“Actually the battery will probably lose the exact amount every year, and nothing will ever go wrong with any parts of it, and also they’ll also break the rest of the car at the same rate as a gas car, which is 20 years, which we’re going to call 15 years. Which means in 12 years the car will be useless, but the battery will still be at 80%. MATHS.”
Fucking. What.
Doesn’t need maintenance is an under-reported significance.
Nope. My car had not mechanical defects at all but cost $23k to repair when the battery failed.
Your battery wasn’t still under its 10 year / 100000 mile warranty?
Some people keep their cars for a long time.
People who constantly drive new cars are fucking psychos. Why would you ever get rid of a car just because it’s 10 years old?
Because I need the latest and greatest/look good. Also, it’s using less fuel/electricity than the previous one, so I’m SaViNg money! /s
Literal reasons I’ve heard when they had to take up a loan, instead of keeping their 4/5 year old car, which was paid off. I don’t understand it.
If they had owned it for a long time it was still cheaper than owning a gas car for the same length of time.
“fall apart” is a very careful choice of words here.
The battery may fail, individual cells may fail, but it will still be one unit.
And you saved more on gas and maintenance than the cost of that repair if it happened outside of warranty (which is 10 years on batteries)
Your math falls apart when people, like me, have long drives. I could make my daily commute with an EV especially since my work has charging stations, but the 100000 mile warranty kills it for me. I do that in three years. I spend $50 a week in fuel which is $7800 for three years. I haven’t even come close to spending another $14000 in maintenance during that time. I also expect to get at least another 3-5 years out of this vehicle.
Long commute > 50$ a week in fuel
Eh… You don’t have a long commute buddy and I doubt you drive over 100 000 miles in 3 years!
Talk about my maths all you want, yours doesn’t make sense.
Also you’re acting like your battery will need to be changed after 100k miles for sure but you certainly don’t take into consideration that your gas engine could blow up after your warranty expires and it’s no cheaper than an EV battery! The difference is that the EV will require much less maintenance over its lifespan and is much cheaper to drive day to day.
All of my numbers are true. I drive 100 miles a day, my golf gets 40 miles to the gallon. You do the math.
I’m coming up on 250k miles on my Volt (plug in hybrid), mostly on battery. Works fine. I spend $50 on fuel every 3 months on average.
I’ve had my current ICE vehicle for 15 years and it hasn’t given me any problems yet. With any luck I can get another ten years out of it. Im not sold on the reliability of EVs yet, but hopefully by the time my vehicle dies reliability won’t be an issue any longer.
I’ve had my ev 5 years. I’ve had the tires changed and had the windshield replaced because it got a chip in it.
There are barely any moving parts to make the thing go. No waste heat or slamming around of pistons to worry about. At one point I quite literally forgot cars need maintenance because with an EV, it’s just not a thing (largely).
The idea that ICE vehicles are even on the same planet as EVs in terms of reliability and maintenance is utterly laughable. It’s very very very simple. Fewer moving parts, no waste heat to manage, no pumps or multiple fluid systems, so no seals and gaskets.
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That and suspension components still need to be greased. Plus electric cars tend to be a little heavier, often time with large wheels, meaning more wear and tear.
Yeah well. Ain’t done shit in 5 years. Like not one iota of shit.
No issues.
Yeah and that’s a rounding error compared to the maintenance ICE cars need
Toyota ? Doesn’t need maintenance is an under-reported significance.
MG started offering a lifetime warranty for the battery and drivetrains in Thailand.
It confirms what the article is saying, manufacturers know with their experience that the rest of the car will break before the battery or the motor does.
How long does MG consider to be a lifetime? I’m daily driving a 32 year old car.
Edit:
Ok, I looked it up. It’s an unlimited-mile warranty for the first 12 months. After that, it lasts up to 80,000 miles or 7 years, whichever comes first. This is less than the battery warranty for many other brands. This kind of advertising should be illegal, but they placed “lifetime” in quotes, so I guess everyone’s cool with it.Actually, it looks like that might be the old warranty, effective in 2019. I’m having trouble finding the actual terms for the new warranty, but I wanted to correct myself first.MG is still making cars? I haven’t seen anything from them in decades!
It was bought out by a Chinese company from what I’d heard.
They’re fairly popular in the UK
I wish evs were just as reliable and repairable as gasoline/diesel cars are on average.
Are they not as reliable?
They’re actually more reliable and money saved on gas and maintenance is much more than the price of changing the battery every 10 years.
