6 ms·

The more I see stuff like this, the more I'm convinced that life is measurably better, less costly, less stressful and less complicated by owning something like

The more I see stuff like this, the more I'm convinced that life is measurably better, less costly, less stressful and less complicated by owning something like a $9000 used Toyota Corolla. Unless you have a truly ridiculously high salary/net worth and can afford to buy something like a model S plaid edition on a whim, for fun. At which point you're into the territory of people who do things like buy Nissan GT-R for fun and then pay aftermarket modification shops to make $65,000 of additional enhancements to them.

jliptzin 5y ago
Nobody is writing news articles about people who drive their Teslas without any issues. I’ve had my model 3 for over 2 years, not a single issue, no oil changes, no maintenance done on it whatsoever. 25k miles.
- lijogdfljk 5y ago
  Man that is sort of mind blowing. I would have thought there was often basic maintenance for .. something. Shouldn't you have rotated your tires a few times at least?
  - rzzzt 5y ago
    If my calculations are correct, the tires have rotated approx. 5.45 million times.
    - throwanem 5y ago
      "Rotating" as in mounting them on different corners of the car so that they wear evenly, I believe is what's meant here.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    25k miles in two years is... not a lot of driving, at all. Even new ICE engines wouldn't need anything other than their oil changed. A tire rotation would probably be a good idea, though.
    - r00fus 5y ago
      You must be mistaken. Most leases are for under 10k a year. 12.5k a year will a] cost you significantly more on a lease (you won't qualify for the cheapo $99/mo leases) and b] will impact your insurance. 25k over 2 years is over-average at least. I did 15k/year but I drove 75mi/day back then (pre-COVID). New ICE cars are lower maintenance, for sure. But they're nowhere near 0-maintenance like an EV. I've spent like $250 on maintenance activities on my EV over 4 years. Not having to visit a dirty gas station or repair shop (the than tires) is quite liberating.
      - meetups323 5y ago
        Even old ICE cars can do 25k miles no problem. I've taken my '04 4Runner from 170k to 200k over the past 2 years, only major servicing was the timing belt replacement (scheduled for every 90k miles, ~$2k). I had to replace the O2 sensor too, but that was about $50 IIRC, and it took me 15 minutes in my driveway after O'Reilly diagnosed it for free using OBD2. No $3k/yr "Toolbox" sub required.
      - zdragnar 5y ago
        A 10k lease lets you drive upwards of 200 miles a week. That is doable if you have a short commute and / or never use it for day trips or vacations. Live outside of a small bubble, and it adds up pretty quick... then again, leases aren't very popular around here. Certainly an EV will have less maintenance, but even ICE cars have practically zero maintenance outside of the occasional 15 minutes at a quick lube oil change place before they hit 50k miles. Not having to fill the truck up with gas would be nice, if it could last a day logging in the forest on a single charge.
    - maccard 5y ago
      It's almost double the average distance driven in the UK [0]. [0] https://www.thinkmoney.co.uk/blog/what-is-the-average-miles-driven-per-year-in-the-uk/ https://www.thinkmoney.co.uk/blog/what-is-the-average-miles-...
    - jandrese 5y ago
      Found the HN user that lives in a flyover state. :) Average yearly mileage is greatly affected by where you live. Someone who lives in a rural area is almost guaranteed to put far more miles on a vehicle than a person who lives in the city. It's the difference between a 15 mile trip to the nearest grocery store and a 45 minute commute on open roads to taking the bus to work and only using the car on some weekends.
  - kampsduac 5y ago
    When having Discount Tire repair a nail in my 1 year old Model Y tire, I asked if I should get them rotated. They measured each tire tread and said they are wearing very even, and suggested I wait longer to get them rotated. Likely something a dealership wouldn't have recommended during an oil change of a vehicle purchased from them ;-) I do need to replace our cabin air filter. Likely sooner than typical, since we've driven on a number of very, very dirty roads on camping trips. No other serious maintenance in sight! https://www.tesla.com/support/car-maintenance https://www.tesla.com/support/car-maintenance
