Because we’re cheap – Bobby & Lori F.

Bob and Lori F

Why do we drive electric?

It was a simple matter of economics for our family. We’d love to say something profound like “To save the world” or maybe “It was our duty to get off gas and stop sending money to the womb of terrorism”, but that would just not be true.

The cold simple truth is that it was about money.

We live in the country, 22 miles from the nearest store; you have to travel down a full mile of gravel road just to reach the end of our driveway. Our daughter is 15 and going into 10th grade, and she has never ridden the school bus to school. Every school day, we take our daughter to school, and every day we go pick her up from school. If that’s all we do, we have traveled no less than 88 miles a day.

We’re also active members in our local church so that is another 44+ miles on Sunday. But also on Sunday, we meet family in town to have lunch and catch up on the past week’s goings-on…and this adds at least 40 more miles to our Sunday commute. So we’re back to 84 miles at least, and then we add in grocery shopping on Sunday (trip consolidation)…and now we’re at about 100 miles on Sunday.

Last year, our daughter played soccer games up to three games a week, which of course being supportive parents, we attended. The closest game was 45 miles from home and the farthest was well over 150 miles from home. Not sure if she plans to play soccer this year, but if she does, we’ll be ready.

Long story short(ish) is that we were spending on average $800 a month on fuel. Then, you have to add oil changes at about $100 each (premium filters and synthetic oil) every 5,000 miles. Air filters for the induction system, brakes, exhaust system maintenance, drivetrain maintenance and the like…and we were spending over $1,000 a month just to drive our ICE car.

Without maintenance as a consideration, just using savings from fuel use, we figure a vehicle break-even of just over 10 years (Tesla Model X @ $100,000). Let gas creep back up over $2.45 a gallon and the break-even is sooner, add in the maintenance and the break-even happens in just under 8 years, which of course is the length of the warranty on our Tesla Model X.

So, as counterintuitive as it may sound, we decided to drive electric because we’re cheap.

Of course once we actually took possession of our Tesla Model X, we realized how mind-bendingly awesome the car is.

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