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Sold my Benz today. A bit sad, really....

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David29

Active Member
Supporting Member
Aug 1, 2015
2,625
2,229
DEDHAM, MA
Today I sold my Mercedes Benz E320. I had had it nearly 5 years. More to the point, I have never (until now) owned any other marque of car besides a Mercedes. I have been driving MBs for 48 years! (So, yes, I am an "old guy!") For more than 30 years, I had Diesels, which for most of that period appeared to be the more economical and more environmentally friendly choice. (I had the Mass. vanity plate "DIESEL" for a number of years.) Eventually the Diesels became less attractive because of rising fuel costs and lack of inventory for used cars, plus gasoline powered cars have become nearly as economical with fuel.

Coincidentally enough, today was the 3-month anniversary of when I acquired the Tesla Model S (9/23/15). And appropriately enough, it was the end of the 90-day "Happiness Guarantee" for the lease. So for me, this was the make-or-break day!

So I am a bit sad, because I have been a long-time big fan of the three-pointed star. Benzes kept me and my family safe and comfortable for all those years, and I have many friends acquired through my membership in the Mercedes Benz Club of America (great club). The cars I owned were well built, durable, and appealed to my engineering background in numerous ways. I think my family and I must have put something like a million miles on the nine MBs that I owned over the years.

But all those cars were burning up fossil fuels and leaving trails of exhaust wherever they went! And consuming lots of my hard-earned dollars on costly maintenance.

So now it is time for a new approach and a new car, and a new adventure! I am happy to be in a new marque, and a new club, and using a new approach.

(Just thought I'd share this. I suspect there are many other Tesla owners who had a long relationship with one brand of car and may miss their old allegiances a bit, at least at first.)
 
I felt the same about BMW. Give it a few years...both BMW and Mercedes will have competitive EVs on the market. BMW in particular with their "i" sub-brand. I'm very interested to see the i5 when it comes out. At some point in the future (?15 yrs) the i-BMWs will be their mainstream products and the ICE BMWs will be the sub-brand. Tesla won't be the only game in town for long.
 
Give it a few years...both BMW and Mercedes will have competitive EVs on the market...Tesla won't be the only game in town for long.
Well I hope so, since one of the goals of Tesla is to force the established auto companies to build EVs that people will want to buy as their primary car. But it is now over 7 years since Tesla started selling the worlds first long range production EV, and there are still no direct competitors. At the moment it looks like GM will beat the Germans to the long range EV market with the Bolt. Which shows just how pitifully slow the Germans are to recognize the inevitability of EVs.
 
Thinking about trading in my ML350 on the X when its time. The ML350 is great and gets like 750 miles on a tank but the maintenance is a bear.

I'm having same internal discussion; I plan to get a Model S when Leaf lease runs out this spring - but will still also have MB SLK280. Keep it or not? It's certainly fun for trips where you want to run with the top down, but how often is that?

On the question of maintenance, the situation seems much more murky. In theory, an electric car should have lower maintenance cost than an ICE. From my experience, this certainly applies to the Leaf, but I don't think it applies to the Tesla. If you follow Tesla's recommended practice, you have $600 per year for a service, and if you keep the car for a long time you are first faced with the question of buying the extended warranty ($4000, I think), and/or paying enormous repair costs when things go wrong. This is due to at least a couple of factors - first, the Tesla is still fairly new. (I worked on the start-up of the Mercedes M-Class plant, and it took us many years to get the car to the high quality and reliability levels people expect of MB). Second, the Tesla is high-end, which means lots of features and parts to fail.

Regarding whether to keep the ICE, this depends on where you plan to go. If your travels are mostly within areas where there are lots of superchargers, you don't need an ICE car. If, however, you live (or often travel in) in one of the supercharger deserts like I do, keeping an ICE available is still important - at least for a while. This should change once the supercharger network is fully built out. So far, Tesla has been unable to meet its scheduled roll-out of the network. (I still plan to get one, though!!)
 
My wife was a bit sad to trade in her Mercedes GLK when we got the Tesla. But it didn't take very long till she made comments to the effect that she was glad it was gone. Recently she did a trip in snowy weather in her Tesla and is now perfectly sure that the GLK (formerly the best winter car she ever owned) will never be missed.
 
For whatever it is worth--
After I sold my Benz, I tallied up the maintenance costs (I had been tracking them all through my ownership), and added in the depreciation (acquisition cost minus sale proceeds) plus fuel costs, and got a total of 89 cents/mile. That excludes taxes and registration and insurance. That was for a used E320 acquired at about 70K miles and driven only about 7K/year. (So if I had driven more miles per year, maybe the cost per mile would be somewhat lower, not sure.) This is pretty consistent with my experience with other Mercedes cars over the past 20 years or so. (Diesels used to be somewhat less in both fuel cost and maintenance, but I do not have experience with the current generation of BlueTek diesels.)
My Tesla Lease will work out to about 69 cents/mile if I drive it 12,000 miles/year as the lease allows. Again, that excludes insurance and taxes, and taxes certainly will be higher with a new Tesla than with an old Benz. But still, it showed me that leasing a new Tesla was no more costly, and probably less costly, than operating an old Mercedes. And purchasing a Tesla would likely make the comparison even more favorable because a lease is not the most economical way to get a Tesla.
This is only one person's comparison, so I do not claim this to be a definitive analysis, but I'd say that operating any high priced car can be very expensive per mile when you consider all the costs.
 
And I can not help but continue to think about what I want to be in if/when I get hit...... I do not miss my BMW habit simply because MS is so nice a car but, even if I did, the safety aspect would give me a reason to stay with Tesla. This holds true even when Porsche, BMW, Audi, MB and the like come out with compelling BeVs. I think Tesla did a long term hit it out of park when Elon decided to put the SpaceX/Tesla engineering minds/approach to the safety task. That decision will not pay huge dividends in the short term but the car will ultimately get its well deserved street cred as the safest car on the road.
 
if its any consolation, Mercedes used to have a 10% stake back in 2010 and a lot of parts in the tesla are recognizable Benz. in my 2013 Model S the turning signal stock and window buttons were identical to my 2009 c300. The steering wheel itself was also taken from Mercedes. so in essence you are still surrounded by Mercedes influences. There is also a general partnership sharing the battery tech from Tesla with Mercedes Mercedes unveils Tesla-powered electric car - Mar. 27, 2013
 
if its any consolation, Mercedes used to have a 10% stake back in 2010 and a lot of parts in the tesla are recognizable Benz. in my 2013 Model S the turning signal stock and window buttons were identical to my 2009 c300. The steering wheel itself was also taken from Mercedes. so in essence you are still surrounded by Mercedes influences. There is also a general partnership sharing the battery tech from Tesla with Mercedes Mercedes unveils Tesla-powered electric car - Mar. 27, 2013

Right. And indeed, the familiarity of the control layout on the steering wheel plus the similar seat controls were both helpful in getting used to the Tesla. The cruise control and turn signal stalk were reversed from my 2002 Benz, of course, as been discussed at length in other threads. But I got used to that difference pretty quickly. But the rest of the car is like night and day!