- Tesla is offering free Supercharging on new Model X purchases and leases.
- The company also hiked the starting price of the SUV by $5,000.
- That makes it ineligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit.
Tesla is bundling the purchase or lease of a new Model X electric SUV with free lifetime Supercharging once again. The offer made a comeback last week after several years on hiatus. At first glance, it’s a nice incentive for potential buyers of the slow-selling flagship EV, but the details are a bit more complicated.
The same incentive was offered with the Model S late last year, and it says that the free Supercharging is tied to the owner’s Tesla account and cannot be transferred to another vehicle, person or order, even if the car is sold. This is different from what some older Model S owners have benefited from, where the free Supercharging stays with the vehicle forever, irrespective of who drives it.
As a reminder, Supercharging means using Tesla’s expansive network of DC fast chargers, which has over 27,000 stalls in North America.
However, while tying the free Supercharging with one’s account might not be a dealbreaker, the new pricing for the Model X is. The electric SUV is now $5,000 more expensive–starting from $84,990–making it ineligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit. To be eligible for the federal incentive, electric SUVs have to be priced under $80,000, and the Model X was just a hair under the limit before the price hike.
Now, for eligible customers, Tesla’s largest SUV is effectively $12,500 more expensive than it was last month. What’s more, free Supercharging is unlikely to balance things out. As we found out when doing the numbers for the Model S, 83% of EV owners have a home charger and use that for their electric vehicle energy needs. But let’s dive a little deeper.
According to the Federal Highway Administration, the average American drives around 13,473 miles every year. Taking the U.S. Department of Energy’s home charger stats into account, we can assume that 83% of these miles–11,182 to be precise–would be driven with energy from a home charger. The rest–2,291 miles–would theoretically be driven with energy from Superchargers.
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The base Tesla Model X All-Wheel Drive has an official energy efficiency of 2.77 miles/kilowatt-hour, according to the EPA. Meanwhile, the average rate for Supercharging is around $0.43 (Tesla doesn’t offer an average base rate, so we had to look at its Supercharger map and do our best to come up with this figure).
To drive 2,291 miles, a Model X would need 827 kWh of energy, which would cost an average of around $356 per year. So, to offset the $5,000 price hike, it would take 14 years. For the full $12,500 price increase (including the lost federal tax credit), it would take 35 years.
Still, just for fun, let’s do the math for when an owner would exclusively use Supercharging and do without a home charger. That would entail an average energy use of 4,864 kWh, which would have an average cost of $2,091 if it would be paid out of pocket. In this case, it would take two and a half years to offset the $5,000 price hike and six years to offset the $12,500 effective price increase of the vehicle.
Is that worth it? It could be, but the owner would have to throw away one of the biggest benefits of driving an EV, and that’s charging at home. Moreover, Tesla can revoke free Supercharging “in the event of excessive charging,” which is quite arbitrary and could mess up someone’s plans of using the perk.
