They break at much much lower rates, because they have many fewer parts. EVs don't have the pistons, valves, belts, fans, compressors, alternators, spark plugs, etc that gasoline engines have. There's probably order of magnitude fewer parts to break.

Having seen the interior of an automatic gearbox, the surprising thing to me is that conventional automobiles are as reliable as they are.

I hate to break it to you but very few vehicles are going to the dealer for engine/trans related work. Dealerships mostly only see vehicles that are new enough to be under warranty or recently out of it and major power-train stuff doesn't often break in that time period. It's stuff like steering and suspension wear items, the occasional window motor, trunk latches that won't pop, HVAC and stuff like that they make most of their money doing. EVs would probably actually net more money for dealers more money because they wouldn't take a loss on fixing random leaks under warranty (they get paid but book times are often unrealistic).

Very few vehicles are going to dealers for repairs at all. Most appointments are for maintenance. Oil changes, transmission fluid replacement, coolant flushes, etc. Teslas need less of this sort of stuff.

My parents both decided they trust the dealership's mechanics more than anyone else's, and have their vehicles serviced there. The family pickup, a Ford F-150, is expected to last ~18 years (makes me sad, because that's a long time to go without Bluetooth) and went out of "warranty" a few years back. The truck has yet to need major work on it, but my dad intends to get it worked on at the dealership.

Mind you, we also live within walking distance of both dealerships, and personally know my mom's mechanic. As is always the case, your mileage may vary.

> makes me sad, because that's a long time to go without Bluetooth

Kinda off topic, but you could always just get one of these: https://www.amazon.com/Upgraded-Bluetooth-Transmitter-Sumind...

What's kind of interesting is comparing the original tesla user interfaces from years ago with the current UI.

Although they didn't get new hardware, the UI has gained lots of features (not that all changes were popular)

Not all dealerships are stealerships. My experience is domestic ones tend to have good service departments, especially the older, rural ones.

If you own something like a Subaru or Hyundai, then you'd best find a good indie mechanic.

Howdy. As a fellow F-150 owner let me just point out that two DIN replacements are available for the stock radio with everything from just bluetooth to full blown android or proprietary entertainment centers with digital radio and sirius xm inputs. I realize your dad may just not bother since the dealer (most likely) won't do the work but it is possible to replace the stock radio.

> There's probably order of magnitude fewer parts to break.

According to Tesla a comparative ICE drivetrain will have around 200 moving parts, while one of their vehicles will have roughly 17.

The real upside is longevity. While it is a miraculous feat that machines, such as transmissions, last as long as they do today - they're not needed in electric vehicles. I think it's fair to assume we all expect 100k miles and more out of a car produced in the last decade. The two main components of a traditional ICE vehicle are the main contributors to longevity of a vehicle: engine and drivetrain. Those two items are of such high cost to replace many people will not consider the repair as replacement is more feasible.

As electric cars stand today longevity is significantly improved immediately. The major failure components will be batteries and electric motors. However the former can be considered a wear item and is, generally easy, to replace. The latter is also much cheaper and more simple to replace compared to the ICE equivalent. That being said the expectations of a BEV today are 300k+ miles with significantly less wear maintenance.

Finally as electric vehicles tend to be more modular it may very well be that we finally start to see platforms instead of model year differentials. If I have 'platform 1' here are motor, battery, electronics, etc upgrade options. We haven't seen this that bluntly yet, but I hope we get there. Cars today are built as non-upgradeable partially due to the built in life cycling / planned obsolescence the manufacturers have created for improved sales. It would be great if we could truly move cars to a more repair / upgrade centric platform. Not only could this spur new forms of labor and business but help waste reduction and overall manufacturing waste and pollution.

Modern cars can easily go 200k+ miles without any major repairs other than tires / brakes / suspension.

And various belts replaced, fluids changed, ignition plugs swapped, starters break, climate compressor (or its clutch) sometimes break... Also turbos, [automatic] transmissions and [manual] clutches are prone to cause trouble. Electric systems might misbehave due to wear and tear on cables. And with 200k+ miles on a modern small car, I would really worry for the engine (here in the EU cars tend to have less cc). Not to mention the hunt for the actual defect. (Source: I am at ~200k miles/326kkm and used to fix a lot myself).

Our 2006 Honda Civic (1.8L engine, which at least in the US counts as a very small engine) just rolled over 200k miles a month or two ago.

