Well, there are a bunch of things to consider. First, electric motor to create vehicular motion is MUCH more efficient than using combustion engines, there’s very little wasted heat, wasted motion, wasted noise, or waste products. Second, electricity per energy unit is less expensive overall (at 11 c/kWh). Third, the car DOES use energy, sometimes plenty of energy, on things other than moving the vehicle from place to place (heating, cooling, sentry mode, keeping microcontrollers and cameras running when necessary, the nice big screen, etc. Fourth, the $3 number is probably rounded, so at such low numbers it isn’t very useful yet. Fifth, some of the charging stats they show in the app probably don’t show up until you’ve his some minimum (and with your driving habits, you may never hit the minimum in most months).
In the Tesla app, at the bottom of “Charge Stats”, you will see “Settings”. In those settings, you can tell it who provides your electricity and at what price (at home, at work, and “other”). In my case, home is about 15 c/kWh, work is 0 c/kWh, and other is 0 c/kWh (supermarket parking lot, movie theater parking lot, topgolf parking lot, hotels periodically, kids college parking lot, etc).
So $3 at $0.11/kWh comes to 27 kWh. It also shows “Gas savings” which obviously isn’t 100% accurate, but is ballpark. If you click the little “i” next to gas savings, it’ll show you the average price it is using for gasoline in your area.
So what exactly “seems impossible”? And what does it have to do with gasoline prices?
This was indeed a problem for me. I wrote about it in previous posts a few years ago. My car in the driveway barely could get a good connection to my old router. It was very annoying, and it wan’t because of the router, it was because that Tesla had a weak wifi antenna. My phones all worked fine on wifi in that location and in locations two or three times further away. And lest you think it was the metal shell of the car causing it, my phones all worked perfectly on wifi INSIDE the car. The car (2020/21 models) wifi antenna is inside the passenger side mirror housing (which is plastic anyway). So it would usually take quite a long time to download an update. Finally I got annoyed enough, and saw a good enough sale price, and upgraded my router to a mesh wifi system. One node I placed on the windowsill of the front window quite near the driveway and the car now has no problem with wifi and downloads updates as quickly as it can.
