Spoiler: They won’t.
What about it’s batteries?
They are still chemical so they wouldn’t last forever.
Batteries can be replaced. An EV that could run 1 million miles would still need maintenance - I think the point is that they could be designed to last.
Planned obsolescence is so wide spread we don’t even notice it, but lots of products are designed to fail either through cheaper components or deliberately flawed design. That means we have to go and buy a replacement. It is also generally cheaper.
So we either have cheap products that will break or seemingly expensive products but they last for a very long time. But in the long run the cheap products generally cost you more to buy than one expensive product.
Batteries will be very expensive, however. The battery company is still quite greedy, eyeing for 5~10x growth in the near future - and that requires raising battery prices by at least twice.
Yes, the batteries would need to be replaced but that means designing them to be replaced.
Unlike the Tesla model Y which built the battery into the frame and filled it with foam so that it absolutely cannot get replaced. Musk said the way to replace the battery is to send the entire car to the scrap yard and recover the lithium from the shredder.
Another reason on my list why to never buy a Tesla.
That’s patently false, according to https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/tesla-battery-replacement-cost-explained/#:~:text=Absolutely.,will likely also be similar.
My 2013 Model S has 235,000 miles on it and still l drives like it’s brand new. I haven’t yet had to replace the battery pack but when that day comes, it will almost certainly be worth the cost.
Here is the link where Sandy Munroe determined the Model Y pack is non repairable and it includes Elon Musk’s reply tweet saying the pack should be seen as “high grade ore”.
That says you cannot replace individual broken cells in a Tesla pack. That doesn’t say you can’t replace the pack
Aren’t all the cells worn in a ten year old battery?
Friend of mine bought an EV. Didn’t even last a month. He landed in a tree.
Lemmy: Capitalism caused this.
In a socialist system cars would be tree proof.
I’m sure if we spend enough time working on it, we can figure out how this is all OPEC’s fault. /s (jeeze tho I hope your friend was okay!)
He luckily only has 4 broken ribs.
After ~20-30 years, rubber gaskets and seals and cable insulation start failing. Plastic becomes brittle, especially if exposed to the sun. How do they solve this problem?
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Pretty much this, diagnosing and fixing an electric motor is about as difficult as an alternator. Check signal, if good remove unit and swap (core gets remanufactured). With drive by wire and steer by wire and all that most things are equally modular. Gas pedal/throttle unit is pretty much a rheostat with a spring-loaded pedal, steering rack actuators, etc
Then you got ICE which becomes a ship of theseus. If you put enough hours on a combustion engine you go from the simple stuff like hoses and timing belts to having to replace piston rings, bearings, or even the cylinder heads if they get so worn out that they leak and fail compression tests
Spoken like someone that doesn’t work on cars.
Cars used to be much more modular. Newer models of car - much like newer models of cell phone - are deliberately engineered to be difficult to disassemble and fix, in order to compel people to replace the whole vehicle on a tighter time frame.
Yep. Like Tesla with its large castings. Makes the cars unrepairable. EV’s are the worst at this too.
It was a big reason for the surge in popularity of Japanese cars, during the 80s/90s. Honda Civics were famously very easy to mod, leading to the trend of “Rice Rocket” cheap urban street racing cars. That’s fallen off substantially in the last ten years, thanks to Japanese companies becoming infested with Wall Street / McKinley Consultant profit-chasers. Toyota and Hyundai might as well be run by the CEO of GM, the way they build their vehicles.
But a lot of the new Indian and Chinese vehicles are adhering to more traditional modular manufacturing style. They’re also having a really hard time getting their vehicles into Western dominated car-markets, for some curious reason.
Agreed 100 percent. I’ve never touched anything Chinese so I’m clueless there, but from what I’ve seen they are quite far ahead in the EV front. It’s a shame we don’t get the good stuff that Toyota still makes in Australia
True, but even electrical vehicles need lubrication, cooling, breaking fluids etc.
I’m expecting that, as EVs become more common, the car maintenance industry will catch up.
Modularity of construction, so that rubber components can be replaced without scrapping the whole vehicle. Reducing reliance on plastic parts, or improving the ease and quality of plastic recycling, so that we can fix the exterior components without sacrificing the chassis and core parts.
My guess is the thermodynamics of a hot engine makes the rubber and plastic parts fail more quickly than they would otherwise.
Not really. There’s no excessive heat outside of the engine bay, but plenty of rubber and plastic. Heck, even my rubber grip on my toothbrush has turned into a mush after some years and it wasn’t even exposed to sunlight, as there are no windows in the bathroom. Organic matter decays, it’s just life.
The engine compartment is what I was addressing. There’s a number of gaskets where failure can destroy an engine etc vastly reducing the life span of the car. Like while it does matter if the tail lights go out you can often reroute a cable for something like that with little difficulty. You cannot reroute the critical degrading components in a combustion engine as easily.
Electric cars are estimated to have 2/3 the maintenance costs of ICE vehicles. Their lifespan is likely only limited by the frame whereas ICE is limited by the frame and the engine. Major fail points of older cars include timing belts and head gaskets.
20-30 years for rubber…
You have way too much confidence. Have you owned a car for 10+ years? Almost everything rubber - especially within the suspension system needs replacement within the first 10 years of wear and tear.
