I'm struck by how much MMM is putting himself in the way of "temptation"; reading all the specs, fan boying on E. Musk, riding in friends' Teslas, sniffing the upholstery, etc! I'm not sure whether to admire how much he's testing his anti PJM strength or to face punch him for putting himself so close to an edge he's decided he doesn't want to cross for now.
...
We need to set up systems and exposures that support our values not undermine them. MMM might be a non consumer ninja but he's flying close to the sun imho. :)
Seriously. You keep doing that, you end up buying a Tesla at some point, and I expect within a year or so, there will be the "Justifications for why I purchased a Tesla" post from him at this rate.
I (fortunately) learned the lesson the relatively cheap way with motorcycles. I won't claim they're a cheap way to get around if you ride something with a bit of guts behind it, but the lessons I've learned from motorcycles have saved me an insane amount of money over the years - because they entirely curbed my desire for fast cars. Commute (and spend your weekends on) on a sport touring bike with a big motor for a couple years, in your mid to late 20s, and it just cures the desire for anything else fast - because nothing else
is fast. My bike was legitimately Tesla-fast - and an awful lot cheaper to buy/maintain.
One of the big things I learned was, "
Stop test-riding things unless you're looking to buy!" If you show up to a variety of motorcycle shops on a clean sportbike in full gear, turns out, they'll let you ride basically anything you want. BMW more or less looks you over, tosses you the keys, and says "Bring it back sometime today." Grand fun - and, really, a great way of selling motorcycles, because a brand new bike $30k will be a nicer ride than an older bike obtained as new-old-stock for well under $10k. And I realized, all it did was just stoke dissatisfaction with my perfectly reasonable bike(s). So I stopped doing it.
And I apply that to other things as well. I rarely research anything unless I'm actually in the need to purchase one, and then I try to avoid the whole analysis paralysis thing I'm very prone to. Find something that looks like it will work, buy it, and if it truly doesn't work, replace it when I know what I need better, but usually it works fine.
In the context of Teslas, beyond my general dislike of unmaintainable things (which a Tesla clearly is), I tend to describe it to people as, "No, I won't take one for a test drive - I'm not sure I can make my will save vs Tesla." I play a lot of D&D (a
wonderful way to have fun with a group of friends around a table for an evening), and it's a good description of the process. I just don't trust myself not to buy one, even though it would be worse, in just about every way, than our Volt (which I
can maintain myself, for a large variety of tasks).
Yup, I wish Pete had just bought the Tesla instead of the Leaf way back when. This post can just as easily be about saving a buck and not getting what you want. If it is worth the money and you have the money, why buy something cheap and inferior?
That's a horrible way to look at things. *checks which site we're on* Because that approach will creep into every aspect of your life, if you let it, and then all of a sudden you're spending torrents of cash on "nice" things, instead of figuring out what is a reasonable way to fit your needs.
For someone who has built a local life around biking, an expensive long range supercar is
silly. A Leaf accomplishes the same stuff for far less money, and avoids the whole hedonistic adoption treadmill that's far too easy to get stuck on. It's very, very hard in life to "go back" to what you used to have when it's not as nice as your current stuff, but it's relatively easy to avoid upgrading in the first place. I've got some friends who have jumped to the $100k class cars early in life, and it's going to cost them a million or so in their life to maintain that level of luxury. We've decided (quite deliberately) to avoid upgrading to really expensive cars. We drive a Volt (which is a
genuinely nice car, by our standards) as it's cheaper for our regular trips than other options, I've got a 20 year old truck that does just about everything a new truck will (that we care about - no interest in hauling around a 30k lb 5th wheel), and various other forms of older transportation that work. I'll rent a newer truck on travel just to see what's changed, but in general, I come back from that appreciating my truck. I work from home, so it's not like the truck sees many miles. I basically wear a groove in the road from our place to Home Depot/Lowes for things I'm building.
But, no, "I can afford it, therefore I should buy something nice" is not a particularly good way to approach life. That way leads to some genuinely face-punchy purchases. One of said friends quite literally spent more on the cars in his driveway than we spent on our house.