Fuel prices

[lukefrisbee]

I believe Elon can think about this topic far better than I can. And I hope he has already. But So I don't make any wrong assumptions can someone give me the skinny on how the price of fuel/electricity is determined at ALL the types of Telsa away from home chargers is formulated?
Then I will post what I am concerned about.

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[ajdelange]

Elon has pledged that the Super Charger network will never be a profit center. It is basically now and always has been a marketing tool. Initially it was free to all owners. Clearly it costs a lot to build it out and run it and as the user pool got up into the hundreds of thousands operating costs became burdensome and Tesla began rolling back the free charging at first limiting it to some period of time or some number of miles and then eliminating it altogether. They still offer free charging as an incentive. If someone uses you as a reference when he buys a car you and he each get 1000 miles free charging (plus a chance to win a Roadster). If they want to encourage sales of a particular model they may offer free lifetime charging on that model for a time. The X now comes with it. Keep in mind that the SC network is one segment of your Tesla transportation system. As such you are going to pay for it one way or another that is, either as part of the price of the car or in use charges. I didn't get free super charging when I got an X, The price of the car included my share of the capital and the amount of electricity they estimate I'll use in it's lifetime. That is actually quite small given that most charging is done at home. Given that the CT is expected to be a high volume product and that they hardly need to offer an incentive to induce people to order it it is very unlikely that free super charging will be included.

What you probably really want to know is how much you can expect to pay for supercharging. The answer is that it will be enough to cover at least some part of the costs of building out and operating the network. The average price now seems to be about $0.28/kWh but varies over time and with place. As each kWh will get you 3 or 4 miles that's 7 - 9 cents a mile. With gas at $2.00/gal even a relatively poor 20 mpg utilization shows that you won't save much on fuel if you primarily use SC's (electricity costs at home are typically 11 c/kWh or lower if you add solar which many BEV owners wind up doing).

In some states Tesla cannot sell electricity by the kWh but can charge for time connected and do that instead. Rates per minute are higher when the charging rate is higher.

Tesla Destination Chargers are paid for by Tesla but operated by the businesses that install them who then pay for the electricity they use. They are almost universally free because they don't, currently, interface with credit card readers etc. The new generation with it's WiFi capabilities may be different in this regard. Some businesses do charge for the use of their DCs (you pay a flat fee at the front desk an the guy flips a breaker) but that seems to be rare and earns warnings on PlugShare about this so that those businesses can be avoided.

 

[Hendo72]

I believe Elon can think about this topic far better than I can. And I hope he has already. But So I don't make any wrong assumptions can someone give me the skinny on how the price of fuel/electricity is determined at ALL the types of Telsa away from home chargers is formulated?
Then I will post what I am concerned about.

How many years will we be ahead owning a Tesla before they add a additional tax for road use. Government always gets you in the end

 

[ajdelange]

0 in Virginia. We already pay an extra fee at registration to compensate for the gasoline taxes we don't pay. Though it really pains me to say it you have to admit that it is sort of fair. The roads in Virginia are in bad enough shape as it is.

 

[Crissa]

Yeah, but it really stings when that EV registration is so high. It will really reduce the demand for lower-end EVs if they have a high registration cost.

$100 a year is just slightly more than I pay in gas tax for my Mazda. But applying it to my Zero is... Well, it doesn't go as many miles nor would the ICE version of the bike use that much fuel!

-Crissa

Best way to look at fuel prices is to multiply your peak electricity price (unless you have time-of day, then you can choose the lower) and multiply it by 33. There's about 33 kwh in a gallon of gas.

 

[Sirfun]

I saw a link to this somewhere on here before and found it interesting.
https://www.energy.gov/maps/egallon
Looking up each state it seemed like everything was skewed to electric. Until I looked at Hawaii, where electricity is more expensive than gas. I guess solar and less range would be the way to go there. No such thing as a road trip in Hawaii. Also interesting to me, was Florida at 89 cents per E-gallon.

 

[Crissa]

I saw a link to this somewhere on here before and found it interesting.
https://www.energy.gov/maps/egallon

Their definition page is 'access denied' (not is a true 503 page, weird)... But taking the numbers it gives it's assuming 3.25 miles to the kWh, which is easily doable by a Tesla.

-Crissa

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