Inevitably, the elephant in the room when discussing getting an electric car is why not a Tesla?
Of course this makes sense, Tesla is by far and away the most popular selling electric car brand in the U.S. They’ve pushed the electric car envelope more than any other company to date. Tesla has made impressive stats around driving range, ludicrous acceleration, a direct retail model, technologies like over the air updates and their proprietary supercharging network.
But there are still many elements that keep me from getting a Tesla. Much has been documented about Tesla’s build quality and consistency, which leaves a lot to be desired, especially for their premium price points so I won’t dig more into that here. Tesla also lacks a number of general features that are becoming fairly commonplace on luxury cars and even some mainstream cars. Compared to our X5, we would lose ventilated front seats, we would lose massaging front seats, we would lose a 360 degree parking camera (although I believe this is eventually coming to the Tesla models, but maybe only with the pricey $10,000 Full Self Driving option). The Model Y and Model X don’t offer opening moonroofs and don’t have shades for their glass roofs.
One big element was also the lease price. A Model X Long Range Plus with the standard white paint, 5 Seat Configuration, has a price of $79,990. A 3 year lease with 10,000 miles per year, same as what we did on our e-tron, would be nearly $1,250 a month with no down payment (which, I wouldn’t recommend a down payment on any lease). Now, our e-tron Prestige had a sticker price of over $83,000 and the heavily discounted lease came out to less than half the monthly payment of the Model X.
In fact, our e-tron lease came just under where the lease on a Model Y would be. A Model Y Long Range, again with the standard white paint and 5 seat configuration would be just over $630 a month. And again, still missing much of the luxury and convenience features that we were able to retain in the e-tron. Yes we lose the 100+ miles of extra range and supercharger network, but as yet we don’t see the compelling need for either of those elements.
The rest of the automotive industry is quickly launching their own electric vehicles like the Audi e-tron. Within the next 2-3 years we’ll see the Volvo XC40 Recharge, Polestar 2, Ford Mach-E, VW ID.4, Nissan Ariya, additional entrants from Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, BMW and Genesis as well as startups like Rivian (which just completed a real-world gauntlet in the Rebelle Rally), Lucid, Byton and numerous others. We think our lease on the e-tron will give us a great dip into the electric driving world, that allows us to retain a luxury car experience and help us bide our time while seeing what else comes out next. And who knows, maybe Tesla will turn a corner on their products as well.