  - lallysingh 5y ago
    Also brake wear is lower because of regenerate braking.
    - asdff 5y ago
      You can lower break wear if you drive a manual ice car too. On my stick shift for a freeway off ramp I only hit the brakes when going from 5mph to a complete stop at the end, the rest of the time I smoothly downshift and let the engine brake the car. There is just no chance a tesla that weighs twice as much as my manual little honda is wearing the brake pads less.
      - jliptzin 5y ago
        I routinely go entire drives without touching the brakes at all. Have you ever test driven a Tesla before?
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- sithadmin 5y ago
  Nobody's writing new articles about people getting their Toyota's parts replaced either, because there's a robust marketplace of parts and service providers that can get the job done. What's remarkable about Tesla (but should be entirely obvious) is that given their small market share relative to ICE vehicles, this marketplace doesn't really exist. Your options are to 'wing it' with DIY or somewhat iffy greymarket fixes (such as the one described here), or deal with Tesla, which from an outsider's perspective seems to have some severe quality and customer service issues when it comes to maintenance and repairs.
  - poink 5y ago
    > which from an outsider's perspective seems to have some severe quality and customer service issues when it comes to maintenance and repairs. From another outsider's perspective they have these same issues when it comes to just getting you a decent car in the first place. Some big tech influencer was posting on Twitter the other day about how he was accepting his new Model Y even though it was a piece of crap, because he was worried he'd get an even worse piece of crap if he sent it back based on photos he'd seen from other Model Y owners. Seems real cool...
- coding123 5y ago
  Ouch, don't write that stuff.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  That might be relevant for the overall reliability of Teslas, but it's not relevant to how enjoyable the experience is of getting work done on a Tesla.
- lastofthemojito 5y ago
  The article isn't really about regular maintenance or other Tesla cost-of-ownership issues. It's about older Teslas that are out of warranty and the sometimes extremely high repair costs that come with battery replacement and repair, which are especially expensive due to Tesla service practices (replacing the entire battery). It seems like Teslas (and other EVs) have a different typical cycle of costs than typical ICE cars. In the ICE world, maintenance and repair costs start fairly low, then become moderate, and eventually moderate to high ("I'm tired of throwing a couple grand at this car every 6 months, I'll just put that towards a new car", says the American consumer). EVs start with incredibly low cost maintenance, then continue with incredibly low cost maintenance, and then even more low cost maintenance ... until WHAM! the battery bill hits. This isn't really a surprise to folks who have been paying attention to electric cars, but as more and more people go EV, it seems newsworthy to point it out, as well as to encourage Tesla to play nice with third-party repair shops.
  - m463 5y ago
    I think the "wham!" battery bill is an outlier for telsas. It's more normal to have a gradual range degradation. I've seen cars with > 300k on the odometer that work fine.
  - jliptzin 5y ago
    Yes but my point was that situations like these are the exception not the norm, usually these batteries degrade slowly and you should be able to get at least a few hundred thousand miles out of them before it needs to be replaced (assuming you took care of it properly).
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I think reasonably most modern regular cars would also do 2 to 3 years or even more without any maintenance.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Except engine oil changes, of course. But those take 10 minutes and $50/year.
    - pengaru 5y ago
      The unfortunate thing about oil changes is unless you're DIYing them or have a reliable mechanic overqualified for oil changing, every one is a risky diceroll of some oil changing lackey putting their ham fists on your vehicle and wrecking something. From cross-threaded drain plugs to unnecessary access holes cut in aero panels out of laziness, there's enough examples out there to be concerned.
      - frosted-flakes 5y ago
