Cost of owning a BMW i3
tomkiss.netTheir i3 isn't even an electric car, it's a hybrid with a petrol engine (range extender).
The title claims the content is somehow about electric cars in general, but it's just one datapoint about one model and one owner. FWIW, my maintenance costs for almost 3 years with a Tesla S90D were so far: €290 for changing and storing winter tires. No repairs, no breakdowns so far, despite some abuse on italian country roads. Yearly cost for insurance and (0) tax was half as much as the 530xd I owned previously.
Your costs for a ICE car wouldn't be much more. There were be a few oil changes in there, but they are not expensive.
After 20 years, I'd expect it to be different. We have a '99 Honda CRV, and a significant chunk of the money we've paid for maintenance in the 12 yrs we've had it has been for the exhaust system. Over time, on any car, brakes will eventually need replacing, electrical bits will fail and need replacing, bits of your suspension will need replacing, and so on.
You expect owning an electric car to be different, yet Teslas also have the very systems you mention will wear out -- brakes, electric bits, etc -- making them comparably consumable to any ICE or hybrid, especially after 20 years of daily driving (like your CRV).
I would imagine any car heavily dependent on advanced sensors and electronics to cost more to maintain than traditional cars, especially after the first few years. And those parts will likely cost more than a muffler.
Tesla brakes are rarely used because the majority of your braking is regenerative. They're rated to about 150k miles before needing service for the Model 3.
Yeah, but these days, _every_ car is coming along with complex electronic systems that will be expensive to maintain. Which is one of the reasons we keep our old Honda running.
The real question is: how are we going to maintain the geopolitical/industrial system necessary to keep gas flowing ? And why should we?
After 10-15yr the Tesla (or any EV) will probably need a battery. After 20yr it is basically a certainty.
yet my 2001 tahoe ICE gas guzzler has required only oil changes, brakes and tires.
260k miles and it still goes strong, diesels easily get to 500k miles
An interesting twist would be using a hydrogen fuel in an ICE.
The 4l60 in that Tahoe is on borrowed time. That's on the same order of cost magnitude as a battery.
For people who have to pay other people to do maintenance (i.e. most people) whether or not you buy a POS that eats suspension wear items for breakfast and how anal you are about getting every little scratch fixed will dominate long term cost. A couple grand for a battery or transmission spread out over more than a decade really isn't that much. Shelling out a grand every time your vehicle gets humped by a shopping cart will add up quick.
You can get a new tesla battery for 1400 ? granted most folks cant replace one but I can. I cant work on or replace a tesla battery. I have also rebuilt transmissions and that gets you a fraction of the cost because the clutch packs are typically the only wear out part... that and seals.
Look at Prius batteries. You can get cells for $25 a pop and rebuilt batteries for a grand.
Tesla will probably never reach that price point because they're a bigger battery and more on the luxury end of things (indeed a reman engine for a German car will hit your wallet harder than a crate SBC) but there's no reason to believe that the industry will all be hard/expensive to service like Tesla and other luxury brands. Also Tesla is particularly terrible about parts supply chain and locking everything down so you'll probably never see aftermarket batteries apply downward price pressure there.
I can essentially haul a Prius around on/behind my Tahoe with 6 people plus the driver. Not sure we are apples to apples here
Your Tahoe may as well be a Prius for the purposes of major component cost. Its major components are about the cheapest there are since it's basically a GM truck. It doesn't get any cheaper than that. The Prius is a valid comparison.
When a proper cheap mass market EV comes along it will likely have similar maintenance costs as a comparable ICE vehicles.
My question around EV is arent we switching fossil fuels from petroleum (gas) to minerals (batteries) ?
It seems suboptimal to not use something like hemp biodeisel or hydrogen ICE
diesels easily get to 500k miles
They also cost on the order of five figures extra over gas engines.
I see usually 4 figures over and the standard saying goes it takes 5 years to see the cost equalized. Owning a diesel will save you money but buying or leasing wont.
