around and re-charge the car at home. Will this happen often? Probably not, but it sure would make us think differently about our trips/destinations in a way that we aren't accustomed to. I'm hoping for $1000 or some sort of pay per use. As Tesla markets a crowd that is less affluent than they have been accustomed to selling to, the marketing and charging for SC access will need to change too.
You really need to get a grip on reality. What you are stating as fact is simply not true.
If it will cost something around 2,500 to enable free supercharging for life (and this is made up by the OP, so it's a complete hypothetical), how does that compare to what you pay for gas?
According to AAA an average family spends close to $10,000/yr on gas. Edited to add: about $3,000/car/year according to AAA.
What am I missing here?
Last edited:
diamond.g
Active Member
Pay per use charging exists through third party networks.
If this is what they're pricing in, then they're losing a lot on $2,500 for unlimited, unless they think people will use less than 48 hours in the lifetime of the car.
I think the price would be much less to account for infrastructure and electricity rolled into a "per hour" fee.
It's tougher to compare, because most of your charging will be at home and not at a supercharger or gas station.
Tesla isn't going to send people that way, because that creates more range anxiety. My guess is that they will end up offering more SC payment options.
Not sure how I am taking anything out of context. The quote you stated was exactly the quote I was referring to up thread. I picked the Reddit post because it was tagged to the time stamp where JB talks about supercharging. I figured the folks here would be smart enough to ignore the dumb title once they watched the content since I don't know how to time stamp you tube links like that. I guess I can't assume anything in an online forum and should have put a caveat to ignore the title. My bad.
My point is they have been talking about monetizing the system for a while now (since 2015 as you pointed out) and it sounds to me like they would rather work towards payment plans of some form vs one-time fees for unlimited use. (With JB's "transaction" verbiage and Elons "plan" verbiage)
My current theory is they will make the unlimited for life plan painfully expensive because they would rather have all of us on the hook for continual payments over time. This would also decouple supercharging from the car, so that used car buyers would have to buy a supercharger plan as well. More money in Tesla's pockets to fund and build out the network.
I might be completely wrong, and supercharging for life may be very reasonably priced and we will all gladly sign up. We will just have to wait and see once the details are released.
I see. I didn't think about that since I don't yet own a tesla and sort of assumed I'd always go to a supercharger, without giving it much thought.
Nonetheless, I still feel that superchargers are the key for me to be able to own a Tesla, since I take long road trips, and if I have to pay some life long access fee, which is much less than what I would pay for gas, I don't see the problem.
What you're missing is that I'll be charging most of the time at home. So the question is whether I would use $2500 in gas while on longer distance trips (ie, when I'll use the SC network). Add in the time value of money and this becomes a very poor ROI.
I live in WI, but make trips home to MI about 2-3x per year. This is most of my long distance travel. Roughly 400 miles each way. Add in a couple closer long distance trips. So let's say I do about 3000 miles per year where I would use the SC network. Our trip car gets about 25mpg so that's about 120 gallons of gas. 120gal * $3.00 per gallon = $360 per year in "trip gas".
This is where the $2500 really falls apart for me. A payback of 7 years on $2500 is a poor "investment"
It gets even worse when you factor that most of those MI trips are going to be in our minivan, and not the Tesla. We aren't light packers. If I only do 1000 long distance travel miles, the payback gets much much worse.
Last edited:
AustinPowers
Total Smeghead
Similar situation here. With my driving habits I would never make my money back.
+1 Exactly. Same here.
That's as maybe, but to many people buying a Model 3, a Supercharger will be seen like a gas station on long roadtrips. And like others have said, you don't pay for those upfront either. Plus, more people than one would think don't go on longer roadtrips all too often.
Last edited:
You mean vs. not being able to make the trips? Or having to pay to maintain a second car just for trips?
Similar threads