        Very true. I don't know why more cars don't have top-side oil filters, because it would make DIY oil changes so much easier. Even when I lived in an apartment with no garage, I could easily change the oil in my car (mk4 VW Jetta TDI) out in the parking lot. I use an oil extractor to suck it out the dipstick hole, and since the filter is front and centre, I don't need to get under the car at all. In fact, I've never removed the oilpan drain plug.
      - asdff 5y ago
        I've never had an issue taking the car to a place like valvoline where oil changes are their bread and butter. I've only heard of that sort of stuff happening at dealerships where they might have highschoolers working above their heads in the maintenance department.
        pengaru 5y ago
        The first and only time I used such a place, the Jiffy Lube in Pacifica off Skyline, the smell of burning oil graced my driving experience for the better part of a week afterwards. You see, I had brought quality Mobil 1 full synthetic oil in quart bottles, which the career oil changers didn't seem to understand how to pour without spilling everywhere. Pro-tip: the offset spout is supposed to be at the top, not the bottom orientation. Oil changes are inherently a probable interaction with either children or clowns. And I'm saying this as someone who did oil changes as a summer job, back before I had a driver's license. The things I've seen... I pity the fool who relies on random third parties for maintenance. EVs are a potentially huge improvement in this department.
- bumbada 5y ago
  That is what happens with electric cars, they are maintenance free, for most people. That was the main reason car dealers did not want to touch an electric car, they make more than half of their income from the repair shop, and they know with electric cars that business is mostly gone. New business will be created, though. Changing the batteries, balancing them when dead, putting a new technology when batteries improve,or improving the driving assistant will be necessary.
- asdff 5y ago
  Thats kinda the story of me with my ICE cars too. Oil changes take 15 minutes twice a year and its a drive through where I don't even have to exit my car. I make up for that time and more with the savings from it only taking sixty seconds to juice up the car. I've also owned cars for a long time, from new to 300k miles, and typically the expensive fixes that start to creep up are due to components wearing out. Things like rubber seals in the suspension, brake lines rusting out due to the salt used on the roads or a manufacturing defect leading to premature rust, electrical harnesses needing replacing. I don't think electric cars are immune to these issues since they have nothing to do with the powerplant, usually that part of the car is bulletproof in my experiences if you buy from reliable manufacturers like Honda.
lallysingh 5y ago
It also makes life much less pleasurable.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  Realistically speaking, there's 6 things my life I might have to randomly spend $22k on: my house or my family (5 of us). Adding another thing to that list would make my life much less pleasurable. But to each their own.
- pengaru 5y ago
  Your life must be pathetically short on pleasure if the choice of car substantially moves the needle, make some effort to diversify your sources of pleasure away from powered wheelchairs.
  - FinalBriefing 5y ago
    Eh, if you spend a lot of time driving, a quieter car with extra safety features can make those parts of your life more enjoyable. Avoiding driving altogether should be step 1, though.
  - kilbuz 5y ago
    I don't know, there seems to be a lot of people who enjoy cars -- whether for looks, sport, status, collecting, fixing, restoring, etc. I don't think it's particularly surprising if I were chatting with folks at a party and someone would mentions cars as a hobby of theirs. I think your charge could be leveled against most hobbies, especially collectibles. It seems a bit mean-spirited.
  - thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
    Sometimes people enjoy things you don't.
  - lallysingh 5y ago
    Clearly you've only tried crap cars.
speedgoose 5y ago