We've had the car for 7 years and probably 80k of those miles. We had to get the brakes and tires replaced very early on, and have just done a second round of replacing both within the past 6 months. We needed a new muffler and starter last summer. A week ago, we replaced the front struts. I put in new spark plugs and O2 sensors this past month, mainly because they seemed like easy things to swap out and cheap insurance against them going bad down the line. We get the tires rotated and oil changed every 6k miles. Have replaced the transmission fluid once.

So yes, more than nothing, but doing maintenance two or three times a year for a total of maybe $3k over the time we've had the vehicle seems quite reasonable.

I was talking with the sales guy when I picked the car up on our most recent visit, and he commented that he had a Civic that he sold a couple years ago when it had 350k miles, and the guy he sold it to is still using it as his daily driver.

Modern cars, particularly the ones out of Asia, have extremely reliable engines and drivetrains. Worry about a car with 100k miles being near the end of its life is outdated. I would trust a well maintained car from the past 15 years to 250k miles and probably beyond.

The Civic is indeed renown for needing few repairs. The stuff I listed still has decent odds of breaking for most cars - while many/most of these parts are not present for BEVs.

The 100k claim is of course utter BS for a modern car (or US built quality is as inferior as some people claim - which I doubt), but it comes at a cost.

> The major failure components will be batteries and electric motors. However the former can be considered a wear item and is, generally easy, to replace

Are there "wear items" in ICE vehicles that cost anything like as much as replacing the batteries in an EV?

A battery in an BEV has no direct counterpart in an ICE vehicle. However it most closes aligns as critical to the power train. Any major repairs or replacement of power train components can be comparable depending on the component and labor. Batteries can, like engines and transmissions, be recycled and so costs of replacement today are likely closer to peak than 5-10 years out. Batteries have also proven they last well over 200k miles with less degradation than originally thought [0].

The standard length of operation of a gas ICE doesn't compete with electric, even early in the stage of BEV.

[0] https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/tesla-battery-degradation/

> Batteries have also proven they last well over 200k miles

For some value of "last" ... what percentage degradation are we seeing at 100k, 150k, 200k miles?

> The standard length of operation of a gas ICE doesn't compete with electric

Can you expand on this statement?

As I've pointed out before[0], the ICE vehicle I drive cost $13,800 new including all taxes, and its servicing needs (and costs) and depreciation curve are all well understood.

EVs? Not so much.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19238680

This assumes that Tesla would allow repairs on their cars, which so far not been the case.

I'm not stating that other manufacturers would not allow repairs, but that Tesla has been particularly hostile to people who like working on their cars.

> EVs don't have the pistons, valves, belts, fans, compressors, alternators, spark plugs, etc that gasoline engines have. There's probably order of magnitude fewer parts to break.

If you buy a new ICE powered vehicle, how many of any of the parts you mention would one expect to replace in - for instance - the first three years of the vehicles' life?

Our experience is that the first few years of a ICE vehicle's life involves changing oil and oil filters and most likely not a whole lot else:

https://owners.vwmodels.ca/maintenance/timeline/

Point of data here - having owned an ICE vehicle for two years, the first components I had to replace were windshield wipers, a taillight, and a tire (which ran over a bolt) - all of which would be at the same risk of failure in an EV.

The average age of the vehicle on the road in the US is about 10 years. Not everyone buys brand new cars, and after a few years things start to break.

Although from my experience things not related to drivetrain break:

* Suspension

* Brakes

* Steering rack.

As these components handle the most peak force.

But are used car buyers, (or owners of 3+ year cars) having them repaired at the dealership? Most people I know go to 3rd party shops to minimize costs; the same motive that leads them to buy used in the first place.

I wonder how much the average dealership makes off repairs covered by warranty, compared to out of pocket repairs.

Brakes in an EV pretty much never need to be replaced, because most of the braking is regenerative and doesn't wear the pads at all.

If you live in a place with a decent winter, and hence a decent quantity of salt on the roads, you may have to replace your brakes due to corrosion long before the pads "wear out".

Does this kind of stuff not happen to EVs?

http://www.safercar.gov/staticfiles/safercar/pdf/EA11-001_cl...

Same. Never had to repair anything in the first three years of a new ICE. If it weren't for mandatory visitations (in order to keep the guarantee) I'd have never see the dealership from within again.

The average car on the road is closing in on 12 years old [1] so you can't just look at the first 3 years. The first few years of an ICE vehicle might be very similar to an EV, but that changes drastically as a car ages.

[1] - https://www.bts.gov/content/average-age-automobiles-and-truc...