For comparison - also a small city car, VW Polo 2016, 1.2L TSI - so far(3 years in), we only paid for a single service(two initial ones were free) - £159, plus £20/year in tax. So a total cost of ownership(except for petrol of course) in those three years is barely over £200. We didn't even buy winter tyres for it, which I normally do for my other cars.
Don't know where you live but a regular yearly service with oil and cabin filter change is around €200 for a basic ICE car at a dealership in Austria. €290 for a Tesla would definitely be cheaper here.
YMMV. I change my own oil - it takes me less time because I can get the parts as part of a different errand, and I can do something else while waiting for the oil to drain out. If I go to the dealer I spend an hour in their waiting room with nothing to do, plus travel time for a special trip.
You can do a lot better than dealer prices for oil changes if you don't do your own maintenance.
You don't understand the difference.
Just look at the cost of brakes. An ICE car will need them every 30-60k miles depending on various factors, but an electric car will need them every 100-200k miles.
People do understand the difference, my household drives around 3000 miles per year, so telling me that a brake change once every 10 years is important is kind of ridiculous.
It gets down almost entirely to personal behaviour.
Agreed. I just replaced my wife's brakes, rotors and pads, at a grand total of $350. The old pads probably had about 50% left after 50k miles.
If you don't tailgate and slam your brakes all the time, they last a long time, even on an ICE.
So your ICE car doesn't need any gas?
Gas is cheap. Unless you are driving a lot of miles (at which point electric cars don't have the range you need) this is really significant compared to the initial cost of the car.
Gas is cheap when you don't count the externalities like fucking up the planet or the whole military-industrial complex and wars to guarantee oil supply.
The lastest version has a bigger battery and doesn't offer the range extender IIRC.
Yes, they stopped selling the REX. The i3 is still not a very attractive car for me and despite the good crash test results, it doesn't look safe to me. Here's the aftermath of a frontal crash vs. an old Cadillac that happened recently - both drivers dead: https://image.kurier.at/images/cfs_landscape_1864w_1049h/372...
This [1] seems to be the report including photos you are talking about. Not sure which image you linked here. Totally different story.
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/328403/bmw-i3-vs-cadillac-cts-imp...
> This [1] seems to be the report including photos you are talking about.
No, you guessed wrong. The crash I mentioned happened 2 days ago: https://kurier.at/chronik/niederoesterreich/zwei-tote-in-moe...
I don't know why you bring up an old rear-ending when I mention a frontal crash...
Sorry, bad google foo on my part.
I expect costs on my Tesla to be about one set of tires / 2 years. I am hard on them and they cost about 400/tire installed. When you consider they is essentially the only ongoing cost to a daily driven car that performs like a legitimate super car in a straight line it is pretty amazing though. I change to winter tires in the winter though. Still I wear down one set of tires per year approximately.
Your cost should also include the price to set up a charging station at home. That costs $1500+ in the USA.
Why? There are plenty of public chargers here and at my house I have a 380V 3-phase plug so I can charge at 11W.
There is no need for a charging station with the i3.
Their i3 isn't even an electric car, it's a hybrid with a petrol engine (range extender).
Not true, there are two models, one with range extender, one pure EV. It's fair to assume he had the pure EV since he didn't include any ICE costs such as oil changes.
He did have a fuel cost and explicitly mentioned the range extender.
Site getting hugged.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190828121621/https://tomkiss.n...
I recently got a used Leaf with about 70mi range for around $7000 (total cost including fees, tax, etc.). It's extremely low maintenance (no ICE at all) and while I haven't done math in this detail yet the "fuel" price even at California's higher electricity rates is less than half the cost of gasoline per mile driven. Once you factor in the relative lack of maintenance it's much cheaper to operate than an ICE.
Overall if you don't need really long range a used Leaf is a great deal. You can get them in virtually mint condition for under $10k. Just be sure to research and check out battery health. There's an Android app called LeafSpy that will use a Bluetooth ODBII dongle (these are cheap) and can query lots of detailed battery info so you can check out battery health after buying. Mine was about average in terms of capacity loss for its age and it gets around 70 miles per charge without issue.
