Home editor's blog on evs & phevs

On evs & phevs

evs-section1In this blogging section, I'll riff on EVs & PHEVs, from both a practical perspective and from a political perspective.

Analyst defends Tesla Model S lease

editors-blog-entry3Along with many other media outlets, SolarChargedDriving.Com last week ripped Tesla for misleading advertising that, at least at first glance, implies you can lease a Model S for $500 per month.

In fact, it turns out you’ll be cutting a monthly check to Tesla for more than twice that amount. Not exactly a bargain, nor, as Tesla maintains, a “savings” bonanza, cheap electricity or not.

Still, some are saying Tesla’s $1,100 lease of the Model S is a smart move despite the relative bogusness of its $500 per month post EV savings claim.

Online investment media outlet Motley Fool is one of these. In the video above, Motley Fool analyst John Rosevear explains what the real goal of Tesla's new financing offer might be -- and why it's a great long-range move for the upstart carmaker.

Read more...

 

Tesla's phantom $500 Model S lease

bogus-tesla-lease

While you will save over a gas car by leasing a Tesla Model S, you'll only save if it's a comparable luxury gas car, and the check you'll be cutting Tesla Motors is going to be around $1,100 per month -- hardly an affordable sum for the majority of Americans.

editors-blog-entry3I 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!

Read more...

 

Can we afford to lease a Tesla Model S?

model-s-500-lease

If you can lease a Model S and truly cut a monthly check for just $500 to Tesla in order to do so, we could afford a Model S -- if we dropped from being a two-car household to a one-car household.

editors-blog-entry3So, 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).

Read more...

 

5 reasons to lease rather than buy an electric car

LEAF-lease-buy

To lease or buy a new EV such as a Nissan LEAF, that is the question -- and the answer is most of us are probably better off leasing.

editors-blog-entry3Back 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?

Read more...

 

Why buy a Volt if you go electric 95% of time?

17k-mpg

This Volt driver drives electric 93 percent of the time -- which is great, but it also begs the question of why not a pure EV such as the Nissan LEAF being advertised on the right?

editors-blog-entry3I’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? ;-)
 
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