Electric Cars are Changing the Cost of Driving


Olde Hornet

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sleek-looking Tesla's with the Tesloop logo, pasrked in a row at night

Tesloop's fleet. Photo by Tesloop
Few have driven a Tesla to the point at which the vehicle really starts to show its age. But Tesloop, a shuttle service in Southern California composed of Teslas, was ticking the odometers of its cars well past 300,000 miles with no signs of slowing.

The company’s fleet of seven vehicles—a mix of Model Xs, Model 3s and a Model S—are as of late 2019 among the highest-mileage Teslas in the world. They zip almost daily between Los Angeles, San Diego, and destinations in between. Each of Tesloop’s cars are regularly racking up about 17,000 miles per month (roughly eight times the average for corporate fleet mileage). Many need to fully recharge at least twice each day.

These long days have pushed Tesla’s engineering to the limit, making Tesloop an extreme testbed for the durability of Elon Musk’s cars. Tesloop provided Quartz with five years of maintenance logs, where its vehicles racked up over more than 2.5 million miles, to understand how the electric vehicles (EV) are living up to the promise of cheaper vehicles with unprecedented durability compared to their conventional combustion-engine counterparts.

The results reveal Tesla to be a company still ironing out bugs in its products, but one that pushes the limits of what vehicles can do. “When we first started our company, we predicted the drive train would practically last forever,” Tesloop founder Haydn Sonnad told Quartz. “That’s proven to be relatively true.” He notes that every car except one, a vehicle taken out of service after a collision with a drunk driver, is still running. “The cars have never died of old age,” he added.

It’s difficult to know how representative this data is of Teslas overall, given that Tesloop’s fleet is small, but it likely includes a large share of the highest-mileage Teslas on the road. Several are nearing 500,000 miles. Finding conventional vehicles to compare is virtually impossible since most fleet cars are typically sold off after 100,000 miles.

But the implications could be huge. Every year, corporations and rental car companies add more than 12 million vehicles in Europe and North America to their fleets (pdf). Adding EVs to the mix could see those cars lasting five times longer—costing a fraction of conventional cars over the same period—while feeding a massive new stream of used electric cars into the marketplace. Whether the future of fleets is really electric, however, depends on the data. And that’s still in short supply.

The Promise of EVs​

Most commercial vehicle fleets still run on gasoline and diesel, says David Hayward, a fleet expert with Deloitte consulting. But EVs are top of mind. “Everyone is excited about it and everyone wants it,” he told Quartz. “But there’s trepidation.” The potential savings are huge. Fleet owners’ biggest expenses are depreciation (44%), fuel (22%), and maintenance and repairs (11%), according to Deloitte. EVs could slash those by more than half.
But uncertainty and the paucity of available models (particularly heavier-duty vehicles) have kept fleet owners on the sidelines. Range and charging infrastructure remain major concerns for fleet owners who must ensure recharging isn’t more difficult than refilling at a gas station for salespeople and corporate clients on far-flung trips (most drivers charge at home or work).
Fleet managers interviewed by Quartz said they didn’t have reliable data on how well EVs performed in fleets. One of the first surveys done on EVs came this March when New York City revealed its first lifetime analysis of fuel and maintenance costs for its light-passenger fleet. It found conventional vehicle maintenance was two to four times higher than the $386 spent on EVs. That’s before gas. With some EVs now selling for less than the median price of a car in the US, such as Kia’s $33,145 electric Soul or GM’s $36,620 Bolt, the savings for owning an EV car could be substantial alongside lower fuel costs and greater durability.
 
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