Also note that the Leaf's mileage estimate tends to be a little pessimistic, at least in my experience. My guess is that it's designed this way to avoid stranding the driver. Gas cars are often a little pessimistic too for the same reason. They give you a bit of a reserve.
What's more, many of the Leafs are still under factory warranty when they're sold for a fraction of their new MSRP.
I bought my 2011 Leaf when it was just about three years old and had somewhere in the neighborhood of 22k miles on it and paid somewhere around $6k.
I figured it was a pretty safe buy because the car still had plenty of miles left on the warranty.
I never had to make use of that warranty though; truly the best fit & finish of any car I've owned. Reliable & by far the best value of any car I've ever purchased.
After eight years, capacity is running down... somewhere around 40 miles per charge in the summer now... but that's perfect for my use-case. I'm looking forward to many more years with minimal maintenance costs. Once the battery capacity gets low enough, I'll spring for a new battery.
There are companies working on aftermarket battery upgrades. There's one that has a module that lets you put a newer 40kWh battery in an old Leaf. Such batteries can be purchased from junked/totaled Leafs. There's another out there working on some kind of emulated battery module. Neither of these are quite ready yet but the market is there so I assume such upgrades are coming.
Very detailed writing, thank you! But this “Costs for maintenance totalled £3056.0” is shocking! It’s a golden car! Ok, it has internal combustion engine too, but 100€ maintenance monthly is shocking. 8 tires for 45000 km is also shocking. I am driving almost double that with one set (except nasty flats). Are other electric cars cheaper to drive?
Shrug Why would that be high? It seems to include the required yearly checkup, and a 450L brake change that wasn't necessary. My (diesel) BMW X3 cost a little bit more than his car to buy, and I expect to average the same maintenance costs over say 5 years (his car was second hand when he bought it, too). BMW official dealerships are quite expensive, what you get for it are exact quotes within minutes on the phone, reliable planning and always new, OEM parts. Whether that's worth the money is for everyone to decide for themselves, but I don't think this is 'golden car' territory by a long shot.
Perhaps its not expensive for a BMW, but I've spent well under $1000 over ~4 years on maintaining my car in the US, including all manufacturer suggested maintenance and a new set of 4 tires. That's retail cost - I did none of the work myself.
Also keep in mind that BMWs are notoriously expensive on maintenance compared to many other cars.[0] Around where I live, it's easy to find some relatively inexpensive used BMWs when people want to unload them due to high maintenance costs.
[0] https://www.consumerreports.org/car-maintenance/the-cost-of-...
The article we're discussing is talking about BMW in the UK. Your link is to US-based consumer reports.
I wouldn't trust anything about BMW or other premium German brands from a US source as an EU customer, because:
1) US (and Canadian, Australian, Malaysian) fuel is of much lower quality, and BMW engines are notoriously sensitive to this. As an example, the BMW I own wasn't ever sold in North America or these other markets because of the high sulfur content in the fuel.
2) US consumers who buy BMW are going to have a selection bias towards people buying muscle cars. You're not just looking at reliability numbers, but numbers skewed by Americans who'd buy a foreign luxury vehicle with a powerful engine.
3) BMW is fickle about its maintenance requirements, and generally the further you get away from Germany the worse your quality of maintenance and ability to source genuine parts easily is going to be.
BMW is still pretty bad when it comes to total cost of ownership, but this German study of vehicles on EU roads shows it isn't quite that bad: https://europe.jdpower.com/de/press-releases/2019-germany-ve...
> US (and Canadian, Australian, Malaysian) fuel is of much lower quality, and BMW engines are notoriously sensitive to this. As an example, the BMW I own wasn't ever sold in North America or these other markets because of the high sulfur content in the fuel.
This hasnt been true in a long time, at least with regards to sulfur. Current US regulations limit sulfur to 15 ppm [0], EU limits to 10 ppm [1]. Compared to the 1990s and earlier, when it could be as much as several thousand ppm in both the US and Europe, sulfur has been nearly eliminated in current diesel fuels (for road use, at least).
