It's been just over 8 months since I took delivery of my Model Y, so I figured I can do a quick initial comparison of the cost of charging (both home and on the road) vs the cost of gas I would have used over the same span of time.
As of today, the car has 9,102 miles on it. When I compare the cost of my utility bill for the months of April - October of 2020 and 2021, the difference is $248.05 (and yes, this includes natural gas usage as well - I said this is just a quick comparison...😉). On top of that, I have to include the cost of Supercharging while on road trips, which adds another $63.92 for a total of $311.97. So, over the 9,102 miles I've driven, charging cost has been $.034 per mile. This is obviously high as it includes the cost of natural gas used to heat my home and run the hot water heater and gas dryer. At some point, I will go back and use just electricity cost in this calculation, perhaps when I've had the car a year. In addition, I got about 600 miles of free Supercharging which I need to account for somehow but for the purposes of this calculation, I'll assume that it's offset by the fact that natural gas cost is included here.
On the gasoline side, my Mazda CX-5 got around 22 mpg around town and 27mpg or so on the highway, so I arbitrarily picked 25 mpg as the average. Since gas prices have changed so much in the last year, I also arbitrarily picked $3 per gallon (currently above $3.40 here locally). So, for those 9,102 miles, I would have used 364.08 galls, at $3/gallon, that would have cost $1,092.24 and meant that the cost per mile is $.12. So I saved a significant amount in fuel with the Tesla over my CX-5, even with the cost of natural gas in my calculation.
The conclusion is that while I didn't buy the Tesla purely for the fuel savings, it's pretty remarkable how much less costly it is. Of course, this may change depending on where you live and the cost of electricity, but from what I've seen, New Jersey is in the upper echelon in terms of cost of electricity. And right now, I can't take advantage of off-peak rates as PSE&G hasn't rolled out Smart meters yet, which are needed to track usage by time of day. Once that happens, my cost to charge at home will go down.
In other news, I am able to garage the MY now, as I sold off a project car that had been taking up space for about 20 years.... Pretty excited to be able to get the car in out of the elements for the winter.
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