In theory. Has that actually played out in reality yet? Teslas aren't exactly the pinnacle of reliability, and other EVs are produced in low enough volumes that it may be difficult to draw real comparisons yet.
Also, most of the parts of a car that wear out are shared between EV and ICE. Modern ICE drivetrains rarely break and routinely last the lifetime of the car.
I mean there are very detailed overviews of Model S taxis with 400k miles on them. There are many many Model 3s with 150-200k miles on them. Anecdotally, teslas seem to last a very long time.
Things that break on ICE vehicles commonly EVs don’t have:
* fanbelts
* flywheels
* alternators
* starters
* spark plugs
* transmissions
* etc
In practice, Teslas break most when other drivers hit them.
There are countless examples of ICE cars going hundreds of thousands of miles, too.
> In practice, Teslas break most when other drivers hit them.
Have you been to a service center? They're packed, especially when compared to Tesla's market penetration. And none of the cars I saw there were wrecked. Just broken.
Tesla cars will most likely last about the same length of time as a current ICE vehicle, because what mostly kills vehicles is body rot. I'm even open to the argument that Teslas will have lower average lifespan, to be honest, due to the rate of change in the EV marketplace.
I’ve owned a Tesla model 3 since 2018, and I’ve been to service centers in two states. The recommended Tesla scheduled maintenance is every two years. The drive trains are actually engineered to last “approximately a million miles” per Musk. Even the 500,000 mile Teslas owned by taxi services have only had battery replacements, never drive train replacements, so this isn’t a lie. The battery research team includes one of the principal inventors of the lithium ion battery and he’s patented what others are calling a million mile battery. No, I don’t think Toyota drive trains are designed with quite the same longevity, though Toyotas are excellent. I had a Scion tC for years.
Service centers are packed because there aren’t enough of them. If you look at the ratio of service centers to teslas on the road you’ll see the problem rather starkly… there aren’t enough of them.
Tesla supplants this problem by heavily leaning on mobile service, which is awesome, but fundamentally, the service org has scaled at maybe 20-30% the speed of the manufacturing org.
I’ve personally owned 3 Toyotas with over 150k miles on them with very little maintenance. One of them was from 1994. One(my wife’s current car) has almost 200k on it.
The tech in the Model 3s tends to be significantly better than these old model s cars mind you and they still hold up to 400,000+ miles. I bet you’d get an engine rebuild or two and maybe a new transmission or two after 400k miles on a gas car as well.
I have no links or whatever but as a persistent Toyota owner most of them, particularly the smaller engines, have not required engine rebuilds. Prius' are notoriously reliable in that mileage range, also with taxi drivers for whatever reason.
I have a 2RZ-FE (2.4 I4) Tacoma (the vintage where half were recalled due to rusty frames) with 390k and 3UZ-FE (4.3 V8) LS430 with 300k, both requiring just normal maintenance. If you change the oil, many Toyotas will just keep going. A large portion of car owners simply neglect their vehicles, though. I've always read that keeping a car on the road is a net win for the environment versus creating a new one, as long as it isn't some unreliable gas guzzler. That isn't to say that Toyota doesn't have bad cars, like the 2nd gen Scion XBs that had bad rings and would eat oil, or even LS460s with their control arm bushings being a $15k repair. Their modern quality probably isn't as high as it was in the 90's or early 2000's, as their focus has been on bigger vehicles for us fat Americans instead of better quality.
The existence of individual vehicles with very high mileage doesn't feel like a good signal for overall reliability or maintenance req's over a lifespan. I did some brief searches and it seems there's a lot of "record-holding" gas vehicles with several million miles on them, some even claiming to be using original engines. Again though, I'm not sure this is a good representation of how reliable the vehicles are in aggregate.
The vast majority of cars are not scrapped because mechanical failures in their ICE engines. Typically, materials in parts (rubber, gaskets, hoses, electric switches, interior, body/chassi rust) degrade to the point of stopping peripherals from working, creaking/rattling/vibrations, and the user experience starts to feel like junk. Replacing these parts then costs more than the value of the car.
Median mileage has more relevance than any single machine , that entirely depends on how well the owner maintains it and a bit of luck.
Gasoline car engines are more complex while that can in theory mean lesser reliability, we should also consider that they been around a lot longer , we have had a lot of time to develop manufacturing process and mature them .
Battery vehicles are very very fast evolving, also Tesla is not exactly known for well manufactured vehicles
Finally also the availability of know how and feasibility to fix a motor is lot harder than gasoline engines , there maybe a tendency to replace the motor than fix it because cheaper or easier for Tesla like how phones do it.
> Do you have a Toyota with higher than 300k miles on it? If not, why?
Both cases where I sold my Toyota were because I was moving cross country and had to downsize to a single car, at least temporarily. We still have the other one.
Belts are maintenance parts, and are extremely unlikely to break if changed on schedule.
> flywheels
You would need a shaped charge warhead to break a flywheel.
> alternators and starters
Electric motors and servos exist in electric cars as well, to drive fans, pumps, brake servos, and so on.
> spark plugs
It is extremely rare for spark plugs on fuel injected engines to break, but they degrade and are cheap and easy to replace. Much easier than brake pads or tires.
> transmissions
Very rarely break, but the transmissions in electric cars share the same basic components.
> In practice, Teslas break most when other drivers hit them.
If this was true, it would mean teslas are babied and only used sparingly in forgiving environments. But there are still too few old teslas around to produce meaningful statistics about drive train/chassi failure modes, which usually happen much later in the cars lives. The oldest ones are essentially babied "boutique" individuals.
Maintenance changes on cars are: tires, brake pads, fluids (oil, cooling, hydraulics), and some belts, shock absorbers and suspension parts.
It is true that electric cars don't need oil changes.
Most of those internal combustion engine maintenance parts simply do not exist one electric vehicles. You still need maintenance to fix / replace them, and that does not exist for most of those. The transmission on say a Tesla is a single speed and significantly simpler as a result.
As an example, the tesla model 3 warranty is 4 yr/50,000 mi basic, 8 yr/100,000 mi powertrain.
By comparison, the BMW M4 warranty is 4 yr/50,000 mi basic, 4 yr/50,000 mi powertrain.
Now the powertrain warranty being twice that of BMWs tells me they expect it to last at least that long. Perhaps I'm misreading something here?
The oldest teslas with the most miles are primarily taxis. I'm not sure I'd call a taxicab a "babied" vehicle.
I've had an ICE car where the electronics broke down way before anything in the drive train. What's particularly annoying is that most auto shops, especially the dealership have no idea how to fix the part in question. They just replace the entire thing and everything that is attached to it for 2000€ and charge labor on top when replacing just the specific component should cost 1000€ or less including labor. What's especially egregious is that the auto shop needs licensed diagnostics tools from the car manufacturer for something as simple as a part swap. I had to go to 4 different places before I found one that wasn't trying to screw me over.