[0] https://www.epa.gov/diesel-fuel-standards/diesel-fuel-standa...
[1] https://www.transportpolicy.net/standard/eu-fuels-diesel-and...
Interesting, I didn't know that. Your first link pertains to diesel, as far as I can tell the EPA instituted the 10 ppm limit for gasoline in 2017
The limit was 50 ppm and 10 ppm in the EU in 2005 and 2009, respectively according to your [1].
I've got an N53 engine[1] which was introduced in 2006. This[1] page shows it and a few other BMW engines weren't sold in North America for fuel quality reasons.
As far as comparing long-term reliability numbers it amounts to the same thing. US numbers can't be trusted for EU consumers. We've got 10 years of data at 10 ppm, the US just 2 years.
But the main reason I'd distrust it is consumer bias. As shown in [2][3] BMW is as common in Germany as Nissan and Honda in the US. I live in The Netherlands where it's about as common to see a BMW (5% market share, 2% in the US).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_in_the_United_States#Engin...
2. http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2019/01/u-s-auto-sales-brand-ra...
3. https://www.best-selling-cars.com/germany/2019-q1-germany-be...
He mentioned the tires are a very specific size only really available from one source, and that they are narrower than a typical tire. I’m guessing that means reduced tread life, and not having options means it’s probably harder to find the perfect tire for your climate and region to optimize longevity.
I agree, though; I can usually get the same range out of one set of tires.
You don't have to stick to the OEM tire. You can get a different, cheaper size, as long as it doesn't rub the wheel well or bottom out. And the exact tire and manufacturer you get, along with the conditions it was kept in, will determine the wear life of the tire. And when people complain about their tires wearing fast, it's often just badly aligned tires that could be fixed by going to a better mechanic. And buying tires online or from a warehouse is always cheaper, often by a lot.
So just because you have a certain kind of car doesn't mean you will always have the same tire wear or cost.
>>You can get a different, cheaper size, as long as it doesn't rub the wheel well or bottom out.
In the UK you have to tell your insurer if you do that and it can impact your insurance significantly in some cases. The best one I could find was with Aviva they allow 10mm variation in width of the tyre from the manufacturer spec, so if the original size was 225/45 you could buy 235/45 or 215/45, but anything beyond that would require you telling them and have an impact on your premium. Chaging the rims to a different size always requires telling the insurer, even if they are the manufacturer's original rims(which is incredibly dumb, I bought my car with factory 20" wheels, I bought an original set of wheels directly from the dealership in 19" size but I still have to tell my insurer because it's a "modification" to the factory spec of the vehicle).
Why would you tell your insurer? They don't go around checking tire widths, afaik
Because if you have an accident and they find out you had tyres/rims different from stock they will absolutely either refuse to pay out the claim or reduce it significantly. Especially if you put on tyres of a different size than that approved by the manfucaturer, they can very easily say that a tyre that is too narrow/too wide affects how the car handles and it would have contributed to the accident.
And then you take it to court, and you get a mechanical engineer and a racing instructor to say that a 215/45R60 is not going to cause an accident that a 205/45R60 wouldn't have caused, since tread wear, hardness, speed rating, structural design, and road conditions all are the most important factors in traction. Identical tires with a 10mm width difference will perform nearly identically, but the same size tire using different manufacturing processes will result in completely different traction. Tires of the same size rating but different manufacture can have comparatively narrower or wider (due to sidewall stiffness) or flatter or bulging (tread patterns) geometries.
But my bet is it's more a matter of following a contract than whether it actually caused an issue; either way I can see not wanting to deal with the potential hassle.
BMW is known to specify weird size tires where nothing else will fit in the space allowed. I don't know about this car, but in general I would expect that you have a limited choice in tires.
400 of that was for the brake replacement, and the remaining 2600 sound pretty normal these days (if you're going to a manufacturer contracted garage instead of some 3rd party garage). Remember there is still an ICE for range extension, and the inspection checklists probably doesn't care whether you used the ICE virtually never or all the time.
