If you are to believe popular wisdom, the EV bonanza is gone, sales “cooled down,” carmakers postpone or abort plans for new models and new battery factories, and so on. Lately, the industry has been preparing for the probable impact of the Inflation Reduction Act shutdown if Trump becomes president again. But is the picture that grim? Let the numbers talk.
Still, sales don’t follow the predicted S-curve, the early adopters’ wave has gone, and the anti-EV propaganda has seeded doubts among the undecided potential customers. As a result, hybrid sales are on the rise—but you should pay attention to details, as mild-hybrid cars are also falsely considered hybrids.
On top of all, the presidential candidate who recently dodged bullets in an assassination attempt promised that he would stop the Biden-Harris Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which he refers to as “meaningless Green New Scam ideas.” Surprisingly, Tesla’s boss supports Trump’s wacky ideas, which leaves me speechless.
Nevertheless, I will use America’s electric sweetheart as the main character in this break-even analysis. My opinions could be subjective, but numbers are not. The only problem is that this break-even is theoretical and doesn’t comprise all the variables in a Total Cost of Ownership professional study.
I only considered the cars’ basic MSRP prices, the EPA’s MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent), electricity and consumption values, and the national average fuel and kilowatt-hours prices in both fast and home charging scenarios.
This should be enough to make an educated guess about the answer to the question in the headline.
The undisputed crown of electric sport SUV
Currently, three versions of the Tesla Model Y are on the market. The basic one has rear-wheel drive and the smallest battery, the second one is a pretty powerful AWD EV, and the top of the line is simply a performance small SUV, capable of only 3.5 seconds for the 0-60 mph sprint. Dodge this, all the other sporty SUVs!
I will start with this latter variant in this episode because… well, you’ll see how short the story is. I had to look for all the quicker-than-4-second SUVs out there. It was a piece of cake, as I found just a bunch of them.
Of course, the main competitors are battery-electric SUVs. Currently, there are only two models to consider: the Ford Mustang Mach-E (in two variants, sporting the same battery but dynamically tweaked differently) and the KIA EV6 GT.
Photo: Tesla, Ford, KIA
They are pretty similar from a technical point of view to Model Y Performance, but reviewers worldwide tend to praise the Mustang Mach-E Rally and the EV6 GT more for the thrills they give in a hardcore driving session. You know, how a car makes you feel is too subjective to translate into numbers…
However, this comes with an almost ten-grand higher price tag and less efficiency in daily driving. The end result is that there’s no case for break-even because Model Y Performance remains the best-for-bucks offer compared to its direct rivals.
Photo: Author
Of course, that is if you care about the price difference when you’re willing to pay more than $50,000 for an electric sporty SUV. But here’s the thing: if the next president will be a woman, which means the IRA will go on with its EV tax incentives, the Tesla Model Y Performance will remain the king in its arena.
Thanks to the $7,500 incentive, its MSRP price starts from under $45,000, while neither Ford nor KIA is eligible for the government bonus—at least for now. So, at this point, the Tesla Model Y Performance is clearly the best electric sporty small SUV and almost affordable for its power.
Photo: Author
But is it the best overall, even compared to competitors with internal combustion engines under their hoods? Well, today, there’s no comparable plug-in hybrid SUV in the around $50,000 area that can reach 60 mph in under 4 seconds. If you find one, please let me know.
Plug-in hybrid or full-hybrid sporty and affordable SUV? No, thanks
The only two plug-in hybrid SUVs close to what you can call a dynamic SUV—they can sprint to 60 mph in an estimated 6-6.5 seconds—are the bigger Mazda CX-90 and the off-roader Jeep Wrangler. Of course, they target different customer profiles than Model Y, but at least you can have a context.
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For the sake of math, in theory, the Model Y Performance breaks even pretty fast compared to these two contenders: around 50,000 miles against Mazda and only 21,000 miles against Jeep. But you should know those values – based on MPGe criteria – are useless in real life.
That’s because the miles per gallon of gasoline-equivalent criteria is an “invention” to help customers compare efficiency between electric, fuel-cell, or plug-in hybrid vehicles—namely those capable of no-emissions range—and those that rely almost entirely on ICEs (full-hybrids, mild-hybrids, and, of course, classic gasoline engines).
Photo: Author
But here’s the thing: you can’t use the MPGe to find the real operating costs for any of these powertrains. Applying gasoline prices to MPGe only gives you an idea of the theoretical break-even between Tesla Model Y, in our case, and ICE-based powertrain competitors in a somehow mixed usage scenario.
The break-even value can only be calculated as a relation between the difference in car prices and the difference in real cost-per-mile. For this, you need to know how much electricity and gasoline real consumption are, respectively. Well, in our case, “real” is actually “EPA estimated…”
That’s why, along with the MPGe value, for a plug-in hybrid, the EPA also estimates how much kWh are used in a hundred miles when the car is used in electric-only mode and how many gallons are consumed in a hundred miles when the battery is almost depleted, and the car is used in hybrid mode.
If you ask me, this kind of break-even calculation isn’t helpful because plug-in hybrids have a poor all-electric range. Nevertheless, it’s necessary to get to a valid conclusion. First, you need to compare the electric car and the plug-in hybrid one in the fully electric usage scenario.
Photo: Author
Can you imagine having a plug-in hybrid and using it solely as an electric car, charging it every 20-30 or, at most, 50 miles? In real life, this is simply stupid because why, in the name of logic, is there an engine under the hood that you’ll never use? So, again, this is only a theoretical calculation.
Unfortunately, Mazda does not yet have EPA kWh/100 miles data, so we’ll only refer to the Jeep Wrangler. If you’d only fast charge the Model Y and the Wrangler 4xe, the fully electric SUV would break even in less than 5,000 miles. In the home-charging scenario, breaking even would take around 12,000 miles.
