“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.
What do you mean?
No-one reports that their car didn’t need maintenance. See also, Toyota, Prius.
Genuinely confused as to what you mean. I need more words to understand, not less.
When your car just works, you don’t report anything. The Prius is relevant because it has a battery pack (NiMH chemistry) famous for doing 300000kms before replacement. Not sure what extra words are going to help, it’s a simple concept, don’t need to report what ain’t broke.
I’m not sure the Prius is actually relevant to this conversation in anyway. That 300,000 doesn’t account for time, and batteries also aren’t made of the same materials. You also have Cabs upping that average, which most people are not cab drivers. And that is a significant factor, as I’m pretty sure the Prius is one of, if not the most popular vehicles for Cabbies.
I had to dig deep to find this:
an average EV battery degrades at 1.8% per year, it will still have over 80% state of health after 12 years, generally beyond the usual life of a fleet vehicle.
You still have to assume they’re using average fleet vehicles use as their comparison, but at the same time also that they’re using 80% battery as comparable.
Yeah just the article goes from saying cars last 20 years to you’ll probably buy a new one in 15 to quoting this. Was a wild ride.
I’ll buy an electric car when
A) it won’t spy on me and
B) I won’t have to sign away my soul and first born to whatever car company I’m buying from
I hate to break it to you, but nowadays neither of those are exclusive to electric cars. Just sounds like you might never be buying a new car again.
It’s still easy to disconnect the cellular antenna if you’re fine with losing features like self driving and map updates.
This. Shit doesn’t magically communicate with the company that made it. If they don’t want their data used, don’t connect it to wifi and disconnect the cellular antenna and pull the sim card 🤷♂️
It would be good to know which car companies don’t give annoying/intrusive warnings for doing the disconnect.
Plus I’d be concerned about gotchas regarding warranty and liability - GM just issued a recall for brake fluid level software not working, I don’t want to be on the hook for causing an accident just because I didn’t update my software.
I guess there just aren’t many old enough electric cars out there.
What we need is an open source alternative to the OS’s in our cars, but the hardware is disparate and it faces a steep buy-in hurdle of “spare practically brand new project car”.
I’m sorry. Do you think that gas cars don’t spy on you. Literally every car manufactured since 2000 has its own GSM/CMDA radio that is constantly connected and sending telemetry data to private corporations contracted by car manufacturers.
Those companies are constantly having security breaches too. Constantly
At least some companies let you use the data too (eg https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/bmw_connected_drive/). Mainly European companies.
Get a Dacia Spring. Its like a classic car but BEV. And has a manual button that switches off all data transfer to the cloud.
Probably just stores it until you turn it back on. No way a company is going to just throw money away.
This shit can’t even determine it’s charging connection stare properly in cloud.
We all overestimate automotive capabilities in terms of cloud. Most of the companies make shit system with shit performance and capabilities.
Buy one from China, The only people spying on you then will have a miniscule impact on you, ever.
lol, I wouldn’t bet on that. They wouldn’t be spying on you if they didn’t think they had something to gain. Just learn where the attenna or comm unit is and pull the wire/fuse. Check online for any electrical engineers who already disabled theirs.
Chinese car companies sell their data to anyone who will pay. Including American companies who then resell your data… and so on. There are no protections and all your data is it out there
Do you have a source for this or are you just making it up?
I do. It’s called embedded telematics. Here’s the first Google result for it:
“Just like a smartphone, a vehicle that is equipped with embedded telematics has a cellular modem built into it right from the factory. This embedded telematics modem allows the car to connect to the cellular network and communicate with other internet-connected devices such as mobile phones.”
But be very careful about information on disabling or modifying these things, most cars after 2018 will straight up no longer work if you disable them.
Unverifiable stuff, don’t trust: I’ve seen the data first hand and worked with companies that provide services to “de-anonimize” the data produced through various systems to provide targetable consumer lists.
It’d take exactly zero effort to find your cars driving activity and when you (your cell phone) were in the car. And anyone with money can get it.
Is it “legal” probably not? Do corporations care? Absolutely not. Legal costs are nothing compared to be value this shit provides
This doesn’t say anything about selling the data to anyone who will pay.
All the car companies have mobile apps now, and the car needs some way to communicate with the app…
I agree with your terms, and would add one more:
C) when they don’t all weigh 6000+ lbs
Hey, good news - they don’t. Now back to your cave.
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 so will I.
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)
$23 grand for a battery plus the cost of the car? I don’t think they would have spent more on gas and maintenance.
$23 grand for a battery plus the cost of the car? I don’t think they would have spent more on gas and maintenance.
I love how you’ve added the capital expense with the operating expenses on only one side of the equation but not the other. You know we can see that, right?
$23k is more than the cost of my last 2 ICE cars combined!
Now you’re comparing used cars to a new car.
Or do you buy $11k new cars?
No, I’m comparing two used cars to the cost of an EV battery replacement. Also, I was generously rounding up the cost of the two cars. My total was actually $12,200. $9k for a 2006 Subaru Forester and $3,200 for a 1992 Miata.
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.
Assuming $3/gal, $50/week for 3 years is 40mpg. Averaging that is damn impressive for an ICE car.
