When big companies change the subject from the cost of their products to TCO, that's when you check your wallet. Particularly when you are calculating TCO by assuming the car is under warranty and trying to sell that to a used car buyer who has no warranty and is forced to service their car at predatory dealerships and may be facing a 20K battery replacement cost. TCO needs to be calculated over the entire life of the vehicle, otherwise your plan is to sell the car to a sucker at the end of your ownership period, which may work for a short period of time, but not over the long term.

Rear drive standard range model 3 starts at 40K. There is simply no universe in which this is either affordable or a bargain. This is entry-level luxury car pricing. If you are buying an out of warranty used Tesla for 20K, say 5 years old, then your TCO is going to be far higher than if you buy a 5 year old out of warranty Camry or Toyota. It is also foolish to include temporary government subsidies when determining the long term viability of a company. Those will all go away shortly at which point your TCO will also go up, and used car buyers do not benefit from these subsidies.

And the Camry is the more expensive sedan, with the cheaper Corolla outselling it regularly.

That's kindof the point. If you want Toyota style volumes, be prepared to have Toyota-style reliability, repair costs, parts eco-system, independent mechanics, and selling prices.

The weighted average retail price for new Toyota cars sold is 34K, and 2/3 of cars purchased each year are used cars. The weighted average selling prices of Teslas is ~60K, nearly double the price of Toyotas. And remember that Toyota is a premium brand due to their legendary reliability. Let me know the lifetime service costs of a Tesla and then we can compare that to the Toyota. Include battery replacement costs in that figure and get back me to me with a real TCO.

For Tesla, there are real question marks about out of warranty cost of ownership and battery replacement costs for purchasing used Teslas. For example, I've never paid more than 13K for a car, always have it serviced at independent mechanics I have a relationship with, and I have always kept my car for at least 7 years, with relatively cheap maintenace cost -- the biggest repair ticket item I ever needed to pay was a clutch replacement. So I am not willing to eat 5-7K in depreciation+maintenance per annum that Tesla buyers will pay. I've only ever suffered at most 1.5K per annum in depreciation+maintenance over the life of cars I've purchased. So don't talk to me about the great deal of paying 40K for a tesla that will lose 20K in depreciation over 5 years. I don't care how much cheaper electricity is than fuel, there is no universe in which this is a cost effective form of car ownership for the majority of the public (2/3 of car sales are used car sales).

I buy reliable used cars that are 5-7 years old that are easy to service. So do other cost-conscious purchasers. For this demographic, there are too many question marks for me to dip into the EV market now, but wait 10-20 years for more reliability data to come out and to see if a cost-competitive third party aftermarket springs up for Teslas that has replacement parts and service costs comparable to what you can get with a good local mechanic working on Toyotas or Hondas, as well as battery replacement costs that are less than the price of the car when the battery dies -- unless the plan is to sell disposable cars, at which point the value proposition is even worse for cost-sensitive purchasers, and Tesla will have a hard time competing if their intention is to sell disposable cars for a higher price than cars that can be maintained for 30 years.

>Rear drive standard range model 3 starts at 40K

Even if you round up $39K to 40K. It's still a far cry from your initial $50k assumption. $10K is not even close to being a rounding error and makes it seem like you're reaching.

You also made quite a bit of other assumptions here. You should actually fact check some of your claims. You can do the math yourself. Numbers don't lie.

If you can somehow show that the articles and data is wrong. I genuinely would love to see how. Because I put a high value on facts/data vs opinion and that will be news to me.

> Even if you round up $39K to 40K. It's still a far cry from your initial $50k assumption.

Tesla 3's ASP was ~60K in 2018 https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/23/tesla-model-3-average-s...

That was the latest data I could find and I decided to give them a break. You will find in analysts calls a number of 50K is a common estimate.

> Numbers don't lie.

Agreed

From starting price now to ASP. What's next? That's some mental gymnastics going on there. FYI there has been several price cuts since 2018.

> Agreed

So... Do you have that calculation handy where a Camry/Accord cost less to own after 5 years? I would love to see it, so we can compare notes.

My question was made in good faith. I implore that you actually read the HN guidelines. Because it seems that you need to moderate yourself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments