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That dealer avoidance also means that fixing a Tesla (regardless of warranty) might commonly become horror story [0]. And this drives insurance costs through th

• redindian 8y ago
  > And this drives insurance costs through the roof [1]. This is literally fake news. I too assumed it will exorbitant from my 2018 Tesla M3 Long Range, then I got a quote from my agent (Safeco), it is same price as my 10yr old BMW. In fact, it is cheap for a new car. $650 for 6 months (Tesla & X3) is not astronomical.
  • bsagdiyev 8y ago
    Then you got reamed on your insurance for a 10 year old BMW -- full coverage on a similarly aged BMW for me is less than $50/mo. So no, that isn't "literally fake news" just because not everyone has the same insurance as you. My point being, just because you don't experience something doesn't make it fake news when other people do.
    • user3359 8y ago
      Comparing absolute insurance numbers without context of age, professional discounts, geography, etc. is pointless. I paid $500/month as a 20 year old on a $5000 used Intrepid because I was in a high risk category in a major city. My uncle who lived on a farm in another state paid $500/year for both him + his wife on newer cars. Point is, if he thinks it's fairly or underpriced for his particular situation, it probably is.
      • icantdrive55 8y ago
        Let's compare rates. Fifty year old male, 80's Toyota truck, just bare minimum insurance (don't recall, but just what my state requires), no tickets; $497 year through Mecury. I honestly don't like paying that. I don't drive much, but can't prove it because my vechicle doesn't have a computer. I'm at the point, where I would like to go back to no mandatory insurance. If you have a nice vechicle, and have assets to protect; insure. A lot of you will disagree, but I think the Insurance industry has been reaming us for years. I won't even mention home owners policies, and 15 pages of what they don't cover. (The Insurance Lobby is feared in California. They get what they want, and we are at their mercy. I've always felt their was collusion among the carriers, but couldn't prove it. And discounts, I found to be just around 5%. I had a buddy stay with Farmers for years because he thought he was getting a "long term customer discount". He wasen't. He let his insurance expire one year. He reapplied. He paid $400 less as a new customer?)
      • bsagdiyev 8y ago
        So you've just compared exactly what I'm trying to point out to... what I'm trying to point out? My entire point is that with zero context we have no idea whether the article is completely true or false and dismissing something as fake news because it doesn't jive with his experience is wrong.
        • close04 8y ago
          He wasn't necessarily shafted, insuring a 10 year old car is expensive especially if it's a model that is often involved in insurance claims. This is generally true but it will depend on so many factors that it destroys his argument. It's like saying that he literally has a fake profile because I know a guy redindian and he doesn't have a BMW. Or that the Tesla M3 must be a fake car because I don't own one.
    • rconti 8y ago
      ok, then I'm getting reamed on my wife's 10 year old Subaru because, with 3000mi/yr, it's only a few bucks less than our brand new "expensive to repair" Model 3 with 15k miles/year. Yes, data is not the plural of anecdote, and I want to agree with the source that Tesla repairs are more expensive (repairing anything aluminum is expensive; see: Audi A8), but I am just not seeing these high costs reflected in ANYONE's bills.
      • bsagdiyev 8y ago
        The point, which also seems lost on another comment, is that with zero context you can't really make a full observation on the circumstances that lead to the insurance cost. Just because he doesn't pay a lot for insurance doesn't mean it's fake news that someone else does, I can think of many reasons why insurance for one person would be rock bottom and sky high for another on the the exact same car.
    • redindian 8y ago
      How so? I said $650 for 6 months for both cars. You pay $50/m x 6 = $300 every 6m. I do the same ($42/m) for my X3. I just looked up my actual bill for the split (it is even lower). I pay $257 for X3 ($42/m) & $357 for Tesla ($60/m). For context I am in Seattle market, 40s, clean record. When I said fake news, I meant the article seem to play on the FUD for Tesla/EV vehicles. Check the M3 forums, no one seem to pay $2500/6m unless in corner cases. "BREAKING $50K Tesla Model3 insurance similar to other $50K car insurances" doesn't make an exciting article - does it?
      • close04 8y ago
        To be honest comparing the insurance between old and new cars isn't that relevant either [0] (random example). The vast majority of people don't understand how insurance works and what are the criteria. Old cars are expensive to insure because they tend to be more expensive for the insurance company. Do you really think that fixing a car where the parts are very rare and expensive, in authorized garages that are rare and expensive, while taking a very long time because there's no network for servicing will be as cheap as fixing any regular equivalent car that does have that servicing network? Any car that's expensive to fix will have more expensive premiums. And expensive to fix usually means: it's often involved in accidents, parts are expensive, garages that fix it are expensive, takes a long time to fix. Tesla checks the last 3 out of the 4 main boxes in most regions in the world. [0] http://www.thejournal.ie/car-insurance-10-year-old-vehicles-3895339-Mar2018/ http://www.thejournal.ie/car-insurance-10-year-old-vehicles-...
    • Spooky23 8y ago
      It all depends. If you live in Brooklyn, it might be 3x more.
  • davewritescode 8y ago
    Then you were being ripped off on the BMW. The cost of insurance is more related to how often certain cars get into accidents or get stolen and then adjusted for he driving record of the person driving the car. It has almost nothing to do with repair costs of the car itself. Source: a Mustang GT costs more money to insure for me than a Mercedes C63 AMG. Repair costs on the AMG are borderline criminal and yet according to the actuaries it’s a lower risk.
    • beat 8y ago
      Which sort of suggests something I was thinking earlier... that the autopilot features of Teslas are significantly reducing the number of accidents.
      • tomatocracy 8y ago
        Or, much more likely, that the average person who buys a Mustang GT drives ina much more accident-prone (and a much more expensive accident-prone) manner than the type of person who buys a Tesla. A very large (and the most variable) part of the actuarial cost of car insurance is third party liability, not the liability the insurer takes on for repairs to your own car or fire/theft. The difference between insuring a 19-year old man and a 55-year old woman on the same car is huge.
  • village-idiot 8y ago
    Anecdote is not the plural of data. Unless if you can prove that the averages quoted above are false, touting your bill is literally meaningless.
    • dwighttk 8y ago
      But data is the plural of anecdote.
      • village-idiot 8y ago
        Lol, I did screw that one up didn’t I?
• reaperducer 8y ago
  Having a network that can provide proper support might be more important than being able to make a sale when the product is shiny and new. A lesson I learned the hard way. I'll never buy another Fiat, not because I don't love the car. But because in my region, repair and maintenance options are limited compared with other brands. Next time I'll go with a Ford/Chevy/Toyota/Whatever simply so I don't have to drive 200 miles away for service because the local dealerships are understaffed and only open banker's hours.
  • nambit 8y ago
    Only open banker's hours? Doesn't seem like the most intractable problem.
    • reaperducer 8y ago
      Some of us have to work during the day.
      • nambit 8y ago
        Most places let you drop off your car and give you a loaner.
        • gambiting 8y ago
          If you book like 3-4 weeks in advance, sure. Literally no dealer around here will give you a loaner if you just turn up.
        • reaperducer 8y ago
          Work starts at 8am sharp. Dealerships around here open at 10am, close at 4pm. Like I said — Doctor's hours.
          • ghaff 8y ago
            My anecdata. Both the Honda and Toyota dealers I use let you drop off around 7AM and pickup (at least some evenings) to 8PM or so. My impression is that dealerships are pretty flexible in this regard these days.
• Diederich 8y ago
  > And this drives insurance costs through the roof One bit of anecdata: full coverage on my 2017 Model S 100D (all options except performance) is only slightly higher than full coverage on the car it replaced: a 2014 Prius C with no options. I was bracing for the worst, Re: insurance, but (I'm with Geico) the rate is...in my mind at least, very low. Perhaps they're factoring in all of the built-in safety features?
  • mark212 8y ago
    from what I remember, most of the cost of car insurance (at least here in the US) is the driver, not the car. Young unmarried men pay the highest premiums because they're the drivers most likely to cause and get into accidents. The cost of repairs and even the value of the car isn't really much of a driver of insurance rates.
    • ams6110 8y ago
      It's both the car, and the driver, and the driver's past claims history. An exotic car is going to cost more to insure regardless of who's driving it. Even more so if the driver is young, male, unmarried, or has a record of accidents or violations. When I added my 16 year old to my insurance, there was quite a difference in cost, depending on which car we said was his primary car.
      • acct1771 8y ago
        How'd you figure that out?
  • hcknwscommenter 8y ago
    I would guess, that they simply do not have enough information to come up with a reasonable estimate of their cost of insurance, so they err on the side of making it affordable because it is such a low volume car that is often (but assuredly not always) a second car that gets less use. I further predict that insurance costs are going to rise dramatically in the next few years. All the anecdata (I know I know) I have seen suggest Teslas are comparatively expensive to service for minor bodywork and other repairs.
• jccooper 8y ago
  Parts availability doesn't have much to do with dealerships. That's just Tesla being crap at inventory management, which would be the same story regardless of their sales/service structure. (Also, dealers don't generally do body work, and Tesla already supports 3rd party body shops.) They do seem to have velocity problems with service scaling, and dealers and independents may be able to help with that, but I see no reason to expect it to be a problem once growth levels out. I don't particularly like the lack of 3rd party general maintenance, but most of Tesla's target customers probably don't care.
  • Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
    > That's just Tesla being crap at inventory management My knee-jerk reaction is to respond that "Well every part they make is going into a new car, they don't have the capacity yet to keep up with production while building spare parts" But after more thinking, I think you're right. They should prioritize at least having enough spare parts on hand so that people aren't waiting months for new body panels. I think pleasing the people who already have a car in their possession is more important than getting cars to more customers. People on the wait list already know they're going to wait a while, but having to wait an excessively long time for replacement parts creates a very negative user experience and I think is more likely to lead to order cancellations.
• sowbug 8y ago
  > And this drives insurance costs through the roof That's an interesting claim. Any firsthand data to back it up? For me, insuring a 2014 Tesla Model S cost less ($405) than insuring a 2006 Toyota Prius ($429). Six-month period, Progressive Insurance, California, no accident history, identical coverage on both except the estimated mileage was 5,000 annually on the Prius and 12,000 annually on the Tesla -- that's right, driving the Tesla more than the Prius. It's odd that insurance would be lower for the Tesla if it's supposed to be "through the roof." (and for what it's worth, our Model X is even lower -- $337 for six months. Again, identical coverage.)
• ratsbane 8y ago
  For me, with Nationwide, same comprehensive coverage on both cars (every 6 months): 2005 Mercedes E320 CDI: $572.40 2018 Tesla Model 3 Long Range: $641.76 The collision part of that is $230.70 for the Tesla and $185.72 for the Mercedes. Anybody want to buy a 2005 Mercedes?