One of my favorite cars is the line of Tesla’s.  Ground breaking.  Cool. Totally gnarly.  Totally awesome too.  And then sort of Eco-Green in a way, surely from the use of fuel.   Probably not so Eco-Green when one thinks of the impact of simply manufacturing the vehicles, and so on in relative terms to other cars and the oil it takes to manufacture any of them at any price or scale.  

Now, I happen to be along a Starbuck’s one day, and saw this one. Model S, 85D.  Just a great combination of class and menace, all wrapped into a very slick package.   If you don’t know this car, just know if you option it up, $100k is coming closer than you think.  But for the money and assuming one can afford such a luxury, what a great car to spend the money on.   Note the license plate……..I love the irony here…………. 

As I sped away to my next appt, this got me to thinking about the math……how does that really work.  It could go something like this:

Lets say it’s $80,000 out of the gate post incentives etc for the Model S…….and lets also say this same person could have bought a fully loaded Prius, another nifty little car for sure.  The gap, about $45,000-ish.  Lets also assume the Prius gets roughly 45 MPG…….and gas is $3 per gallon………build my 22 page spreadsheet…….hit the calc button……..one could drive the Prius 675,000 miles……which for the average driver, would take approx forever…….or actually 45 years. 

I don’t know about OPEC and all that, but if the math truly mattered, one should buy the Prius.  But if I had a money tree in my backyard, I’d have me a Tesla.  And my license plate would just be a big smiley face!