What Is the Total Cost of Ownership for a Luxury Electric Vehicle?
Luxury electric vehicles offer a plethora of exciting new features to longtime luxury car buyers who may be looking to make the switch. One of the most underrated benefits of LEVs, however, is their maintenance costs. Compared to any conventional, gas-powered luxury car on the market, luxury electric vehicles have an incredibly low cost of ownership. At Ray Catena Auto Group, we’re happy to walk you through the ins and outs of owning an LEV for the first time.
That may seem like a paradox – usually, the higher performance a car is capable of, the more maintenance it needs. Specialized services for performance vehicles always cost more. And LEVs are packed with new technology. But in reality, a lot of that tech just makes luxury electric vehicles all the easier and more inexpensive to take care of – and our service department at Ray Catena makes it even more convenient since we’re on the leading edge of luxury electric vehicle service and parts.
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Luxury Electric Cars Are Less Expensive to Fuel
The biggest selling point of fully-electric cars, besides producing zero emissions, is that they don’t need gasoline. Gas prices can be unpredictably high, depending on geopolitical events out of anyone’s control. Vehicles that require higher grades of gasoline cost even more to fuel up. Luxury electric vehicles, on the other hand, don’t need anything equivalent to higher-octane electricity. They can be recharged just as inexpensively as more conventional electric vehicles.
For example, the Porsche 911 Turbo has a 17.6 gallon fuel tank. According to eia.gov, the year-over-year national average price for a gallon of premium gasoline from 2016 to 2021 was $3.09. This means that filling up the 911 Turbo from a quarter tank, a total of 13.2 gallons of gas, would cost $40.79 on average, and that price has been and could be much higher, given the volatility of gas prices.
Meanwhile, Porsche’s comparable all-electric Taycan Turbo S boasts a battery with a 93.4 kWh capacity. Charging that battery from 25% to fully charged at a public DC fast charging station, the fastest and most expensive type, could cost as much as $0.25 per kWh. This means that the required 70.05 kWh would cost a mere $17.51. This is a pittance to fill up a high-performance car, and keep in mind this is probably the most expensive way to recharge a luxury electric vehicle. If you are able to charge overnight at your home, you would pay several times less than this based on how much your power company would bill you.
See also: How Much Does an Electric Vehicle Cost to Drive Per Mile, Compared to a Gasoline-powered Car?
Electric Vehicles Require Less Annual Maintenance
Every conventional luxury car owner knows that they should take their vehicle to their dealer’s service department for maintenance often. Given the specialized parts and labor this requires, such checkups get expensive. However, this helps prevent breakdowns – and when a part fails in a regular luxury vehicle, it’s many times pricier to fix.
The Porsche 911, for example, has recommended 10,000-mile service checks and, like all gas-engine vehicles, regularly needs its engine oil, spark plugs, and engine air filter changed. On a less-frequent basis, the brake pads, rotors, and tires need to be replaced. While maintenance in the first year of ownership costs less than $400 on average, this grows quickly. A 911 in its third year accrues close to $6,000 in maintenance costs alone due to the average need for extra-expensive service checks at the 40,000 and 50,000-mile marks. Between maintenance and repairs, the mean year-over-year cost to keep a Porsche 911 in top condition is $3,994.80 per year. Over five years that translates to $19,974.00.
By contrast, a luxury electric vehicle simply does not have many of the systems and parts that need servicing so often on a conventional luxury car. There’s no engine to worry about, and thus no engine parts need to be replaced. The brakes in an electric vehicle last considerably longer than those in a gas-powered vehicle since braking is taken care of both by a friction system and regenerative braking, which occurs directly in the motor and relies on kinetic energy. The only consideration in a luxury electric vehicle that you wouldn’t have to worry about for a conventional car is the large, powerful, and expensive battery. Since the luxury electric vehicle niche is so new, costs to own over a multi-year period are less clear, but expect to pay less overall than for a gas-powered performance vehicle, especially since electric vehicles appear to last longer in general.
Interested in learning about the other benefits of driving a luxury electric vehicle? Ray Catena Auto Group is happy to help – we’re NY and NJ’s leader in Electrified Luxury. Contact us or visit a dealership today.
Ray Catena is the New York/New Jersey area’s specialist in LEVs. Looking to take a test drive? Visit a dealership or contact us for further inquiries on what Electric Luxury can do for your daily drive.
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