If it's taking 6 years pay off a car.
And that car is now 11 years old last payment.
Would not be for me.
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I kind of like this thinking, and have avoided payments altogether for a few decades other than EV purchases of recent years. However, the EVs are important to me for reasons that go beyond spreadsheets and personal finance, and while I'm not pleased with all my decisions around them, I'm still at a point where I'm willing to make sacrifices to address certain points that are personal to me in transport which go beyond concerns of getting from A to B reliably and safely and even go beyond how gilded the carriage may be that takes me there. I haven't sorted it all out yet, but I think top issues for me in this recent decision, having shopped for a couple of years were:
- The used Tesla prices were not coming down fast enough.
- Each of the would-be Tesla competitors, unfortunately without any exceptions, signaled to me that it would be years before they would really strike the right chord for me, or really be committed to giving me their best effort and having it translate into a used vehicle I both really want and can afford.
Basically, to sum those two elements up, for 30 years (dating back to the 1990 GM Impact) I have been wondering when an automaker
- would give me their most excellent best effort in a reasonably spacious luxurious useful long-range EV.
- let it gestate in the marketplace for 5-10 years while the price comes down, and then I could buy it.
The answer for 30 years from most of the non-Tesla automakers in the US market has been "just a bit longer". A few years ago, Jaguar and then Audi gave different answers, and that's great, and I would have considered a used i-Pace, but I am not going to wait another 3-5 years on those prices.
There is also always a human element in the process where I make my decision and have to live with it. There are a lot of elements to that, and a significant amount of risk-taking, expense, time, and trouble in purchasing a used vehicle, and so, for most people, including myself, a large dose of compromise. In this case I compromised on quite a few things, even at this price level. A very big compromise is ongoing in the time-consuming paperwork and registration matters (other than getting it back to my area, I still haven't driven the vehicle in two weeks, and counting), exacerbated by the fact that the state motor vehicle department, in the midst of the pandemic, has decided to make itself unreachable by phone, and appointments here locally I think have to be made weeks out.
Still, I was able to prioritize getting a battery and overall vehicle that, as far as I know, is in decent shape, and the vehicle is good-looking and overall it is not an insult, in my view. To return then to the specifics of this particular thread, if I do get to the point of completing payments, and if I haven't damaged the vehicle, then I'll probably look around at that time to see if I can afford a battery upgrade, or another vehicle, or what. On the one hand, the landscape will change dramatically over those years (perhaps a used polestar, i-Pace, Ford, e-tron, Hyundai, Rivian or whatever will be attractive to me six years from now). On the other hand, there are some interesting (to me) questions around whether the vehicle represents an opportunity to value a good-looking, comfortable and safe-driving coach that can be fitted with an updated battery at the right time (depending on Tesla's approach to matters). This wouldn't work for everyone, but for me, I'm not a huge fan of the throw-away culture we live in, and the pack technology is evolving so rapidly that when I get to 2024-2027 or so, it looks possible to ask whether the new packs at that time can be dropped nicely into those early Model S's. How much could an 85 or 100 or 130 kWh or so pack cost to manufacture in the mid-2020s? And, if other manufacturers have enlightened pack replacement policies in place at that time, then might this help Tesla to decide to offer such deals (or perhaps they are already there and it is just not that apparent since it hasn't come up that much since the vehicles are only just recently exiting warranty periods on the packs). If they don't, I suppose that will be fine too, I can just at that time figure out what my other options are. I doubt that all the makers of the better longer-range EVs at that time will be trying to bill nearly as much for a replacement pack as I just paid for the vehicle.
As well, from a carbon perspective, it would keep my overall footprint lower to replace a pack then to continue the cycle of throwing away vehicles. Still, my preferred way to look at that would be for the pollution costs to be built into the pricing and for it to be overall a competitive deal (both in dollars and in intangibles) to replace a pack rather than getting rid of the vehicle.
