On the other hand, the incumbent car companies have all sorts of technological, logistical, and regulatory hoops they will have to jump through before they can follow Tesla and embrace this new business model turning their cars into software sales platforms. Whether Tesla further follow Apple and opens an App Store for 3rd party developers to develop apps for their cars remains to be seen, but there is nothing technologically stopping them from doing so. Tesla, similar to Apple, has realised that their hardware device can be a platform for software sales. I’m not aware of any other automotive manufacturer who is doing this, or even has the capability to do this. However, what you may be less aware of is how Tesla has also recently started to offer paid over-the-air updates to do things like shave half a second off the 0-100km (0-60mph) time of its vehicles, to activate rear seat heating in cars that shipped without that feature turned on, and they are about to offer their Full Self Driving on a subscription basis. The updates can be bug fixes ( Tesla offers a bug bounty for anyone who finds a bug in its code), they can be feature adds, or they can be efficiency gains. Most of us are familiar with how Tesla provides over-the-air updates for its vehicles, in much the same way as Apple does for iPhones. In 2011 Marc Andreessen penned his now famous essay Why Software Is Eating The World in which he pointed out how software is taking over everything from book sales (Amazon), to direct marketing (Google), to everything from financial services, oil and gas, health and education, on and on, you get the idea.Īutomotive is no exception to this phenomenon (as Andreesen himself pointed out in his piece), but the extent of that change has gone beyond what he even imagined. And many of the big name brands we are familiar with today will go the way of Nokia, Kodak, and Blockbusters, if they don’t change completely as well. The world of automotive is changing, changing utterly. Substitute in your own local costs to see how much you would save by switching your car to an electric one (if you haven’t already!). Electric vehicles require far less maintenance than internal combustion engines. I didn’t keep a record of how much maintenance I paid for the annual maintenance for the Prius, but when I took delivery of the Leaf the first maintenance scheduled in the Maintenance Manual was at 30,000km. Of course, I plug the Leaf in to charge often during the day when the sun is shining so as to take advantage of the “free” electricity being generated by our solar panels, so the figure of €150 is much higher than I pay in reality.Īnd then there is the issue of maintenance. If we round that down to 6km to make the calculations easier (and to be a little conservative), then because our night rate electricity costs €0.09/kWh, that gives us a cost per km of €0.015 and a total of €150 for the full year’s 10,000km. The Leaf can drive 6.25km per kWh of energy in the battery. In 2018 I traded in the Prius for a Nissan Leaf 40kWh. I drove an average 10,000km (6,000 miles) a year so that cost me about €715 in petrol expenses alone (ignoring oil changes, maintenance, etc.). the fuel efficiency of the vehicle we’re talking aboutįrom 2008 to 2018 I drove a Toyota Prius and it used to get around 5.5l/100km (42.8mpg), and petrol here in Spain costs around €1.30 per litre (roughly $5.93 per gallon).the price of the fuel (electricity/petrol/diesel) in your area and. ![]() ![]() Why? Well, it depends on two main factors Those are two questions I get asked a lot and it’s not as easy to answer as you might think. “How much does it cost to drive an Electric Vehicle?” and “How much cheaper is it to drive an Electric Vehicle than a petrol/diesel car?”
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