I mean, depends on the car you have. Outside of purchasing the vehicle, I haven’t spent 15k in the last decade of car ownership and that’s in AUD, so like 10k us. Pretty sure a new battery could cost more than that. Definitely the case for some though, especially if you have cheap electricity.
Why would you worry about the battery when it has a 8-10y warranty on it on average? The only reason to replace it is if it has a manufacturing problem and that’s why there’s a warranty. Don’t void the warranty and you’ll be fine.
You don’t have to change the high voltage battery on EV nowadays.
Source: I own a Polestar 2.
Cars last more than 8-10 years so the warranty wont always help. For example I have never in my life owned a car that is less than 10 years old, my current '08 is the newest by almost a decade. Being concerned about replacing the battery is a long term thing.
Very true. Although out of warranty doesn’t mean the battery needs replacement. There are many Teslas out there (because there are not many other EV that old yet) that have 700 000 km and more, some even closing in to the million km, and on average their battery SoH is still over 70%.
Again as the article says, the car will need replacement for pretty much everything else (suspension, steering, etc) before the HV battery.
Again, the battery is not something to be concerned about, even long term.
Gas + maintenance, you haven’t spent 15k? I call bullshit unless you drive so little that you don’t really need a car in the first place…
My last car I had for just over 2 years cost me $500 in services, $200 for a new fuel tank (new is a strong word for an at the time 22 year old car), and then its just fuel and rego, fuel was like $80/month and is the primary expense, rego might actually put it over 15k for a decade because that’s like $700/year on nearly any car i’ve had (where i am its mostly based on cylinder count, and i haven’t owned a 4 cyl car since like 2017, at least my performance car doesnt cost more because 6 cyl is 6 cyl regardless of power output).
I don’t drive a whole lot, but enough that I’m not in the bottom bracket of my insurance, car is required due to not even living in a town. Not even remotely interested in walking the 4km to work because 6 months of the year minimum are way too hot for that.
700$ + 1920$ = 2620 x 5 = 13100$ over 10 years at that rate
Pretty fucking close to 15k and, again, I’m gonna call bullshit that you didn’t spend more if we you said you only drive old cars and a 2008 that you’ve had for 2 years is the most recent by a decade. I know what it’s like to own old cars, it’s far from cheap.
The 2008 is new, thats like 2 months old for me right now, the car for 2 years was a 2000 model, Ford Falcon AU.
I have no idea what old cars you’ve bought that aren’t cheap, but if cheap was the goal you clearly bought the wrong old cars. Outside of my first and current car, all of my cars have been cheap, reliable trash because that’s all I had the money for. I’ve even only had a single car break down, presuming broken down means wont turn on, or wont drive. The Falcon had an issue where it wouldn’t turn off, but arguably not broken down as I drove about 300km like that before the locksmiths replaced the ignition barrel.
Your math is… interesting, and while it actually favours my side, it shouldn’t because you’ve made some presumptions that may be accurate in your country but not mine. $1,920 I figured out is 2 years of fuel which is about right for all the 6cyl cars, Although definitely not my '08, but I didn’t buy that to be cheap. $700 is… I’m presuming you mean that to be car registration but you only account for 5 years of it, which heavily overcounters my slight rounding up for what a year of rego is (670 for a 6cyl, at least currently, hasnt been under 600 since ive had 6cyl cars though). I slightly underestimated with 15k with my math presuming current costs reflect the past decade, i got to about 18k with fuel/rego/services/repairs, however many of my cars have been 4cyls which removes $100-$200/year depending on when I owned them in rego, the 4cyls also definitely cost nowhere near 1k a year in fuel, particularly because I had them when fuel prices were about 40% lower than current. What was an $8 drive is now about $30. I presumed services were all $250, however most of them were under $200, just more recent Mitsubishi Magna and the Ford Falcon were $250. Could lower the total by 2k if you count in selling/scrapping prices, with the Datsun adjusted for what it would’ve scrapped for (~$250) as opposed to the 2.5k I actually got because lucking in to an almost 2k profit after using it as a learner car isn’t realistic for most people.
