Depends who you are hearing from regarding "as economical as people are saying".
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RE: "Economical" from a resource (energy) perspective
They do great for around-town driving. In warm temps, I often get better than the rated range by 10-20%. EVs in general really do great at city driving for two reasons: they're just more efficient at low speeds, and they can use regenerative braking to recover energy that an ICE vehicle otherwise wastes.
Winter is definitely worse, and city driving is probably the worst for heating energy requirements relative to motion energy. Just how bad depends on your local temperatures. A decent guess is you'll experience 30% reduction compared to rated range as long as you're moving but...
Another factor is if you're just sitting in the car waiting for customers, standby with the heater on, you're using a lot of energy that isn't being used for "range". This could add up and sort of becomes a fixed cost for daily operations. Again, ICE vehicles need to deal with this too. However, Model 3 is a bit unique with all that glass for heat to easily escape. A cold, windy day will absolutely show up on your energy usage.
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RE: "Economical" from a financial perspective
Here in North America, both "yes" and "no" are appropriate answers when comparing to an ICE vehicle. A Model 3 is more expensive than most vehicles you'd use as a taxi, and generally more expensive to insure as well. If you can always charge in the cheapest possible way (e.g. at home during low rate periods), then it may eventually reach a break-even compared to ICE at some point. But if you need to rely on expensive charging to get through the day (e.g. Supercharging), then your costs may be similar to fueling an ICE vehicle.
As a business vehicle, they are attractive due to the lower routine maintenance requirements,
with a huge caveat: if your vehicle requires service and is inoperable,
Tesla service is slow (at least it is here). You could have a large break in your operations while your car gets fixed or waits on parts. That would probably suck, and this is why taxi companies have entire fleets of vehicles.
This all depends on your local costs. Basically, consider:
- Insurance (esp. for your intended use, if that changes insurance rates)
- Fueling costs (how, when, and where you will be charging)
- Initial costs (price of the vehicle)
- Service availability (how close is the nearest service center)
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RE: Comfort. They're fine. Not excellent, but fine. These things are normally subjective anyways: its not the most comfortable vehicle I've driven, but it's definitely not the worst! I was definitely sore after back-to-back 12h days, but that would be the case even in my "most comfortable" car to some degree as well.