I used the national average price of 0.45 $/kWh for the fast-charge scenario, which is 2.5 times higher than the national average price of 0.178 $/kWh for the home-charging scenario. The break-even mileage will naturally vary depending on your local rates, but this requires creating a very complex calculator. Maybe sometime in the future…
For now, let’s switch to another scenario: using the plug-in hybrid solely in hybrid mode and never charging its battery. That is never driving in electric-only mode, which is nonsense: why spend money on a bigger and more expensive battery if you’re not going to enjoy its advantages? Of course, this is another theoretical calculation.
Photo: Author
Just as in the previous scenario, we should consider both extreme situations: when the electric car uses only fast chargers and only home charging, respectively. This time, the Tesla Model Y needs between 6,700 and 26,000 miles to break even compared to the Wrangler 4xe (if the latter doesn’t use the all-electric capability, remember?).
However, the surprise arises in the case of the Mazda plug-in hybrid model: if it uses only gasoline and the Model Y only fast-chargers, the full-electric SUV will never break even. How’s that possible?
Well, the Tesla SUV costs around $1,500 more, and fast charging is more expensive than filling Mazda’s gasoline tank (considering gasoline’s national average price of $3.478/gallon, estimated in August, and the EPA’s estimated fuel economy of 4 gallons/100 miles).
On the other extreme, where the Model Y is charged only at home, with a much lower price for kWh (estimated at 0.178 $/kWh as a national average in August), it easily breaks even in less than 20,000 miles compared to Mazda’s plug-in hybrid.
In real life, a plug-in hybrid will mostly be used in all-electric mode in cities, while on long journeys, it will heavily rely on its internal combustion engine, with a little help from the electric motors(s). Likewise, an electric car will use Level 2 AC or home charging, mostly in cities, and fast chargers on long journeys.
Averaging those four break-even values in Jeep’s case can be considered a 50:50 scenario for plug-in and EV charging habits. The result is a break-even of around 10,000 miles, half the strictly theoretical one based on the MPGe criteria.
The bottom line is that the break-even based on MPGe is closer to what we could call an average worst-case scenario for the electric vehicle than for its plug-in hybrid contender. In the vast majority of use cases, the Model Y Performance will break even in fewer miles than what resulted from MPGe calculations here.
How about adding into the equation the EV tax, which also applies to the plug-in hybrid Jeep but only half the amount the Tesla is eligible for? (Sorry, Mazda, no governmental incentive for your plug-in hybrid)
Photo: Author
Well, given the lower price for Model Y, there really isn’t a case for calculating a break-even for any scenario and situation considered. Of course, thanks to Mazda’s lower cost per 100 miles for gasoline compared to fast-charging the Tesla, the Japanese model will break even in around 1.2 million miles—basically similar to “actually never in the car’s life…“
Ultimately, the Tesla Model Y Performance has no plug-in hybrid direct rival. Maybe, at this point, the industry can’t or isn’t interested in creating such a contender. My bets go on the first choice: high-performance plug-in hybrid powertrains for sporty SUVs are much more expensive than the $50,000 bar.
Is there a fight with ICE-centered performance SUVs?
Frankly, I was surprised to find no full-hybrid SUV as quick as Tesla’s top-model Y and with a similar, unincentivized price. In theory, adding an electric motor or more to the internal combustion engine can greatly increase performance. But in real life, this is too costly compared to a solely battery-electric powertrain.
So, I only found gasoline-engine SUVs, some of them fitted with mild-hybrid systems—which are basically just an upgrade, not a real improvement to the proper hybrid technology level. But get this: they all have MSRP basic prices over the $50,000 bar. I stopped before the $100,000 limit only to give you the context of the ICE “affordable” performance SUVs.
While many of them can sprint to 60 mpg in less than 5 seconds, none can match Tesla’s 3.5-second time. Still, this doesn’t mean Tesla is superior in handling or aggressiveness—I bet Elon’s engineers can learn a thing or two from the top-of-the-line German models on this list.
Photo: Author
But, hey, numbers talk, and as you can see, a break-even calculation only makes sense for the less expensive (and less in almost any other field) BMW X1 M35i. Given that you’d only fast charge the Tesla, the X1 remains less costly, while the X2 would break even in around 30,000 miles. The rest of this crowd doesn’t pose a threat to the American performance SUV.
Once you apply the EV tax to Tesla, in the worst-case scenario for the electric car, the X1 and X2 would break even in more than half a million miles. I doubt anyone would consider it wise to choose any of these German brothers instead of the Model Y Performance.
Photo: Author
So, there you are: in case you’re interested in break-even theory, the Tesla Model Y Performance is the undisputed sporty SUV in the fifty grand area (or less than four and a half grand if the EV tax is applied). At least objectively revealed by the numbers because the subjective driving impressions are almost impossible to quantify.
Interestingly, range anxiety tends not to be such a big issue because the difference to the ICE contenders is around 100 miles at most. At the same time, its direct EV competitors are less efficient, although by a small degree.
At this point, I can’t really see another reason why someone interested in a fast, spacious, non-polluting small SUV would choose anything else for around $50,000. Well, subjectively, I like the Ford Mustang Mach-E’s looks more, and I disagree with Elon’s ideas lately, so, yes, there are a few reasons for me not to choose the Tesla.
But apart from subjective reasons, if you’re looking for a very fast small SUV for even less than $50,000, the best budgetary option is an electric one. This is what hard cold numbers concluded, mind you.
In the next episode, we’ll apply the same break-even calculations for the entry-level rear-wheel drive small-battery Model Y and its competitors (spoiler alert