I'm not going to dispute your numbers with diesel versus EV reliability, but I have to think the simplicity of an EV drivetrain will win that battle in the next version or two.
The reliability speaks to the technology immaturity. I agree with the inevitability of the EV drivetrain + charging off the existing distribution network being more reliable than competing technologies.
idk these sound like very specific problems they had. The chargers had an availability of only 23% because of a recurring issue with the power modules failing. In a later volume they also again attribute a lot of unavailability to the same chargers:
> The BEB fleet operated at 66% availability with more than half of the total days related to retrofit of the charger cabling and programming by the OEM.
I guess you could say this is due to immature technology but honestly I don't see 75% of HPC chargers being offline for maintenance at any given time. This is probably just bad luck with a vendor.
If you look at the road calls the BEB is by far the most reliable one, causing one road call out of 45. It was also the cheapest per mile by a long stretch.
It’s hard to imagine it not. And also kudos and crazy respect for all the thousands of engineers that poured their work into making combustion engines as efficient and reliable as they are. A true marvel of humanity, and something to be respected even as we leave it behind.
Relative to EVs it’s not. But relative to ICE engines from 50 years ago it’s great. EVs are obviously going to take over ICE, my only point is that we shouldn’t discount all the work and ingenuity that went into ICE engines simply because a disruptive technology came about.
Based on personal experience my guess is that the unreliability would be in the battery not the drive train.
Or more precisely put, batteries are a sort of black box they ether work or they don't work but either way you are not going to be able to open one up and find out why. that is, they are a high cost unrepairable item on the vehicle and this is a huge liability.
Batteries aren't unrepairable; you wouldn't open one up in the middle of the road to try fix it but at the bus depot with enough volume of battery electric vehicles, they'll have reason to hire repair technicians that can refurbish and repair batteries.
Obviously anything has a bunch of single points of failure, or catastrophic means of failure, but a battery isn't like "one engine". It's basically hundreds of little power modules wired in parallel, so an individual battery cell loss shouldn't bring down the whole pack.
So a battery pack should actually be heavily redundant ... assuming the pack has enough modules for a loss of vehicle to get to some charging station.
