fter unveiling a lease/finance program that read like a list of increasingly desperate rationalizations—I’m actually saving on housing, because I can live in it!—and facing attack from all corners, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has backtracked. His mea culpa accompanies a new financing plan, and while it’s objectively better than Tesla vs. Sense, Round 1 (our full teardown here) the misleading fast talk is still there.
The new plan extends the finance term from 63 months to 72, not so much because people need another nine months to repay their loans, but because it results in a lower monthly payment. For buyers who plan to take Tesla up on its offer to buy back the car at the 36-month mark, the longer term cuts the monthly installments by about $120 to $915. As in the first iteration of the Tesla plan, a 15-percent down payment is still covered by the lending bank, which will repay itself with your $7500 federal tax credit and any eligible state credits.
The other big change is Tesla’s adjustment of the guaranteed resale value. Whereas all versions were previously pegged at 43 percent of their original sale price (after 36 months), the base 60-kWh car now will be worth 50 percent at the three-year mark. A bit confusingly, all options still depreciate down to 43 percent. All told, a base car turned in at the three-year mark will yield a three-to-four-thousand-dollar windfall for the owner—meaning that after three years, a Model S owner will have paid roughly $815 per month, or about the same as they would for a well-loaded Mercedes-Benz E350.
What about our other gripes, mostly related to terms in the original promotion that were either misleading or flat-out mutually exclusive?
• The home page screen, shown above, does at least say “after gas savings” beside the price now. Originally, there was neither fine print on the page nor any indication of fine print. (Pat, can I buy an asterisk?)
• Inside the “True Cost of Ownership Calculator,” the estimated price of gasoline has been notched down from a preposterous $5 per gallon to an also-preposterous $4.90 per gallon.
• The calculator still defaults to 15,000 driven miles per year for figuring out savings versus gasoline, but at least the lease now allows for 15,000 miles per year without penalty. The first time around, the lease was capped at 12,000 miles per year, making Tesla’s default calculator numbers actually impossible to attain, since they would have incurred a several-thousand-dollar mileage penalty.
• Using the potential benefits from business tax deductions to determine a “true cost of ownership” for the Model S is still very shady. This benefit isn’t exclusive to Tesla or electric cars generally—the same person doing the same driving with a conventional gasoline-powered car would be entitled to the same tax deductions. We may as well add another $100 per month in savings because the Model S’s cargo area is large enough that owners can cancel their self-storage unit.
• The calculator still lists the available state tax credits for EVs, including the $7500 monster (on top of the $7500 federal credit) in West Virginia. Take a quick trip down to the fine print and—huh?—the lease program isn’t available in West Virginia.
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