Did you drive a last gen Tesla and an used Toyota recently? I have and I bought a Tesla.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Tesla was and remains a luxury car. I don't think the Model 3 changed that. It's competition for BMW or Mercedes, not Toyota. Luxury vehicles are notorious for their long-term dealer driven maintenance costs. What Tesla has over its luxury competition is likely more reliability and less of those costs. But the same "you have to get it done at the dealer and it's gonna milk you bigtime" philosophy seems to prevail. I don't think it's intrinsic to EVs, is what I'm saying. But more to how Tesla has positioned themselves re: market segment. e.g. the Chevy Volt is now in its 10th year and only now are people starting to have real difficulties with gen-1 10 year old Volts and battery packs and getting GM to service and replace them. Prior to that it was just smooth sailing. Most are not seeing serious degradation and the warranty has been excellent on them up to 8 years or so. A third party market is building up around older Volt battery servicing in some cities, despite not many Volts having been sold. I think it's entirely feasible we will see the equivalent of a fully electric Toyota Corolla in the next 5-10 years. I don't think Toyota will make it though.
Spivak 5y ago
As a fellow "always going to buy a cheap but reliable older car" driver I can attest that it is in fact the least stressful car buying / owning experience ever. If you need a car for the actual "moving your body to and from places" it can't be beat. * Parts are always available and inexpensive for the mass-market models and any repair ship can get you sorted. * If I get into an accident the most I can ever be out is $8-10k but with depreciation more likely $4-5k. * If they don't offer you 0% interest you just buy the car outright. * Insurance is cheeeeap because the car isn't worth anything and it's not the kind of car anyone will drive fast or target for vandalism or theft. * You can buy cars with high mileage and still easily get another 100k miles out of it. If the thing is a scrap heap by the end who cares?
- AustinDev 5y ago
  I was this way until I got married and my neighbors wife nearly got killed in her ~2010 model lexus suv by an inattentive driver running a red light @45 mph t-boning the drivers side with 1 ton truck. She's lucky she wasn't seriously maimed and fully recovered. A 2020 Lexus might have avoided the hospital trip entirely based on the difference in crash tests for drive side impact. I'd rather my wife be in a at most 3-4 year old BMW, Lexus, Volvo, etc than a late model cheap car for the sake of my piece of mind alone.
- tashoecraft 5y ago
  I used to be in the camp of buy a cheap, old reliable car, until I realized just how much safer cars made in the past 5 years are vs the older ones. Cars are getting much safer, and I'll happily pay 5-10k more just for the insurance of reducing the chances of me being maimed or killed in an accident.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    Yep, my wife rear-ended a delivery truck in our older Audi and totalled it -- with the kids in the car; everyone was OK, but after that she would not consider anything that didn't have collision avoidance systems and safety at least as good as the Audi we had. I'm glad she wasn't in our older Kia. There would have been injuries.
vagrantJin 5y ago
> I'm convinced that life is measurably better, less costly, less stressful and less complicated by owning something like a $9000 used Toyota It's not fair at all to compare any Tesla even to a 20 year old Toyota. The Toyota will embarrass even respectable, older car makers.
- m463 5y ago
  I don't know, I've talked to folks with telsas (model s) with > 300k on the odometer.
heavyset_go 5y ago
After years of headaches, my criteria for buying a car includes that it must have a huge after-market for parts and that I can bring it to pretty much any shop and get it fixed. Corollas fit that bill perfectly.
taylodl 5y ago
Yeah. I bought a used Honda Civic. It had 38K miles on it. I did replace the battery - $140 with a 3-year unconditional warranty and 7-year pro-rated warranty, and oil changes - $50 including tire rotation and that's it. My last oil change was a year ago and it's about due for another. The parts are universally available, dirt cheap, capable mechanics abound, and the insurance is super cheap. It's the way to go for me.
- protomyth 5y ago
  If you are concerned about part and maintenance costs, then a car favored by tuners is a pretty good bet for repair. Its amazing the amount of parts you can get for the Honda Civic. Given some of the manufactures are starting to sell crate electric motors, I am a lot more interested in the Ford F-150 Lightning and anything Honda builds than Tesla given the repair stories of time and expense.
agumonkey 5y ago
try living in a small town with a bike.