As for tires, my hybrid seems better and also takes pretty much any manufacturers tires (19/235 summer, 17/235 winter - can't say anything detailed about durability regarding my driving since I only have it since April this year, but the previous owner seemed to make about 40000km per set), but the i3 tires seem to be purpose build, so less quantity (more expensive) and MAYBE focused much more on efficiency over durability.
Also 45k miles, not km? (Link is down now, so can't check).
(some editing)
Sadly km or ~900 miles per month.
Engine inside is small one from motorcycle, so it shouldn’t be hard to service. I was considering buying i3, but went for 328i.
Small engines generally need more service than larger ones. This is mostly because large engines are not pushed as hard relative to the size because the buyers want a reliable engine.
A tractor with a 600 horsepower engine would have around 19 liters. GM can get the same 600 horsepower out of 6 liters. I know motorcycle mechanics who can get that power from 1.5 liters. Of course the motorcycle mechanic will tell you upfront that you will have to completely rebuild the engine every 40 hours. GM knows that even though the engine can deliver 600 horsepower it will only do that for a few seconds and then have plenty of rest time at much lower power output to cool off as a result they can get several thousand miles. Tractor manufactures know that their customers will use 600 horsepower continuously all day, everyday with no breaks to cool down so they build for that spec.
Point is I expect the engine in this car is designed to not be as reliable because of the weight/size vs reliability trade offs they can make. It you mostly use the car in electric mode with a few long trips it won't matter overall. If you typically take long trips (without stopping to recharge) get a car with a larger engine.
This engine is run at one of two steady RPMs and is derated in HP from its already reliable historical use on another BMW vehicle.
While motorcycles and cars aren't the same; I've found tires for them are really expensive. I can get about 3000-10000 miles on a set, and the sets are $450 installed. There's cheaper tires out there, but good tires are a safety feature on them really and make a huge difference.
I always bought really cheap tires on my really cheap clunker cars and never knew the difference. I wonder if it's just volume of cheaper tires, or if expensive rubber is just more expensive?
Motorcycle BHP per tonne, and tyre contact patch explain most of a back tyre's life. The contact patch and lean alone for the front. Counter steering has to be rougher on tyre life.
Buy a 400BHP+ Ferrari or 911 and you can get car tyre life right down to similar levels. They'll now be $300-$500+ a corner for being super wide, super low profile, sticky things. $2,000 in tyres every service... A sporty V8 of a couple of decades ago could easily give 6k miles front, 3k back. With higher powers now, who knows.
If you could get really cheap clunker type rubber for those cars, you'd probably be just a few miles from wrapping it round a lamp post. First time you press the loud pedal with enthusiasm most likely. :)
In addition to the economy of mass production on car tires, motorcycle tires are engineered differently. For example, they are generally higher performance tires with a different contact footprint because the handling dynamics of a motorcycle mean a tire 'leans' into a turn.
Similarly, heavy duty truck tires are more expensive as they have more engineering requirements.
I think it's just volume. But yeah it's a pain - they go relatively quick and they cost a ton. It's hard to skimp on safety though, especially if you don't only ride on dry and warm days.
i3 tire are notoriously expensive. People call them "bicycle tires" as they are large in diameter and very narrow, and they also have different sizes back and front.
Last week I read that significant plastic is released in nature by tire wear. Electric cars are often heavier then their gasoline equivalents. I wouldn't be surprised if they wear faster and pollute more microplastics.
[1] https://friendsoftheearth.uk/plastics/tyres-and-microplastic...
This I read by the way from the book "The hidden impact". There's a digital version in English on the website https://babetteporcelijn.com/en/. It has a lot of data that tries to help people to make sustainable impact that matters.
Note that I'm not against electric cars at all. I'm only talking about pollution of microplastics. Not pollution in general.
