Just spitballin here but there are options to look at from the posts above. Just depends on your particular situation/details. What’s current interest on the car loan?
Chief among them though is get more quotes on your car. Carvana, Carmax, Autonation, BaT? bidbus (they are not the greatest, but hey, one more option), etc. You’ll have a better sense of the true trade-in value.
Get a personal loan to cover the negative equity, sell the car, then get an EV. This has a lot of potential downsides. $17k personal loan/3y will be prob $550/mo + the new EV lease that comes with fees due upfront. This might be a wash on the numbers, but could save you gas money, or insurance might just kill that too.
Extend and refinance your current car loan. It’s the most hassle-free and guaranteed way to shrink the monthly.
Did you buy any protection plans/maintenance Acura care, etc? Cancel those if you can
Do you need the 2nd car? You could sell to the highest bidder after shopping around and hope for the smallest loss possible.
Do you live in a state that allows you to roll the sales tax from the sale to the new car you purchase? (like WA). Trade in current car, get a reliable beater at a heavy discount (model 3 maybe?) and save on the sales tax.
But will some of that savings be lost b/c EVs can be more expensive to insure?
And how did he wind up $17K in negative equity and, after a year of making payments, still has what amounts to full MSRP left to pay?
I mean, the specifics of his financial situation are not really any of our business fundamentally, but I wonder if OP is sort of missing the forest for the trees and is going to make another rather large financial mistake.
The negative equity would be around $475/month. So if he could get into a BMW i4 at $495/month + negative equity at $475/month his monthly and 2 years free charging his monthly car cost would be $970. That’s less than he’s paying right now the car note $915 + gas $400 = $1350. There’s a world where this might work. He needs a cheaper monthly payment + free EV charging. Too bad those Mercedes EQS deals aren’t floating around right now. And I wonder if Lucid or BMW would ever accept so much negative equity? That’s the big blocker to this deal unfortunately.
Shop your car to Carvana like others have mentioned and check the price on a 2021 or 2022 Model 3/Y. Seems like alot of Tesla Model 3’s can be had for around 25-30k used and Model Y can be 30-35k range.
If you don’t have super cheap charging at home though I’m not sure you will save that much money on electricity. If you only charge at a Tesla super charger than the price is anywhere from $0.3-0.5 per kWh on peak, and maybe around $0.20 per kWh in a state like California. Model Y get’s around 3.5 Miles/kwh and Model 3 probably gets around 4.2 Mi/kwh if you don’t have a lead foot.
Cost per mile at Super Charger:
Model Y: $0.085-$0.14 at Super charger
2500 miles * 0.085 = $212.5 on electricity per month
Model 3: $0.071-$0.12 at super charger
2500 miles * 0.071 = $177.5 on electricity per month
If you live in a state where electricity is $0.10 or so and you can charge at home then that can drastically reduce the cost per mile figure above by 3x.
If you’re spending $400/m on gas, at 23mpg and $3.57 for average gas price in Florida, you’re driving 2500 miles per month. Even if you assume you get 18 mpg on your RDX you’re doing 2000 miles per month. I don’t think you’ll find any lease for 24k miles per year. If you do a 15k mile lease and end up at 24k miles, you’ll pay 9k over mileage per year at $0.25 per mile which would be $2,250 or add an extra $188/month effective to your lease.
Based on the info you have provided, I calculate that, at most, you are spending $240/mo on fuel.* Take charging costs and probably higher insurance, I don’t think you will save a damned dime.
*64 miles/day x 21 days = 1344 miles / 22 mpg = 61.09 gal x 3.89 = $237.64.
Sorry for your predicament. I hope you get out of it easily.
I will emphasize that you need to get out of this bad financial position and getting yourself into another expensive lease (TESLA) is NOT a solution. As others have recommended, sell the car and eat the $17k through a loan and get yourself a cheap option that wont depreciate a ton over the next 2-3 years while you get yourself financially stable again. Or sell and get yourself into a good lease that is cheapest possible, mid-$300 for ioniq, free 2 years of charges included. Best of luck!
As others have pointed out, insurance cost on ev will probably offset some of the gas saving. Those Free ev charging depends on how close he is to the nearest charger + can he charge during odd hours to avoid waiting there to charge. If he is spending $400 on gas per month, that’s a high mileage usage, he will have to go into high miles lease or buy miles penalty as well = ev lease will not be cheap. Going ev will not save him as much as he thinks it is.
Btw, Nissan lets you buy miles at $0.10/mile for the Ariya before your lease is up, as long as you’ve got good standing. Pretty good deal for anyone doing longer, more frequent drives. An extra 5000 miles/year would only cost $500 or $40/month, so you can feasibly do $300/month for an evolve+ awd Ariya with 15k miles/year, if you do 18/10k+5k mileage buy. Not sure numbers on a 18/15k or 36/15k.
But based on his responses, it sounds like OP is headed from one bad decision to another. The tunnel vision on the Tesla is insane, it’s probably the worst leasing EV right now…
Just to be pedantic, I don’t think that all EV insurance is particularly expensive. My iX insurance is $181/month, which is only $20/month more than my X5. When I had a Tesla Model X it was over $300/month. So I think it’s really Tesla that drives up insurance so much for EVs, since they are so hard to repair without totaling them. (Likewise, the Tesla leases are super expensive…almost 2x monthly payment for a $100K MSRP Model X vs a BMW iX.)
Unfortunately Tesla won’t work for OP even though it’s considered the “standard” for EVs.
