Correct me if I'm wrong: cars' longevity is increasing. Doesn't this indicate an engineering push toward longevity?
Speaking of which, did you factor in the oil change costs? Assuming $30 an oil change, you're looking at $12k in oil changes. That's now $69k for your Camry.
Plus, the Tesla looks cooler and has faster acceleration than your Camry.
I'm curious, though, about the listings with regards to mileage. As has been said many times, electric cars don't wear out in the same way as ICE based cars. For an ICE, mileage is a rough approximation of how dependable the car will be. But the thing I would be concerned about when buying a used Tesla is the battery health. I would love to see a number for each car with how many miles of range the computer shows when the battery is at 100% charge, in miles and as a percentage of the initial rating from Tesla. Mileage doesn't really cover it; you can have one battery at 80% capacity because it was frequently used in Ludicrous mode, deeply discharged on long trips, and often supercharged back up to full, while another was gently discharged some few percent a day for a commute and slowly trickle charged overnight.
And the biggest differentiator, to me, of a sales site is the quality of their parametric search and database. You have a small enough inventory right now that I can manually scroll through all your listings and pick out the ones I am considering, drop the top 6 in a spreadsheet and compare them - but this should be done automatically on the site.
For some examples of parametric searches, Digikey is amazing. If you haven't from them, go check this out: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/capacitors/ceramic-capac... (understand that to an EE, each of those categories makes sense and perhaps 1/3 are relevant to their purchase decision). Now imagine trying to do this if all their parts were on Craigslist. Newegg probably is among the best in their business, when you weigh in availability and customer service, but there are too many cases where I have to select both "Yes", "1", and a few numbers greater than one to identify a value. Amazon is terrible, because you have to select a category, and the data is all provided by the seller and barely normalized. For normalization, at this point you can just manually update the database so they all filter correctly. At scale, you could get a photo of the car's VIN number and look up all the specs, with the user just entering mileage...or heck, it's Tesla, they know how many miles are on each car and what the battery health is.
Also, for the comparison, a visual is nice. Here's an example bubble chart I did when looking for a Craigslist winter beater: http://i.imgur.com/AjHRHOA.jpg Mileage (or battery health?) on one axis, and cost on the other, bubble size and color can indicate age or model.
Do you change oil every 1000 miles?
If you change the oil every 5000 miles as suggested by Toyota, 350K miles is 70 oil changes, or $2100 not $12000.
The article isn't predicting that we'll soon all be driving a Tesla Model S or claiming that electric cars are price competitive right now.
There aren't a lot of cheap electric car options right now, but the situation is improving. The Chevy Bolt is available now, and the Model 3 should be out in a few months or so. They're still more expensive than I would care to spend on a car, but eventually as costs come down, it's not unreasonable to expect electrics will show up in lower cost vehicles.
I'm kind of hoping someone puts out a well-engineered low-cost electric without any of the self-driving or always-on-phone-home-wireless-connectivity stuff, or any other features that aren't absolutely required. No infotainment, just an FM radio and window cranks. Maybe not even AC or power steering. Just a simple small car, kind of like the VW beetle was in the 1960s.
Assuming electricity costs ~1/3 for the same distance as gas, then the used Tesla starts to make some sense, even when compared to the Camry (While being a much nicer car to drive).
[1] https://www.tesla.com/preowned?sort=price%7Casc https://www.truecar.com/used-cars-for-sale/listings/tesla/?s...
When you buy a Tesla you pay upfront the whole price (yes I know you can have some financing and re-pay it monthly) no matter how many miles you put on it, with the gas you pay as you go, i.e. the costs are directly connected to the use you make of it.
It is the same thing (I use to have this argument often) with "green" (energy saving) houses, once you strip from the equation "moral" or "ethical" considerations (lowering the carbon footprint, etc.) the fact is that you have to pay upfront a large sum of money that may (if the house is actually used) be repaid/compensated by the savings over the next 10/15/20 years, in the meantime you will have to pay (anyway) the utilities fixed fees (and rest assured that those will continue to raise).
So yeah, a $15k 2003 Camry used exclusively for long haul trips in sequence isn't approachable by EVs yet. But if you compared it to a Fiat 500e that's been used and refurbed (selling in my county for about $13k) and you're NOT constantly doing 280mi trips... you'll find something competitive.
Not to mention the rich aftermarket for dinosaur fueled vehicles, I wouldn't want to break DRM on my car and lose my warranty or worse.
Yes, a 2004 Camry exists but I'm happy to pay slightly more to radically drop my carbon output.
In the 12 years I've had it I've put on 350,000 miles. Even at a conservative 25 mpg and a generous average fuel cost of $3 that's:
$15,000 in car. $42,000 in gas.
This excludes maintenance etc, but I fail to see how I'm saving money buying an electric car unless I'm already rocking solar.
Maybe it's cheaper by the mile but my assumption is any fuel savings will be quickly erased in additional insurance costs.