Convincing my Wife that a Model X P100D is a Great Deal using Moore's Law
My wife likes French things, speaks French beautifully, even sounds a little French at times. It's because she went to a French school for quite a while.
I've been dreaming of getting a Tesla Model X P100D for a while. It's way better than a mini-van and my Volvo XC60. We don't need two cars anymore so you know, it's everything we need in one!
Back to France though, I saw this interesting video from France in about 1890 recently. Take a moment to watch, so interesting to see how things were then.
In a particular segment, there were many horse-drawn carriages coming and going on a wide lane of traffic.
There were typically 1, 2, or 4 horses per carriage (Fig 1). The really nice four horse-powered carriages were like the Tesla Model X P100D of the day.
Is a Tesla Model X a good deal relative to a 4 horse carriage?
I wondered, how much horsepower did they have compared to a modern Tesla Model X P100D? A fancy four-horse carriage in 1890 had 4 horsepower. A Tesla Model X P100D in 2018 had 762 horsepower.
The Tesla price estimate is about $143,000 USD. That works out to, $187 USD 2021 per Horse.
The fancy four-horse carriage, as best I can determine, would have been around $1200.00 USD in 1890 dollars not including the horses. I think four really good horses would add about $400.00 (the engine). We'll assume all the other bits came with the carriage and round it out at $1600.00 USD in 1890 dollars. And yes, I'm ignoring the price of feed for the moment.
That carriage cost about $400 USD 1890 per horsepower. Adjusted to 2021 dollars that comes to $11,943 per horsepower in 2021.
$1600 USD in 1890 is worth $47,770.73 USD in 2021 dollars. If you were to buy that same carriage today you'd pay just about $50,000 USD in 2021.
That means that today you get just about 12 times the horsepower for the same prices in inflation-adjusted 2021 dollars.
So, I can tell my wife that spending 143,000 USD on a Tesla Model X P100D is 12 times better than if I were to buy her a four horse and carriage and there is absolutely no shit to shovel! And, there'd be a lot of it because to get the same horsepower on our carriage we'd need 762 horses! At $11,943 per horse, we would need to spend $9.1 Million USD on the horses. I also don't think I'd be able to do zero to sixty as fast even with all those horses.
I wrote this to help convince my wife that we really need a Tesla Model X P100D and that it's a fantastic deal. It seems like a great deal to me and if you add in the fully burdened cost (I'm still ignoring feeding, housing, caring for, and shoveling for all those horses) one can see that technology, from a cost perspective, means that for around $143,000 USD today I can get the equivalent of around $9.1 million USD of horsepower today with none of the burdens of maintenance effectively. That's about a 63x improvement in 131 years or, roughly speaking, a doubling of price-performance every year for 131 years!
Pray for me that she doesn't choose the carriage.