Car list if your curious, Datsun 180b '74, $700 purchase, used no fuel but also went nowhere, 0-100kph time of ‘one day, maybe’, got pulled over for aggressive acceleration, somehow. Hyundai Excel, $1,300. Ford Laser (AKA Mazda 323 AKA like 4 other cars), $1,000 purchase, never serviced because a friend at the time super totaled it within 6 months of me getting it. Mitsubishi Magna '95, $500. Serviced for $250, was a V5. Not by design but hey it ran. Mitsubishi Magna '00, $700, actually had a full functional 6 cylinders, although a $500 repair bill while knowing the engine had about 20,000kms left on it made me scrap it instead because why spend the value of a car fixing it when it has a problem that’ll cost several times more in the near future. Ford Falcon AU '00, $2k, boring as shit, first car that took actual damage from my driveway, managed to slam the radiator into the ground, which is impressive because that is in theory higher than the bumper and the bumper was untouched from that. Now a Nissan Skyline 370GT, AKA Infiniti G37 in a lot of places, 15k. This car goes significantly slower in my driveway as I suspect a radiator is not a $200 job and I could really do with not breaking it due to poor terrain. Doesn’t really fit the ‘old car on a budget’ theme I’ve been doing most of my life which is why it’s been excluded from the above math, it would heavily skew it towards the more expensive side. Spent like 5k on it in 2 months, brake pads, rotors and tyres combined were like 3k, tank of fuel is $140 instead of $80 or less for previous cars.
Not OP, but also drive simple, older cars. And yeah, the maintenance costs really aren’t very high. The bulk of my maintenance costs are stuff like tires & brakes - which I’d still be buying for electric cars too. Biggest cost by far is insurance, and once again, going to need to insure an electric car too.
Second biggest cost is gas though, and you are correct, not having to pay that would be nice. But I’m not yet convinced that when I need to replace the battery, that single cost will be more affordable than the running cost for weekly fill-ups. I have yet to see any automaker publicly list their battery packs for sale with a pricetag. Ditto for all of the aftermarket auto part shops. My fear is that lack of visibility is intentional, and that battery packs actually cost far more than we want to believe. I would like to be proven wrong, and I suspect someday I will. But I doubt it will be in the near future.
All you guys are acting like batteries will 100% need to be replaced but the gas engine on an old car can’t break
Overall EV reliability, running and maintenance cost is lower than that of gas cars.
The only issue I’ve ever had with my Ioniq 5 in 2 years was running over a screw and had to get the tire sealed. There is no oil to change, so the only regular maintenance is free tire rotations at the dealer.
It is a relatively new car though, if anything severely broke on it you’d probably be pretty upset, same with a new ice car. You probably have cabin air filters that should be changed at some point, but that isn’t different to an equivalent ice car anyway. At least for EVs in my country, maintenance seems to be about 2/5ths the cost of an ice car, or at least of the ice cars i’ve owned. If you have solar or live somewhere with cheap electricity compared to fuel it’s probably saving a respectable amount.
There’s nothing major to break.
Well, the range part of the equation isn’t. A fuel tank doesn’t get smaller over time, and you can replace one fairly easily. Batteries die over time, and can’t be replaced easily.
Doesn’t fuel efficiency go down, though? I’d say that’s roughly equivalent to the battery losing effectiveness. And generally requires fixing or outright replacing key components to get back to par.
Not to 80% in a few years
True, the scale isn’t quite the same, but the technology is also much newer. You’d agree that fuel efficiency, much like battery efficiency, does go down, though?
To a certain extent yes. Cams get worn down, coils make less spark, that sort of thing.
But as you said, the scale is way different. It’s the difference between a million miles and a hundred thousand. And at a million miles, even the chassis itself starts to become a maintenance item.
A used fuel tank isnt an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
Nah, they’re ecological disasters in progress.
They aren’t that hard, just no one wants to actually do it. Harder than a fuel tank and requires actual training, for sure, but it isn’t that hard for a trained person. I’ve seen reports of batteries actually doing fairly well, although I suspect that’s brand dependant, the Nissan leaf got a pretty bad rep for being hot trash. Literally, I think the issue was a passive cooled battery just degrading it at absurd rates.
You drain it, unbolt 2 straps, pull the pump, and then put the pump in the new tank, and replace the tank. You might even get lucky and not have to undo any fuel hoses.
With skateboard designs, like all Teslas, you have to remove the entire interior.
I haven’t seen Tesla’s getting the battery swapped.much, but I’ve seen others that while probably taking a few hours isn’t removing the entire interior. Honestly, that’s just yet another reason to not buy a Tesla, as if there weren’t enough reasons to avoid them as it is
Having had a petrol tank replaced, you make it seem like it’s a 15 minute job, definitely isn’t, at least it wasn’t in my ford falcon (au, 2000 model) and that’s a basic removed car.