jliptzin 5y ago

Nobody is writing news articles about people who drive their Teslas without any issues. I’ve had my model 3 for over 2 years, not a single issue, no oil changes, no maintenance done on it whatsoever. 25k miles.

lijogdfljk 5y ago
Man that is sort of mind blowing. I would have thought there was often basic maintenance for .. something. Shouldn't you have rotated your tires a few times at least?
- rzzzt 5y ago
  If my calculations are correct, the tires have rotated approx. 5.45 million times.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    "Rotating" as in mounting them on different corners of the car so that they wear evenly, I believe is what's meant here.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  25k miles in two years is... not a lot of driving, at all. Even new ICE engines wouldn't need anything other than their oil changed. A tire rotation would probably be a good idea, though.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    You must be mistaken. Most leases are for under 10k a year. 12.5k a year will a] cost you significantly more on a lease (you won't qualify for the cheapo $99/mo leases) and b] will impact your insurance. 25k over 2 years is over-average at least. I did 15k/year but I drove 75mi/day back then (pre-COVID). New ICE cars are lower maintenance, for sure. But they're nowhere near 0-maintenance like an EV. I've spent like $250 on maintenance activities on my EV over 4 years. Not having to visit a dirty gas station or repair shop (the than tires) is quite liberating.
    - meetups323 5y ago
      Even old ICE cars can do 25k miles no problem. I've taken my '04 4Runner from 170k to 200k over the past 2 years, only major servicing was the timing belt replacement (scheduled for every 90k miles, ~$2k). I had to replace the O2 sensor too, but that was about $50 IIRC, and it took me 15 minutes in my driveway after O'Reilly diagnosed it for free using OBD2. No $3k/yr "Toolbox" sub required.
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      A 10k lease lets you drive upwards of 200 miles a week. That is doable if you have a short commute and / or never use it for day trips or vacations. Live outside of a small bubble, and it adds up pretty quick... then again, leases aren't very popular around here. Certainly an EV will have less maintenance, but even ICE cars have practically zero maintenance outside of the occasional 15 minutes at a quick lube oil change place before they hit 50k miles. Not having to fill the truck up with gas would be nice, if it could last a day logging in the forest on a single charge.
  - maccard 5y ago
    It's almost double the average distance driven in the UK [0]. [0] https://www.thinkmoney.co.uk/blog/what-is-the-average-miles-driven-per-year-in-the-uk/ https://www.thinkmoney.co.uk/blog/what-is-the-average-miles-...
  - jandrese 5y ago
    Found the HN user that lives in a flyover state. :) Average yearly mileage is greatly affected by where you live. Someone who lives in a rural area is almost guaranteed to put far more miles on a vehicle than a person who lives in the city. It's the difference between a 15 mile trip to the nearest grocery store and a 45 minute commute on open roads to taking the bus to work and only using the car on some weekends.
- kampsduac 5y ago
  When having Discount Tire repair a nail in my 1 year old Model Y tire, I asked if I should get them rotated. They measured each tire tread and said they are wearing very even, and suggested I wait longer to get them rotated. Likely something a dealership wouldn't have recommended during an oil change of a vehicle purchased from them ;-) I do need to replace our cabin air filter. Likely sooner than typical, since we've driven on a number of very, very dirty roads on camping trips. No other serious maintenance in sight! https://www.tesla.com/support/car-maintenance https://www.tesla.com/support/car-maintenance
- lallysingh 5y ago
  Also brake wear is lower because of regenerate braking.
  - asdff 5y ago
    You can lower break wear if you drive a manual ice car too. On my stick shift for a freeway off ramp I only hit the brakes when going from 5mph to a complete stop at the end, the rest of the time I smoothly downshift and let the engine brake the car. There is just no chance a tesla that weighs twice as much as my manual little honda is wearing the brake pads less.
    - jliptzin 5y ago
      I routinely go entire drives without touching the brakes at all. Have you ever test driven a Tesla before?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sithadmin 5y ago
Nobody's writing new articles about people getting their Toyota's parts replaced either, because there's a robust marketplace of parts and service providers that can get the job done. What's remarkable about Tesla (but should be entirely obvious) is that given their small market share relative to ICE vehicles, this marketplace doesn't really exist. Your options are to 'wing it' with DIY or somewhat iffy greymarket fixes (such as the one described here), or deal with Tesla, which from an outsider's perspective seems to have some severe quality and customer service issues when it comes to maintenance and repairs.
- poink 5y ago
  > which from an outsider's perspective seems to have some severe quality and customer service issues when it comes to maintenance and repairs. From another outsider's perspective they have these same issues when it comes to just getting you a decent car in the first place. Some big tech influencer was posting on Twitter the other day about how he was accepting his new Model Y even though it was a piece of crap, because he was worried he'd get an even worse piece of crap if he sent it back based on photos he'd seen from other Model Y owners. Seems real cool...
