10000 all electric miles

7 months after taking ownership of our Tesla Model S, we have just crossed the 10000 mile threshold and thought it would be a good point to reflect on what impact if any, this decision has had.

Financial

Firstly I will compare how the Model S stacks up against my previous car, a VW Passat and a car of equivalent value to the Model S.

10000 miles @ 47mpg = 212.77 gallons = 967.25 litres of diesel.

The price of diesel has dropped dramatically over the last 7 months so to be completely unfair to the Tesla I’m going to pretend all of the diesel was bought at todays price of 114.9p/litre making a total cost of £1111.47 to do that 10000 miles.

Next let’s see how this stacks up if I had charged 100% at home, again to put the Tesla in the worst possible light. This time the calculation is a little easier.

3576kWh * 10.687ppkWh = £382.16

Making a straight saving of £729.31 per 10000 miles. Now in the real world I do a lot of charging whilst out and about. I have a supercharger on route to the current client I am servicing and they also have 3 charge points at the office itself! (albeit very slow ones) There are also the Ecotricity points at the vast majority of motorway service stations. There are also charge points dotted around Coventry city centre that I make use of whilst out shopping.

Upon taking delivery of the Model S, Chargemaster took quite a while before installing my home charge point, by which time I’d already clocked up 3000 miles all at zero cost. Since that point well over half of my milage has been using externally acquired juice. For simplicity, lets say it’s exactly half making 65% of the 10000 miles costing nothing at all. This means that the real world cost of my first 10000 miles in the Model S is about £250.34 or 2.5p/mile.

Environmental

I can hear the ‘Yes but that electricity all comes from coal’ arguments already.

To which I say:

1. At home I pay extra for a 100% renewable energy tariff.
2. Tesla are dedicated to using renewable energy wherever possible.
3. Ecotricity are known for their wind power initiatives.

I cannot vouch for the energy mix from the office charge points so cannot say if the co2 levels are good, bad or ugly.

The Passat on the other hand is rated at 158g/km or in old money, 254.2g/mile making a total co2 (not) output of 254.2KG. Lets call it a quarter of a ton per 10000 miles between friends. I have no idea if that is a lot or an insignificant amount as I have no scale to measure this amount against.

Categorised in: Environment

This post was written by Nearly Done