I recently wrote an entry in which I ran the numbers for us on a $500 per month Tesla Model S lease. Unfortunately, it turns out that's a phantom lease, one that's reduced my respect for Tesla quite a bit. In fact, I've written dozens of articles and blog entries about Tesla in the past three years and never once written anything negative -- until now.

Why am I so steamed?

Because I -- and I bet I'm not the only one -- naively thought, when I first read about the $500 Model S lease that I, and you, and everyone else, could actually get into a Model S and cut a check to Tesla for just $500 per month.

Bueller, it just ain't so!

So, Tesla’s trying to make things more interesting for folks who would love to have a Model S, but who clearly are not in the right income bracket to buy one -- that would be us -- with a lease deal it’s offering via a partnership with U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo.

I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty details here, or into a long discussion about whether Tesla’s pushing “fuzzy” math by including too many different variables in its monthly lease cost calculator (though, now that I’ve played with the calculator a bit more, unfortunately, after having already written this entry, I think the calculator is highly misleading, even bogus).

Instead of dwelling on the bogus-ness of what appears to be a phantom $500 monthly lease for the Model S, I’m going to fantasize about us actually getting into a Tesla Model S for $500 a month, and, allegedly, no money down (Tesla says the Federal/State tax credits go toward a down payment on the Model S).

Back in the day when I thought we were going to be among the very first in the U.S. to get an electric car, I was determined to buy an EV outright, not lease one.

Now that I have had time to watch the EV revolution slowly unfold and wait on the sidelines in terms of getting an EV (we’re likely going to be in Germany for a full year, starting in August 2013, and have therefore elected to wait on getting an electric car), I’m revisiting my previous views.

If we were going to go with a plug-in hybrid such as a Chevy Volt (in my view, far and away the best PHEV due to its superior all-electric range), I might still elect to buy a plug-in.

However, if we were moving on a pure electric vehicle, I would definitely lease it, not buy it.

Why?

I’m ready to give anyone who gets 17,000 miles per gallon the thumbs up, any day. And this Chevy Volt driver (see above table) has. So, a giant, double thumbs up to him!

But I have to say: Why bother lugging around a gasoline engine when 93 percent of your miles are pure electric?

Also – and I love how this turns on its head the usual argument that pure EVs such as the Tesla Model S Performance Series are “wasteful” for trucking around an "unecessarily" large battery when most owners will only use that full battery capacity 10 percent of the time: Isn’t it wasteful/inefficient to cart around thousands of pounds of gasoline engine technology when you almost never use that engine? ;-)