UK pricing estimated to begin at £82,500, thats $128,934 via XE.com. Blimey, thats me out totally I can't believe that is really the RHD cost, or have I mis-read the article?
I am so close to a UK deposit (£4000 = $6251), but that purchase price is way beyond ridiculous IMO
Best
Dan43
If the car is manufactured in the USA, and sold new in the UK, I believe the UK price has to have 10% car import duty applied, then 20% VAT on top of that, plus a whole list of small incremental bureaucratic registration charges. In other words, the UK cost could be the USA price + 32% or so, plus shipping. Rule of thumb is about +36% overall. I've moved cars from USA to UK before now, and shipping worked out at under £2k, probably less per car if there's 500 on ship …
However, I think I read somewhere that Tesla has opened a new "Manufacturing centre" at Tilburg, Netherlands. If so, that facility might be doing "final-assembly" of cars from the USA for the EU and can therefore get around the 10% import duty - I think.
EM is on record as saying he doesn’t want to rip-off customers outside the USA, and Tesla will only be charging the USA prices plus shipping, duties and taxes for each country.
Personally speaking, I've reluctantly resigned myself to expecting a £90k+ price for a loaded P85+. But don’t forget there are some excellent tax benefits for pure EV's, such as the ability to write down 100% of the car price against corp-tax in year one, even if you're a one man company, which is effectively a discount on the price of between 20% and 26% depending on tax bands.
I'm also curious as to what Tesla UK are going to do about part-ex values against a new Model S …
Prior to buying my roadster I used to drive a 'performance' car with a 0-60 of around 4.5 seconds, but it only did about 18 mpg average. I bought the Roadster for many reasons, but importantly I wanted to always have a car with enjoyable acceleration and I am really not bothered about being able to go more than 100mph or over as its a waste of engineering on cars that claim to do 220mph etc. Since driving my Roadster, my petrol consumption has dropped to zero, saving me a whopping £5,000 a year in petrol bills, and my electricity bill for charging has only increased by a minuscule £250 a year for the same yearly mileage. Plus I no longer have to pay £490 in road tax, or any congestion charges going into London. Extrapolate all that over 5 years and the "savings" from not running an ICE will be around £35,000 + £20k in corp-taxes reduction, for a total saving of about £55k VS running an ICE car of similar performance, like an M5 :biggrin:
Run a P85 for 10 years and it will pay for itself entirely.
And based on experience the M5 will cost £X0,000 in repairs and depreciate through the floor quicker than almost anything else …
Of course, if you just want to drive around as economically as possibly, just go and buy a 10 year old Audi A6 TDi for £2/3/4k, and it will do 50mpg all day long, with modest running costs.
But despite all the above, I still really really want a Model S because of everything it represents !