GetOffYourGas wrote:dgpcolorado wrote:Tesla chose 400 kWh free per year because that would cover most owners' limited road trip needs. I find that interesting because I did 9000 miles of road trips in my first nine months! But I didn't get my car for urban commuting; I got it, in large part, for road trips.
I have a short commute, but I'm a bit of a weekend warrior. I do roughly 10k miles/year of road tripping per year.
Hmm.. if a Tesla gets 3 miles/kWh, that's 3,333kWh per year. That's well over the 400kWh Tesla is giving owners.
Of course, that assume all of that road trip uses the Supercharger network. In reality, the first charge of every weekend are from charging at home. So that's 60kWh / week or 3120 kWh/year.
So even with my 10k miles/year enabled by the superchargers, I'd only actually use it for about 200kWh, or half of my allowance.
Seems like Tesla did their homework, and is being very generous to boot.
I agree with your (and dgpcolorado's) comments generally, although where the SC price will really matter is for people who can't charge at home or work and must use SCs. At current California gas prices ((average $2.816/gal. regular on 1/13/17) and ignoring charging overhead/inefficiency, $0.20/kWh @ say 3.5 miles kWh average (being generous) is 5.7 cents/mile, so you'd need a car that gets over 49.4 mpg to better that. At 3 miles/kWh it's 6.33 cents/mile, or over 44.5 mpg to better it. It's a good thing for PEVs that gas prices are on the rise again, but things are still bleak for for-profit charging companies like Blink, who simply can't compete with gas prices.