Goodbye, Diesel Range Rover. Hello Tesla!

We’ve been meaning to change our car for a while, which is a sleek black 4x4 Range Rover Velar, fully Diesel loaded engine. Although we are mainly shuttling our toddler Matteo to and from nursery on most days, with the occasional trip to London, our Diesel bill comes up to around $414 (roughly £300) per month minimum.

Apart from petrol costs, here are five reasons we decided to go electric that you may consider too:

1. More environmentally friendly. Tesla has zero emissions
2. Electricity costs vs fuel costs are much lower (our friend told us he spends £30/month to charge his Tesla)
3. Exemption from London Congestion Charge
4. For businesses, we can claim a deduction on the cost of Tesla up to 2025. In a nutshell, our business lease becomes a deductible expense against the company profits lowering our taxable income
5. Exemption from Vehicle Car Tax

Test Drive Experience

On 27 September 2021, we test-drove the Hybrid Jaguar (the Jaguar F-PACE) and the Electric Jaguar (the Jaguar I-PACE), but we weren’t sold on either model. I found the Jaguar I-PACE driving experience to be a bit choppy. When I took my foot off the accelerator, there was a sharp decrease in speed which made the ride choppy until I put my foot back on the accelerator. The Jaguar F-PACE was much smoother and the driving experience was very similar to driving our Range Rover.

The Tesla Test Drive (29 September 2021)

The Tesla Test Drive was an incredible experience. The car key is a piece of card that reminded me of a 5-star hotel room key card. Yes, that’s used to ignite this fabulous piece of technology. Something else which I found fascinating was that apart from a screen that reminded me of a giant iPad, there are no other buttons or distraction indicators around, e.g., no AC or heating buttons, petrol level indicators. Everything is on this big iPad screen.

To my surprise, the Tesla was an incredibly smooth drive. Due to the choppy test drive experience with the Jaguar I-PACE, as a result of the fast deceleration pace, once you take your foot off the accelerator, I was expecting something similar with the Tesla. But this didn’t happen. I felt that I was driving a smooth spaceship! It was a beautiful countryside test drive.

Once we returned to the Tesla showroom, we booked a Tesla Model 3 with some customisations. We actually wanted the Tesla Model Y, which is a 4x4 that you can customize up to 7 seaters (perfect for our growing family) but was told that the waiting list was over one year long. We can always upgrade later!

Weirdly enough, on the same day, we booked our Tesla, the UK ran into a petrol shortage crisis due to lack of delivery drivers and mass panic buying. Indicating that we had made a good decision by going Electric; however, we need to wait for our car order to arrive now, which is in December 2021.

Selling our Range Rover Velar

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour (Elon Musk)

This has been an experience in itself.

We went to get a quote from the Range Rover dealership and despite 10,000 worth of mileage and the car being one year old, we were offered $44,000 / £32,000 for the vehicle. Since we purchased the car a year ago for around $81,000 /£59,000 and have outstanding finance of £56,500 / £41,000 to settle, that means we would have needed to pay $12,400 / £9,000 out from our own pocket.

I don’t usually get involved with the car negotiations (that’s my husband’s turf). However, recently I’ve been getting very annoyed at myself when I hear these words come out of my mouth ‘I’m not very tech savvy’ or ‘I don’t know anything about cars’. So I decided to challenge the car sales guy, who then sent us another offer for £44,000 within 12 hours of offering us the measly £32,000.

The first offer was ridiculous, especially since we are in a second-hand car high demand market at the moment.

We’ve also been on webuyanycar.com and have been offered just under $65,800 / £47,000 for our Range Rover Velar, so we most likely will sell our car to them.

Concluding Thoughts

I feel at peace and happy that we challenged the car sales guy and that we shopped around to get a better quote for selling our car. Because of this exercise, we are now able to avoid paying $12,400 / £9,000 to settle our outstanding car finance and make $8,000 / £6,000 profit instead!

Apart from awaiting a new spaceship, aka Tesla, to arrive, it’s been a journey and a win so far on all fronts. The lesson I learnt was not to settle for less and to do some research and make inquiries on a topic I wasn’t familiar with!