I have a 12y old car and have no such issues.
I guarantee you’ve become use to the slop in nearly all of the components.
I would love to see a car company create a vehicle platform with battery replacements central to the design of the car. Make larger packs out of smaller units so their larger models (or simply longer range models) simply use more of the smaller pack units. Recycle old packs back into making newer ones to reduce the need to mine more materials.
Sure, charge me enough on the replacement to keep this cycle going. Buying a car you know will get battery (and therefore range) upgrades as time goes on is a no-brainer.
Imagine the goodwill and free word-of-mouth advertising you would receive if you went the extra mile and open sourced all the software for the vehicle and allowed users to modify it if they wanted. Make the car not look like dogshit and I imagine you’d do well.
Good luck with that. Planned obsolescence is a key ingredient in capitalism. I mean what better way to make line go up than to turn a one-time purchase into a repeat purchase? This shareholders and executives will never be able to step on the working class if they can’t gouge customers. Won’t anyone think of the shareholders?
As soon as a car company figures out autonomous taxis you will see them go super modular for repairability
It will be too profitable
“Unlike gas-powered engines—which are made up of thousands of parts that shift against one other—a typical EV has only a few dozen moving parts. That means lessdamage and maintenance, making it easier and cheaper to keep a car on the road well past the approximately 200,000-mile average lifespan of a gas-powered vehicle. And EVs are only getting better. “There are certain technologies that are coming down the pipeline that will get us toward that million-mile EV,” Scott Moura, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley, told me. That many miles would cover the average American driver for 74 years. The first EV you buy could be the last car you ever need to purchase.“
No way a car would last me and my family 74 years. First year I owned my car I put on almost 35k. Was driving 100 miles back and forth to work at that time. We typically take a road trip from colorado to near Vermont every year for a vacation.
A lot of midwesterns will drive 14 hours to get some where
At best case 60 miles an hour… Your commute was more than 90 mins? Ugh. That’s awful.
You weren’t clear if that was round trip or not, so possibly more than 180 mins? How did you find time to sleep!?
Round trip was 100 miles every day. This was rural Ohio driving to Columbus so it was not to bad 2 and 4 lane roads till you hit the city most of them time. If we got a lot of snowfall it could super suck but I was from NE Ohio so most of the time it was not that much white knuckle driving. You just listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts or call some friends on your hour or so drive home
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This is basically like saying combustion vehicles could last nearly forever if you replaced the engine every now and then
I mean…they can, you just refresh the motor. Tons of ICE vehicles out there with 400-500k miles on them. Hell most semi trucks have millions of miles on them.
I am thinking of doing that when my civic should be legally declared dead. With the insanity that is new car prices and insurance for new cars plus the vanished used car market it just isn’t worth it. I want an EV but things have to go back to normal before that happens
so do most electronics.
but you know, line must go up.
I think people need to start being educated about how their climate influences how they can use the electric car. Many people know if they live by the sea or where roads are salted that corrosion is an issue. But people might not be aware that with some EVs, they should leave it plugged in if they’re in an extreme climate, so the car can air condition or heat the battery. I caused some battery degradation to my Volt because I wasn’t able to leave it plugged in living in Tucson.
Wear and tear doesn’t kill a car; rust does.
Back in the day you could buy whole (but small) parts, cut away the rusy one and solder in the new one (paint with anti rust paint). Did it on my cheap ass volvo 142 :-)
Maybe you can’t do that any more because of complex crumple zones, but I bet we can do better. A car shouldn’t just have a life span of 6-10 years.
You can still do that. They’re called body repair panels. They are usually plain metal. You have to cut out the old, weld in the new, grind them flat, prime and paint them. This isn’t cost efficient if your car is worth less than the paint you’d need. The parts usually are around $100-$300 bucks (if you don’t need OEM parts) but the labor is expensive. And if you do it for cheap it will look like crap.
If you do it for cheap it sure will look like crap.
Source: me doing it in the nineties without really knowing welding :-D
Climate change is getting rid of snow. No more salted roads. Cars will last forever
You know humidity causes rust too, right? And rain. Lol
Bad drivers like me can fix that by applying wear to bodywork. Normal driving wears the tires and all the gears, gaskets, and bearings in the system. But it can probably last 20 years.
Electric motors can last a really long time, assuming no defects, they should outlast the battery by a Longshot.
That leaves the battery, and an LFP battery should also last a hell of a long time, probably a decent way into a million km before you have degraded to about 80%.
If you got those key items lasting, then it just depends on how well the rest of the car holds up, but replacing small parts while the motors and battery works is probably always going to be more cost effective.
The problem is the battery is a wildcard still.
We know how long those LFP batteries should last in a car, but they’re also pretty are in cars and we don’t have that real world data yet.
I also fear that OEMs will still gouge us on replacement batteries 15 - 20 years from now when costs are even lower and replacing the battery shouldn’t be so expensive.
power density just needs to grow until someone can easily kit-swap a range of battery and motor options into any platform - then we can ev-ify whatever we want to drive around.
1 of the 👍 points that were brought up was artificial gatekeeping. Many techies know it but I guess many non-techies don’t know it. Phone makers intentionally not putting the newest features on the old phones to boost the newest phones’ sales should be widely known. I wonder what the public opinion will be.