Of course it's hard to tell if people downvote because they disagree with me or because there are actually falsehoods in my comment. If it's the latter it's either: 1) electric cars are not heavier, or 2) tire wear due to additional weight is neglectable. Please, correct me if I'm wrong. Perhaps it's my filter bubble, but I only find articles that support my statement [2]. I quote:
"For energy use, the weight is less of a problem than for gasoline cars. They waste the increased energy used to accelerate the higher weight. But the momentum of an electric car lets you return energy to the battery as the car slows. The heavier the car, the more energy it takes to accelerate—but the more you return to the battery commensurately through regenerative braking.
Of course, if you pay six figures for a high-performance electric car (think Tesla Model S P100D) and use its capabilities, you should expect to replace your very expensive low-profile tires every 15,000 miles or so. That's par for the segment."
[2] https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1122838_busting-7-of-th...
It's worth mentioning, at 10k miles per year this driver is significantly above the UK average of 7k. EVs are more advantageous the more they are driven, anyone buying one should do the math for their expected mileage.
Thank you for posting that. If they are in the US, 10k is considered low mileage per year. For working age adults, 18k is considered average.
Source: Bc I'll be asked ;) https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
Wow. 18k is nuts. 50 miles a day? We lowered our last lease to 10k and wont even be close at end of the year.
I think there are two things at play here:
1. The US is much larger than the UK, with a lot of nothing/low population density.
2. Mentality might be different: I imported my current car used from the Netherlands; the country is tiny, but the Dutch seem really like driving a lot. I saw many cars with 30k miles per year on them.
Do people in the US really drive to through the country that often? I guess people drive maybe 2000-3000 km a year for holidays, e.g. to skiing resorts in winter or to Italy in summer, but even that isn't average.
I'd say most of the drives are commutes to work and shopping.
When everything is twice as far away, it adds up. My wife and I work from home and we still manage 10,000 miles a year on the car. That's driving kids to school (just a couple miles each way), going grocery shopping (10 miles each way), driving kids to swim lessons (10 miles each way), going to grandma's house (120 miles each way), our one vacation (150 miles each way)
There's also zero useful public transportation for us. If I worked in the city, I could take the train, but it's 4 miles to the train station.
I wouldn't claim knowledge; it's only an abstraction from local low density areas: Where I live people drive less (suburbia) than where I was raised (country side) because there's practically no point in driving 30km/19mi to do groceries if that could be done in town.
Now Germany has a population density of 621 people/mi². The US has a little less than 100. Assuming similar interconnectness (family, friends, jobs, holidays), travel distances are much larger.
I'm guessing daily commute from the suburbs on the freeway is common in the US. In Europe, population is more densely packed in cities, so commutes are shorter and can often be done via public transit. For example, I've been averaging 5k miles per year in Poland, and most of it is vacations and other long range trips.
50 miles a day is 25 miles each way. At Freeway speeds that is a half hour commute. It really isn't that unreasonable when put into that perspective.
There are lots of other reasons to think it is unreasonable, but from the perspective of someone who sees their trip to work as half an hour it doesn't seem bad.
Most people don’t drive 50 miles a day, but they might drive several hundred over a weekend going somewhere different and fun.
What makes you say that? There are plenty of people with a 25 mile commute (40-60 minute drive). To work and then back home would easily cross 50 miles. I think the average daily commute by car in the US is 30+ miles.
Since I have moved to LA 20000 per year is nothing. It’s nuts and costs a lot of money.
I think this might have been posted here before, but think this is an interesting comparison as well: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/22/toyota-corolla-vs-tesla... It is US centric though, so not a perfect comparison.
So far I have had no issues with my 3. $115 for tire rotation and state inspection is the only thing I have spent any money on so far in 15 months and over 20,000 miles. So that is less than $10/month in maintenance. And I am spending about half as much in electricity as I was for gas. The insurance was a big jump from a 2011 Ford Focus, but that car has cost significantly more to maintain in the same time frame.
I owned 2 different Chevy Volt's for a total of 5 years. The maintenance was normal tire wear. Aside from that, oil needed to be changed every 20,000 miles.
I never ran into a single maintenance issue other than the standard. It was the lowest maintenance vehicle I've ever owned.