coding123 5y ago
Ouch, don't write that stuff.
tshaddox 5y ago
That might be relevant for the overall reliability of Teslas, but it's not relevant to how enjoyable the experience is of getting work done on a Tesla.
lastofthemojito 5y ago
The article isn't really about regular maintenance or other Tesla cost-of-ownership issues. It's about older Teslas that are out of warranty and the sometimes extremely high repair costs that come with battery replacement and repair, which are especially expensive due to Tesla service practices (replacing the entire battery). It seems like Teslas (and other EVs) have a different typical cycle of costs than typical ICE cars. In the ICE world, maintenance and repair costs start fairly low, then become moderate, and eventually moderate to high ("I'm tired of throwing a couple grand at this car every 6 months, I'll just put that towards a new car", says the American consumer). EVs start with incredibly low cost maintenance, then continue with incredibly low cost maintenance, and then even more low cost maintenance ... until WHAM! the battery bill hits. This isn't really a surprise to folks who have been paying attention to electric cars, but as more and more people go EV, it seems newsworthy to point it out, as well as to encourage Tesla to play nice with third-party repair shops.
- m463 5y ago
  I think the "wham!" battery bill is an outlier for telsas. It's more normal to have a gradual range degradation. I've seen cars with > 300k on the odometer that work fine.
- jliptzin 5y ago
  Yes but my point was that situations like these are the exception not the norm, usually these batteries degrade slowly and you should be able to get at least a few hundred thousand miles out of them before it needs to be replaced (assuming you took care of it properly).
Ekaros 5y ago
I think reasonably most modern regular cars would also do 2 to 3 years or even more without any maintenance.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  Except engine oil changes, of course. But those take 10 minutes and $50/year.
  - pengaru 5y ago
    The unfortunate thing about oil changes is unless you're DIYing them or have a reliable mechanic overqualified for oil changing, every one is a risky diceroll of some oil changing lackey putting their ham fists on your vehicle and wrecking something. From cross-threaded drain plugs to unnecessary access holes cut in aero panels out of laziness, there's enough examples out there to be concerned.
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      Very true. I don't know why more cars don't have top-side oil filters, because it would make DIY oil changes so much easier. Even when I lived in an apartment with no garage, I could easily change the oil in my car (mk4 VW Jetta TDI) out in the parking lot. I use an oil extractor to suck it out the dipstick hole, and since the filter is front and centre, I don't need to get under the car at all. In fact, I've never removed the oilpan drain plug.
    - asdff 5y ago
      I've never had an issue taking the car to a place like valvoline where oil changes are their bread and butter. I've only heard of that sort of stuff happening at dealerships where they might have highschoolers working above their heads in the maintenance department.
      - pengaru 5y ago
        The first and only time I used such a place, the Jiffy Lube in Pacifica off Skyline, the smell of burning oil graced my driving experience for the better part of a week afterwards. You see, I had brought quality Mobil 1 full synthetic oil in quart bottles, which the career oil changers didn't seem to understand how to pour without spilling everywhere. Pro-tip: the offset spout is supposed to be at the top, not the bottom orientation. Oil changes are inherently a probable interaction with either children or clowns. And I'm saying this as someone who did oil changes as a summer job, back before I had a driver's license. The things I've seen... I pity the fool who relies on random third parties for maintenance. EVs are a potentially huge improvement in this department.
bumbada 5y ago
That is what happens with electric cars, they are maintenance free, for most people. That was the main reason car dealers did not want to touch an electric car, they make more than half of their income from the repair shop, and they know with electric cars that business is mostly gone. New business will be created, though. Changing the batteries, balancing them when dead, putting a new technology when batteries improve,or improving the driving assistant will be necessary.
asdff 5y ago
Thats kinda the story of me with my ICE cars too. Oil changes take 15 minutes twice a year and its a drive through where I don't even have to exit my car. I make up for that time and more with the savings from it only taking sixty seconds to juice up the car. I've also owned cars for a long time, from new to 300k miles, and typically the expensive fixes that start to creep up are due to components wearing out. Things like rubber seals in the suspension, brake lines rusting out due to the salt used on the roads or a manufacturing defect leading to premature rust, electrical harnesses needing replacing. I don't think electric cars are immune to these issues since they have nothing to do with the powerplant, usually that part of the car is bulletproof in my experiences if you buy from reliable manufacturers like Honda.

