And replacement costs. How many people have had this discussion with a mechanic?
“The engine will cost $4000 to repair or replace. The car is only worth about $3000 so it’s better just to get a new car”
Engine replacements in cars are crap because all of the other bits and pieces are still wearing out. Meanwhile a new batter makes an electric car like new.
But the overall maintenance is going to cost much more on a well maintained engine.
Oil changes, fan belts, flywheels, spark plugs, alternators, starters, etc don't exist in an EV. These are all components I have paid to have replaced in an ICE I've owned. Additionally, if your EV has regenerative braking (such as all Tesla vehicles), it is kind of like an ICE standard "engine braking" resulting in recharging the battery. This results in a much longer lifetime for brakes and brake pads.
My Model 3 requires scheduled maintenance every 2 years and they recommend a tire rotation every 6,000 miles or so. Good luck finding that little maintenance in a traditional ICE vehicle.
This is not the case for all EVs, but for Tesla, the battery is made up of thousands of individual cells which are grouped into individual "packs". The entire battery doesn't just go bad because the entire battery is thousands of small batteries. Tesla now will replace an individual pack that might go bad, making it cost less.
>But the overall maintenance is going to cost much more on a well maintained engine.
Oil changes, fan belts, flywheels, spark plugs, alternators, starters, etc don't exist in an EV.
Not to burst your bubble but just because a Tesla has fewer moving mechanical parts that can break in a traditional ICE car does not make it automatically more reliable, it's just that the points if failure are now electrical and mostly silicon based.
IIRC there was a story posted here a couple of days ago where someone's Tesla broke down while parked. That doesn't prove anything but just like how in a ICE car a fan belt can fail, so can a flash chip, MOSFET or sensor in a Tesla causing it to break down.
Remember when people thought SSDs would be way more reliable than HDDs just on the basis of having no moving parts? Boy were we wrong. The failure rate of(some) SSDs is staggering, just that now it's caused by electrical faults rather than mechanical.
Right now we have too few out of warranty Teslas to draw any conclusions about reliability.
At least for out of warranty ICE cars there are loads of aftermarket parts and garages that can fix things on the cheap when they break. I'm not sure we can say the same for out of warranty Teslas yet.
This is true, but not what I was responding to, which was parent post about replacement cost. The low maintenance is one of the main reasons I drive a BEV. But the high replacement costs is a major factor in why I lease it.
We're a decade in on BEVs and the whole "replace your battery pack" worry has utterly failed to materialize. Most BEVs will simply never need a replacement.
This is thread isn’t about Teslas, it is about the whole electric car industry. Tesla defenders don’t need to get their hackles up. Parent post said batteries in BEVs will never need to be replaced.
I mentioned it because I used to assume that serious degradation is just something batteries do, but I learned that this is wrong and proper battery management all but eliminates the problem.
Battery prices are still falling 10-15% a year. So needing to replace the battery 5-8 years from now won't cost as much as needing to replace an ice engine. And the way Tesla batteries are lasting so far I think you could probably get a good price for the old battery as well. So the cost people keep talking about battery replacement
wont be as much over time
You can rebuild a 4 cylinder engine for under a $1000 dollars. Maybe half that in an area where labor is cheap. In 5 years, replacing a battery pack will still be 5x or 10x that.
You don't need to replace engines on new cars though, and that's the main discussion to have here - what do people care about when buying a brand new car? For a lot of buyers there's no maintenance cost for the first 3 years, so EVs have zero advantage for new buyers. I had a brand new Qashqai for 3 years, negotiated a 3-year service pack for it to be included in the price, and over those 3 years it needed nothing - no new tyres, brakes, bulbs, servicing was "free" so the car was as cheap to keep as an EV would be, except that it was a lot cheaper to purchase. And sure, over a longer period of time it is going to start costing money in maintenance - but I(as a new buyer) couldn't care less - it's simply not my problem.
Or as another example - we bought a new VW Polo for my wife some time ago, and there was absolutely no way to make a case for an EV instead - the price difference was so big that it will have paid for the fuel for a petrol Polo many times over, getting an EV made zero sense.