Just saw somewhere else that you are driving a golf. TDI or gas? I’m not doubting you. That’s just impressive. I can get the mid or upper 30s on my 55mi one-way commute in my gas Passat…if I’m lucky enough to not hit traffic. But that takes me trying to drive for efficiency, and almost all highway. I’d be happy to average at 30.
TDI, and I drive carefully. Accelerating hard and braking hard wastes fuel. I don’t drive fast on the highest either, and am lucky enough that most of my drive is medium speed county and state routes with very few stops. I would live to drive an EV, but it isn’t really viable for me currently, and that was what I was trying to point out.
If you’re that careful with the gas pedal your battery is going to love you for a long time and your electricity usage will go through the floor. I spend less than 20% on electricity than I used to spend on gas.
A taxi company guy I spoke to swears by 2nd generation Nissan Leaf cars, says it’s saved him a ton of money.
There’s a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt sown about electric cars, mainly by people who don’t have any experience of them whatsoever and the petrochemical industry.
Manufacturers aren’t super keen either, because unless they make their own batteries, a big part of the cost and profit of the car is outsourced and they don’t get a lot of income from maintenance because there’s just not a lot to go wrong with the actual driving bits of an electric car and so they’re left with minor things like aircon to service.
Corporate sponsored study finds in favor of corporation.
Stay tuned for the news at 7.
And don’t miss tonight’s special report: Asbestos, Safe after All? Stay tuned.
Yeah wtf. The steel frame is going to last an order of magnitude longer than the batteries
I see someone’s never lived near salt water or snowy winters.
Or salted snowy winters
I think the salt is implied with snowy winters. Very few places with ice roads don’t have some sort of rock salt or salt brine they put down.
Some use beet juice. Leaves everything looking like bloody murder but its good for the soil and doesn’t rot your car out from under you.
I think there’s a scaling issue. I wonder if there’s even enough beet juice to completely replace salt.
Many don’t, I’ve heard
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 loved the B and the Midget that they made in, I think the 70’s. Might have been 60’s. My mom’s friend had both when I was a kid.
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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.
The batteries in most EV’s need some kind of passive or active cooling. Some cars are using liquid cooling.
Tesla, BMW i-3 and i-8, Chevy Volt, Ford Focus, Jaguar i-Pace, and LG Chem’s lithium-ion batteries all use some form of liquid cooling system. Since electric vehicles are still a relatively new technology, there have been problems maintaining temperature range and uniformity in extreme temperatures even when using a liquid cooling system.
That’s not a reason to not get an EV but they all have some form of waste heat and some have fluid systems, pumps, gaskets, and seals. They just have less of all of it.
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 and that’s a rounding error compared to the maintenance ICE cars need
Yeah well. Ain’t done shit in 5 years. Like not one iota of shit.
No issues.
Toyota ? Doesn’t need maintenance is an under-reported significance.
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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.
A battery also needs a ton of energy to become cold. It’s like 300-500kg of mass you need to freeze. Most cars automatically warm up the battery.
I’ve had an EV in Finland for 4 years now and it’s the best winter car I’ve had. -30 C outside and it’s literally T-Shirt weather inside the car within 10 minutes. Zero issues starting after it’s been sitting outside for a few days either.
How does heat work in EVs?
In ICE cars it’s waste heat generated by the engine, carried via antifreeze to the heater core, which air then passes through. Basically, a radiator.
Where does the waste heat come from? Or is it resistive or a heat pump or something?
Yes.
Heat pump is more efficient, but resistive works fine.
And seat heaters and heated steering wheel are super efficient to keep you warm.
Very true. I used to think seat warmers and heated steering wheels were like…obscene-tier creature comforts.
Nah. They’re damn near necessities once you have it.
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).
Almost all new cars in Norway are electric, so it seems they do really well in the cold
Norway may be farther north than where a lot of Canadians live but it’s not colder. Where I live (Southern Ontario), it gets quite a bit colder than Oslo, despite being one of the warmer areas in Canada apart from the coastal regions.
I’ve had my EV for 5 years in Minnesota where our weather is worse than you down south. Other than shorter ranges in the really cold days, no problems with the battery. It’s been driven and actually parked outside as low as -25F (real temp not a windchill)
Parked for how long though? Overnight or during the day? My belief is that an EV will perform much better in cold climates if you have access to indoor parking overnight, such as a residential garage or underground parking at an apartment complex. If you have to park overnight fully exposed to the outdoors with deep freeze overnight temperatures it’s going to be awfully tough on the battery.
But people are saying these batteries have built in heaters, so that’s pretty cool. I wonder how much power they’d use in that worst case scenario outdoor overnight freeze? Especially if you don’t have access to charging overnight and need to charge during the day at work.
All day ever day when I was working in an office and when it was -27F out, my son didn’t listen and when to his hotel without charging first. Even at close to zero, the car ran fine and he got to the charger. However, the battery was so cold soaked that it had to heat the battery for a long time before it could charge.
Actually heat is much harder on the battery than cold. Different manufacturers have their own battery management systems and they aren’t equal.
Iirc most modern EVs have passive climate control for the battery, even when the car is “off”. So for cold weather that would be trace heaters or equivalent
I thought the zoomed detail was a cheese grater.
I wish evs were just as reliable and repairable as gasoline/diesel cars are on average.
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
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.
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.
The Magnuson-Moss Act has entered the chat.
There’s nothing really to repair.
