Every Tesla review tells you what it saved them. Enter your real driving, your real electric rate, and what you still owe on your current car — I'll tell you what changes, both over ten years and next month.
Free. No email. No account. Two short steps.
Your monthly outlay goes up by $116, and the ten-year view says it never gets that back. This one costs you in both directions — check it against your budget, then decide whether you want the car anyway.
Both cars financed on the same terms — 72 months at 6.9% APR — with your equity applied to each. Insurance and maintenance differences sit in the ten-year view, not here.
Ordering through my referral link gets you Tesla's current referral reward — and Tesla gives me one too, which is what keeps this calculator free to run. Same price either way; nothing comes out of your pocket.
Opens Tesla's site. Nothing you do there comes back to me.
Nothing about your click is sent to me right now. Privacy Policy has the plan for if that changes.
No calculator can be exact. These are the assumptions I use, so you can argue with them.
From the trim you picked — real-world mixed driving, not the EPA sticker.
Energy that goes into heat and battery conditioning, not miles.
Applied to home charging only, if you're on a time-of-use plan.
A national middle, blended with your home rate by the split you set.
Both sides are your own estimates, editable in Steps 1 and 3 — this is just the difference between them.
EVs generally cost more to insure than comparable gas cars.
A Level 2 charger and a typical install, added to the cost to switch.
Applied identically to both cars in the monthly view. Your rate will differ.
Subscription only. Counted as a cost — it returns nothing measurable.
The $7,500 credit ended for vehicles acquired after September 30, 2025.
Not "keep your old car forever" — that always wins on cost, which tells you nothing. There are two comparisons, and you can toggle between them in the results above: "Keep what I have" (the default) — your actual current payment and gas cost — and "Buy gas instead" — a hypothetical comparable new gas car in the same class. Same underlying assumptions either way; different baseline.
They're modeled at different depths, on purpose. "Keep what I have" runs a month-by-month simulation over the full ten years, because your current payment and the Tesla's payment can end at different times — if your loan is close to paid off, that matters, and a single flat annual number can't represent it. "Buy gas instead" uses a simpler upfront-price-gap model, because both purchases are financed on the identical default term, so there's no timing gap to simulate.
Two simplifications in "Keep what I have," disclosed rather than hidden: it tracks your payment stopping at whole-month precision, not partial months. And for a lease, "months remaining" is treated as when the lease ends, full stop — it doesn't model what you'd do next (new lease, buyout, purchase).
If you're upside down on your current loan, I count that against you either way — as a bigger switching cost if you pay it off in cash, or folded into a higher Tesla payment for the loan's full term if you roll it in. Strictly it would follow you into any car; I'd rather overstate the cost than quietly flatter the Tesla.
I don't try to compute what you'd actually pay for a Tesla — credits, discounts, and tax treatment vary too much for a page like this to get right. Model and trim only drive the Wh/mi estimate above; the price in every number here is the one you typed in Step 3, nothing computed or guessed on top of it.
The $7,500 federal credit for new EVs ended for vehicles acquired after September 30, 2025, and is not included in any number on this page. If you signed a binding purchase contract before that date, you may still qualify — check with a tax professional.
FSD is no longer sold as a one-time purchase, so there's no price to pay back — it's a recurring cost of ownership. I treat it as an opt-in $99/month line item that reduces your savings, because it produces no measurable financial return. Buy it for the experience, not the math.
Figures shown are illustrative estimates, not quotes. Vehicle pricing, loan rates, subscription pricing, and utility rates change often and vary by state, utility, and credit. Verify before you buy anything.
I built the first version of this for myself: a way to work out whether trading in my own car for a Tesla actually made sense, once I counted what I still owed on it, my real electric rate, and how much I actually drive — not the flattering numbers in Tesla's own marketing.
Once I had a straight answer for my own situation, it seemed worth sharing — so this version asks about your financing, your trade-in, your charging mix, and your mileage instead of assuming one scenario. Everyone's numbers are different enough that a single example wouldn't have told you much.
It also answers two things most calculators skip: what a Tesla does to your finances over ten years, and what it does to next month's budget. Those can disagree — a car can pay back eventually and still be a squeeze right now — and I'd rather show you both than pick the flattering one.
This is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Tesla, Inc. Tesla, Model 3, Model Y, Cybertruck, Powerwall, and Full Self-Driving are trademarks of Tesla, Inc.
Tesla's referral reward, if you order through my link after the calculator tells you it's worth it. I'm not paid to tell you yes.
Short version: nothing is collected right now — this calculator doesn't send me anything about you. If that ever changes, it'll only ever be on a referral-link click, anonymized, and shaped like the plan below: no name, no email, no account, no exact address.
No name, email, account, exact zip, or cross-site tracking — ever. There's no login, so there's no profile to attach anything to. Playing with sliders, changing your rate, re-running the numbers, clicking the referral link — none of it is recorded right now. Nothing is.
If I do turn this on: kept indefinitely, since it's aggregate and anonymized, never more than the bucketed fields above. Seen only by me; never sold, and never used for advertising or retargeting. Once anonymized, I can't find a specific row to delete on request — the tradeoff of never collecting identity in the first place.
The referral link opens Tesla's own site, under Tesla's own privacy policy — nothing you do there (configuring, ordering, payment) comes back to me. My side of this ends the moment you click through.