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Assume:

  $4/gallon gasoline.
  45 miles per gallon for commuter car.
  The average driver in the US drives 15,000 miles/year.
Therefore:

  $9000 / $4 = 2250 gallons.
  2250 gallons * 45 mpg = 101250 miles
  101250 mi / 15000 mi = 6.75
You must drive the electric car 6.75 times further each year than the gasoline powered car for your battery costs to break even with gas costs.

If you are driving that much, you will wear out the batteries even faster than the norm causing the battery cost to be even higher.

Alternately, it's cheaper to drive a fuel-efficient gasoline car like a Volkswagon Jetta until gasoline gets up to $27/gallon.




You should compare it to something that's near its performance class, since people are obviously not going to buy the Model S just to save money. That's going to be a future model.

At under 5 seconds 0-60, the Model S sport is supposedly going to have performance in the 500 horsepower BMW M5 range, which gets a combined MPG of 13 (11 city, 17 highway).

Besides that, the M5 is more like $90k.




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