Technology

How long do you intend to own and drive your Tesla, and what do you anticipate future maintenance and repair bills to look like?

Gods willing, I'll "Ship of Theseus" this thing in perpetuity. Future costs (excluding the battery for now) will be similar to ICE where applicable. I'll never have an alternator or transmission failure, but shocks, tires, heat, AC, and other similar items will have pretty similar costs. Touchscreen failures are pretty rare but I'm OK with that should it fail. Software updates are not a recurring cost. I imagine that would go the same route other proprietary software used to run hardware would go. Should they come out with a completely new version, there would be ample time to prep for an "end of life" scenario.

The battery degredation is a major difference. The good news is that outside abnormal failures, as it ages, the battery simply loses capacity. Most of those abnormal failures would have likely presented by now. The ICE comparison would be if your gas tank got smaller. We are a two car family for now so we could potentially push that for a long time. We could manage if the true range was less than 50 miles.

So what if decide we do want to replace the battery? $4k is much lower than estimates I've heard so far but I haven't dug into it recently either. $10k-$20k is more inline with figures I've seen. My hope is that battery tech keeps evolving and we could potentially get more range with a replacement than the original battery. That is very much a cost I'm comfortable planning for.

If you plan to "drive it into the ground,"

To extrapolate further, I don't want to drive it into the ground. I want to keep this vehicle as long as possible and prop it up like some mangled Frankenstein if necessary. The big reason is that I have free supercharging for life. That means, excluding any legal shenanigans to remove that, I essentially have "free gas" for life. I understand this puts me in a vastly different position than most people, especially those looking to buy an EV.

All that said, I'm mainly asking things like "where'd you hear this bad news" somewhat in an effort to keep my ear to the ground. Life happens and there's tons of ways I'll be in the market again for an EV. Just want to stay abreast of the situation, but also to combat any false or misleading info. In their current form, EVs aren't appropriate for everybody. But I've run into a lot of people that think that based on false/misleading info. You seem to have a firm enough grasp of the situation though.