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That doesn’t say they are unreliable, just that the tech that isn’t the basic car function is utter garbage a lot of the time. Can’t really disagree with that, fuck off with screens bigger than my laptop and give me my damn buttons back.
The repairability is a much bigger concern for me than reliability. When even opening the motor housing is grounds for warranty termination in most EVs, it’s easy to understand why so many people are still buying ICEs
Far less moving parts though. No oil changes. Simpler “transmission”. Regenerative breaking means it takes forever for you to need to replace brake pads. Etc etc.
Less moving parts means an entire drivetrain replacement when something inevitably goes wrong and maintenence =/= repairs
Not necessarily, in theory anyway, but we all know big auto likes full replacements of everything so effectively yes, absolutely. It doesnt matter what powers the car though. The [undisclosed purpose sensor #7] fails and suddenly you have to replace the car computer which is encased in opaque resin for some reason and not even servicable by the engineer that designed it.
If I recall, teslas are built like shit so they have to be replaced entirely. the last statistic I saw was electric cars have 2/3 the maintenance costs of gas cars and will last as long as their frame does.
EV only vehicle manufacturers are not doing a great job on the servicing side of the business with months wait times. Robison is up to 6 mo right now. That’s unacceptable when your AC fails. This is where the large manufacturers have the upper hand, if they can ever get it together and make 1) vehicles that aren’t a 2nd mortgage and 2) cheaper to repair.
A rear quarter panel on a Rivian R1S is $20K+ as the entire side of the vehicle has to come off to get to it. Rivian only sells the quarter panel with the entire side. You can’t just get the rear quarter panel. Absolutely insane engineering.
It shouldn’t be up to manufacturers to monopolize servicing their products in the first place!
They’re following the model of the tech industry, which makes sense because there’s a lot of crossover there
I fixed an acer laptop yesterday. It was a gaming one, like a $700 laptop. Wouldn’t turn on. Acer said the motherboard had to be replaced. When I got it I found a blown capacitor shorting the main power rail, replaced it, and it works fine now. A part that costs like 3 cents in bulk. Repair was roughly 45 minutes including diagnosis.
For this one a motherboard swap isn’t the end of the world but the additional point is that for many of modern laptops and for all phones this results in a superior repair. This laptop in particular had removable nvme storage but tons of laptops have the ssd soldered directly to the motherboard so swapping the motherboard means you lose all your data. No one ever has backups lmao
But acer, apple, Lenovo, hp, etc all do this. It’s much easier to train their techs to just do board swaps, it’s much more lucrative to make repairs a several hundred dollar endeavor instead of the pennys it would cost to replace passives or basic ics, etc. they then send the “junk” boards off to the manufacturing depot in sea to actually get fixed and then sell them again as refurbished
Rivian only sells the quarter panel with the entire side. You can’t just get the rear quarter panel.
Volkswagen did this with the Fox in the 80s. The whole side from the A pillar to the taillight, roof to rocker, was one piece. And to add insult to injury, they shipped them bare. 100% of them required repair by the body shop before putting on the car.
The Magnuson-Moss Act has entered the chat.
There’s nothing really to repair.
They include climates in the study but only hot climates and temperate climates. Temperate climates perform the best of course, but that’s expected given the narrower temperature ranges.
I would like to see studies for cold climates. Here in Canada we have freezing temperatures for about half the year and sweltering temperatures for a quarter. The shoulder seasons bring lots of rain and temperature fluctuations. This mix of always changing temperatures and humidity (along with all the salt used to de-ice roads) is absolute havoc for ICE cars. It tends to rust them out a decades before the engines give out.
On the other hand, freezing temperatures are brutal on batteries (I know this from how my phone responds to the cold). I do know that a freezing cold battery needs a ton of extra energy to heat up before it can even begin charging. Having an EV in Canada without an indoor parking space for it is not a great experience.
I just got back from Quebec and vas surprised to see a ton of electric cars- like California levels of full electric cars on the road. I have to assume that most of them have made it through the winter alright, otherwise we’d be hearing about it. They do test these things in very cold climates before they sell them.
Quebec has the highest percentage of ev as new car sales of all the provinces… Electricity there costs on average around 0.09CAD/kWh… It’s surprising there isn’t more, and that in big part due to cost (Quebec is rather poor), the climate, and distances (Quebec is HUGE, if it included Labrador it would be a bigger landmass than Alaska).
