Howard wrote:For anyone considering personally leasing a Model 3 in the UK the costs are now easy to find out.
I have chosen a basic 6+35 month deal with a maximum of 10k miles per year for the cheapest Standard Plus 4 door Auto saloon. This will cost £507 a month, and including the initial payment it is a total of £21,000 over the three years.
Obviously the cost will be higher if one's mileage is higher than 10k a year. If I was leasing the Tesla, I'd want to include a maintenance and tyre replacement package which I conservatively guess would be from £50 a month extra. And adding metallic paint and a couple of other extras will probably put on another £50 a month.
So I'm guessing the total cost would be around £600 a month. So that's £24,600 for three years. The only other cost apart from electricity would be insurance.
If readers are interested to check my calculations, look at Leasing.com for the figures. Amusingly the cheapest Tesla quote is from a leasing company called "Chicane Automotive Management Ltd".
As a comparison I chose a BMW 3 Series touring special edition 320d M Sport Auto and using the same assumptions as above, the base cost is £309 a month which is a total of £12,655 over the three years. Adding just under £100 a month for maintenance, metallic paint and a few other extras, the total cost rises to £400 a month and a total of £16,400 over three years.
So the extra cost for a Tesla over a BMW is around £8,200 over three years. I'm guessing that the insurance on a Tesla will be quite a bit higher than the BMW but the running costs for the Tesla should be cheaper. (I'd guess the BMW would get around 40-50 mpg.)
Hopefully a well-heeled Lemon Fool subscriber, or acquaintance, will be tempted to lease a Tesla and tell us their experience. For the record, I leased a BMW 5 series last year (pleasingly for less than the cost of the 3 Series above) and am delighted with the car.
regards
Howard
Howard,
That's good info, thank you. So over three years Tesla model 3 is £21,000 vs BMW 3 at £16,400, both excluding fuel/energy.
Regarding fuel costs. Assume the comparison is a dino-juice car doing real world 40mpg diesel (that is what my Golf mk4, 2.0 litre diesel consistently achieved). That's 12 miles per liter, and £1.25 per liter. So 10.5p per mile in fuel costs. You are assuming 10,000/year, so for the BMW that will be approx £1050 in fuel per year, or £3150 over three years. Now The Tesla does 16 kWh/100 km, or 16kWh/62 miles. So 30,000 miles = 7741 kWh. If buying from grid at £0.15/kWh (and remember, you could do as I do and buy pure non-fossil electricity from Good Energy to avoid risk of just becoming a remote emitter) that is £1160 per three years.
Tesla 3 : £21,000 + £1160 = £22,160
BMW 3 : £16,400 + £3150 = £19,550
That's getting quite close. Just a £2160 difference over three years. If one were home charging from domestic 'spill' PV that would benefit the Tesla further, but to a first approximation that is cost parity already.
Insurance is likely to be higher on the Tesla to begin with due to rarity factor, but quite quickly I would expect convergence to make that a parity figure.
However what could easily swing the equation is congestion charging / pollution charging. The London ULEZ is £12.50/day. So if you are doing four days/week in London ULEZ for 40 weeks/year then that is 4 x 40 x 3 x £12.50 = £6,000.
.... mmmmmm £6,000 saving over 3-years in ULEV emissions charges vs a small £2160 increase in (lease+energy/fuel) costs. On that basis this looks like a no-brainer purchase already on purely economic grounds for anybody who thinks they are going to be a ULEV payer.
Please excuse me if I have done the London ULEV numbers wrong. And please correct me if I should also be including congestion charging.
It looks to me as if there is no longer any excuse for hybrids to get a ULEV exemption. We all know most hybrid users don't plug them in. They just buy them to get an exemption. Which there is no longer a fig leaf of an excuse for.
regards, dspp