lallysingh 5y ago

It also makes life much less pleasurable.

bcrosby95 5y ago
Realistically speaking, there's 6 things my life I might have to randomly spend $22k on: my house or my family (5 of us). Adding another thing to that list would make my life much less pleasurable. But to each their own.
pengaru 5y ago
Your life must be pathetically short on pleasure if the choice of car substantially moves the needle, make some effort to diversify your sources of pleasure away from powered wheelchairs.
- FinalBriefing 5y ago
  Eh, if you spend a lot of time driving, a quieter car with extra safety features can make those parts of your life more enjoyable. Avoiding driving altogether should be step 1, though.
- kilbuz 5y ago
  I don't know, there seems to be a lot of people who enjoy cars -- whether for looks, sport, status, collecting, fixing, restoring, etc. I don't think it's particularly surprising if I were chatting with folks at a party and someone would mentions cars as a hobby of theirs. I think your charge could be leveled against most hobbies, especially collectibles. It seems a bit mean-spirited.
- thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
  Sometimes people enjoy things you don't.
- lallysingh 5y ago
  Clearly you've only tried crap cars.

speedgoose 5y ago

Did you drive a last gen Tesla and an used Toyota recently? I have and I bought a Tesla.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Tesla was and remains a luxury car. I don't think the Model 3 changed that. It's competition for BMW or Mercedes, not Toyota. Luxury vehicles are notorious for their long-term dealer driven maintenance costs. What Tesla has over its luxury competition is likely more reliability and less of those costs. But the same "you have to get it done at the dealer and it's gonna milk you bigtime" philosophy seems to prevail. I don't think it's intrinsic to EVs, is what I'm saying. But more to how Tesla has positioned themselves re: market segment. e.g. the Chevy Volt is now in its 10th year and only now are people starting to have real difficulties with gen-1 10 year old Volts and battery packs and getting GM to service and replace them. Prior to that it was just smooth sailing. Most are not seeing serious degradation and the warranty has been excellent on them up to 8 years or so. A third party market is building up around older Volt battery servicing in some cities, despite not many Volts having been sold. I think it's entirely feasible we will see the equivalent of a fully electric Toyota Corolla in the next 5-10 years. I don't think Toyota will make it though.

Spivak 5y ago

As a fellow "always going to buy a cheap but reliable older car" driver I can attest that it is in fact the least stressful car buying / owning experience ever. If you need a car for the actual "moving your body to and from places" it can't be beat. * Parts are always available and inexpensive for the mass-market models and any repair ship can get you sorted. * If I get into an accident the most I can ever be out is $8-10k but with depreciation more likely $4-5k. * If they don't offer you 0% interest you just buy the car outright. * Insurance is cheeeeap because the car isn't worth anything and it's not the kind of car anyone will drive fast or target for vandalism or theft. * You can buy cars with high mileage and still easily get another 100k miles out of it. If the thing is a scrap heap by the end who cares?

AustinDev 5y ago
I was this way until I got married and my neighbors wife nearly got killed in her ~2010 model lexus suv by an inattentive driver running a red light @45 mph t-boning the drivers side with 1 ton truck. She's lucky she wasn't seriously maimed and fully recovered. A 2020 Lexus might have avoided the hospital trip entirely based on the difference in crash tests for drive side impact. I'd rather my wife be in a at most 3-4 year old BMW, Lexus, Volvo, etc than a late model cheap car for the sake of my piece of mind alone.
tashoecraft 5y ago
I used to be in the camp of buy a cheap, old reliable car, until I realized just how much safer cars made in the past 5 years are vs the older ones. Cars are getting much safer, and I'll happily pay 5-10k more just for the insurance of reducing the chances of me being maimed or killed in an accident.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Yep, my wife rear-ended a delivery truck in our older Audi and totalled it -- with the kids in the car; everyone was OK, but after that she would not consider anything that didn't have collision avoidance systems and safety at least as good as the Audi we had. I'm glad she wasn't in our older Kia. There would have been injuries.

vagrantJin 5y ago

> I'm convinced that life is measurably better, less costly, less stressful and less complicated by owning something like a $9000 used Toyota It's not fair at all to compare any Tesla even to a 20 year old Toyota. The Toyota will embarrass even respectable, older car makers.

m463 5y ago
I don't know, I've talked to folks with telsas (model s) with > 300k on the odometer.

heavyset_go 5y ago

After years of headaches, my criteria for buying a car includes that it must have a huge after-market for parts and that I can bring it to pretty much any shop and get it fixed. Corollas fit that bill perfectly.

taylodl 5y ago

Yeah. I bought a used Honda Civic. It had 38K miles on it. I did replace the battery - $140 with a 3-year unconditional warranty and 7-year pro-rated warranty, and oil changes - $50 including tire rotation and that's it. My last oil change was a year ago and it's about due for another. The parts are universally available, dirt cheap, capable mechanics abound, and the insurance is super cheap. It's the way to go for me.

protomyth 5y ago
If you are concerned about part and maintenance costs, then a car favored by tuners is a pretty good bet for repair. Its amazing the amount of parts you can get for the Honda Civic. Given some of the manufactures are starting to sell crate electric motors, I am a lot more interested in the Ford F-150 Lightning and anything Honda builds than Tesla given the repair stories of time and expense.

agumonkey 5y ago

try living in a small town with a bike.