Too bad, AFAIK, the i3 REX (with range extender gasoline engine) is hobbled by a tiny gasoline tank. The total range is something like 200 km: 100 electric and 100 gasoline.
With my current car I can drive to the summer cottage and back with one tank. It's just carefree and convenient. With an i3, even when starting with full charge, one would have to tank about halfway each way.
It is hard for me to understand such design decisions. I have heard that in some countries the gasoline range must be less than electric range to secure some tax credit.
Edit:
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i3
REx 60 Ah: 116 km (72 mi), Total: 241 km (150 mi)
REx 94 Ah: 156 km (97 mi), Total: 290 km (180 mi)[12]
The small gas tank was needed for the car to qualify for a California tax break as an electric car rather than being a hybrid.
https://www.autoblog.com/2013/10/28/why-the-bmw-i3-has-such-...
I wonder why they didn't make one for the European market with a bigger one? It could have been a huge success.
Most of your yearly distance would be covered by purely electric driving, yet you would not have range anxiety and you could still make those long trips with your car as well.
Would also be good for the environment as one wouldn't need to tie needless resources for a rarely needed big battery.
I mean, you can get a Tesla Model 3 long range for $47k that goes 310 miles on a charge and gains 200 miles on a half hour recharge at a supercharger. That seems... like more driving than I'd really ever do. (half hour is super easy to blow when you go pee, grab a coffee, check your email and social media... and keep in mind that's after like 4 hours of driving)
Sounds better. But it's so expensive. You can get a used i3 for 20k euros though. And I street park so the ICE is a good backup.
The i3 starts at $44,450 new, which is almost exactly the same as the Tesla Model 3 LR. I guess it's nice for consumers that there are used i3s out there (probably will be true of Tesla in a few years) but from a business perspective, selling the i3 just seems like a crazy proposition.
Here the cheapest new standard range Model 3 is 50,000 euros and long range 62,000 euros. Cheapest new i3 is around 42,000 euros, though they don't mention REX anymore. No used model 3:s are available on the free market so can't compare those.
Sources:
https://www.tesla.com/fi_FI/inventory/new/m3
https://www.bmw.fi/content/dam/bmw/marketFI/bmw_fi/ladattava...
Without the REX the two cars aren't really comparable anymore. (Also, wow! That's expensive. How much of that is tax?)
... how far is your summer cottage ?
300 km or 200 miles. Usually weekend trips.
TCO is supposed to include the total cost; buy a car that didn't cost 17,400 and your price goes down considerably.
Cost of car: 17,400
Fuel: 712.99
Maintenance: 3,056.08
Other: 940
TCO over 3 years: 22,108
Minus the 11 grand for selling it after, no?
I don't think that's a useful measure. You really don't know what, if anything at all, you will get back after 3 years.
If you total your car and you have good insurance, you might get reimbursed its remaining value, which might be about market, or nothing. If you have a loan out on the car, better hope it didn't depreciate faster than the loan payment takes, or you take a loss. Or maybe you don't total it, sell it privately, and get more than on a trade-in. You don't know what the market will bear, you don't even know if you'll have ended up with a lemon. But even if you do get money back at the end, how old it is, whether its insurance or maintenance costs more, etc will all affect sales later.
I think purchasing a car with an expectation to regain value is gambling. I'd prefer to buy something I'll drive into the dirt, whether used or new, for a more certain financial outcome.
typo in title: owing --> owning
The title should be “Cost of owning a bad electric car (that is actually a hybrid car)”
I wonder why he's getting rid of the vehicle.
It's a one car household. He's probably going back to something that has a more practical form factor i.e. another 4-door station wagon (a 4dr hatch is a small station wagon, change my mind) of similar footprint. The i3 is heavily optimized to be a city commuter car. It's not optimized to be a multi-tool
Or his wife (page isn't loading anymore but IIRC he used a bunch of language implying he has a >1 person household) has one in the oven and they're doing what every upper middle class couple does when that happens, buying a crossover.
Three year leases are common in the UK
OP says he bought the car privately.
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