> The first few years of an ICE vehicle might be very similar to an EV, but that changes drastically as a car ages

If the average age of all cars on the road is 12 years, where's the data for 12 year old EVs?

> They break at much much lower rates, because they have many fewer parts.

I don't really believe this is true. This is Tesla marketing spin. At one point every vehicle produced was having the drive unit replaced. There have been issues with water ingress and seat problems. Scour the Tesla motors forums.

Also, since it's the car is an iPhone model there aren't any aftermarket repairs. Seems to me to worse in every way despite the original spin on maintenance.

My 2013vVolt has 105K miles (85K EV / 20K ICE) on it and besides tires and one oil change, I've done NOTHING to it. zippo.

It drives like the day I bought it.

The volt is an ICE though? As a hybrid one might expect the problems of both ICE and electric in a Volt.

I don't have any data to back this up but I would think that most cars going into the dealership network for maintenance are still under warranty; are less than 5 years old and not going in for expensive or time consuming engine work such as replacing head gaskets, belts, bearings, etc.

Instead, I would think most cars going into the dealership network are either:

1. Having a part replaced under warranty because it is faulty or there is a recall

2. Having a service under a service pack or because the car is still in warranty

3. Having some kind of interior defect fixed (rattling in the cabin, infotainment issue, etc)

and that these issues are still common enough in EVs that I don't expect the dealership network to change much.

Oil changes belong in here somewhere too.

I'm not sure if oil changes are the biggest source of profit, but they probably are the highest volume service. And those get customers in the shop for generally unnecessary upsells (like pumping cleaner into the climate control system to "flush" it? that is a scam, right?).

Marketplace's analysis: https://www.marketplace.org/2017/08/24/sustainability/whats-...

If anything, proprietary software will keep standard updates at the dealer. (Though I expect the schedule will drop way down.)

It's interesting that a lot of readers here and websites in the U.S are saying oil changes every 3,000 or 5,000 miles. This is absolutely not the case in Europe where most cars are on 10,000 or 20,000 mile intervals. I wonder if this is due to much more diverse weather and temperatures you see in the U.S throughout the year and so different grades of oil are required that degrade much faster.

Manufacturers are pushing to extend oil change intervals but depending on your climate and driving style you’ll see different oil degradation, and it had nothing to do with differing quality of oil. Oil standards are international.

The only way to know is to consistently and regularly have used oil analysis done. For my part, I change my oil every 3k or sooner because my vehicle gets put on a race track occasionally, which changes wear patterns and an oil change is cheap insurance. For full synthetics on a car which mostly sees highway miles 10k intervals are fine, but 15k and 20k intervals are ridiculous. For most cars in the US which see significant traffic a 5k interval is correct as stop and go traffic is actually harder on the engine than almost anything else.

Side note: A kilometer is just a little over half a mile. A 10k KM OCI is equivalent roughly to a 6500 mile OCI. So there isn’t that much difference between the US and European intervals.

My last car said 10k miles in the owner's manual, but every time I got the oil changed the dealership would always lie and say 5k miles was recommended.

Maybe that was true decades ago, but it's no longer true. They prey on the misinformed. To be charitable, maybe they know many people wait too long, but I doubt it.

I went every 10k miles or so.

Other cars can go longer distances without an oil change, as you say.

I think you mixed up the units here.

In us oil changes are 3k-5k miles. which is ~5k km to ~8k km whereas in Europe it's 10k to 20k.

I find 8k-10k figure to be close enough and realistic.

5k km for old cars with non-synthetic oil.

20k km I highly suspect is a pipe dream from BMW marketing material ensuring that after about 120k the car would have no resale value.

Some oil places just straight up tell you a lower number even when the owner's manual of the car says a higher one. I just go with what the manual says, rather than some random Jiffy Lube employee.

I tell people to just change it on the 5s because that's an easy round number and an engine that burns/leaks a little probably won't run out in that time. For synthetic I'd say 10k.

I am using my Honda's computer and it asks to change oil around 4500 miles mark. I am mostly drive in a city, so that's would be a cause. I know for others the computer uses more than 10k intervals.

Full synthetic oil/filter is about $60 to change here.

I don't know the cause either but if you look at your oil, you can see it gradually turning colors, from pale ale to stout. At 5k in the US you're about at the latter, so I'm inclined to believe they're telling the truth.

As I replied in another comment:

> Oil changes color as it captures contaminates such as soot, carbon deposits, etc. It can operate effectively while brown-ish, but if the oil is carrying too much it will blacken and start to thicken at which point it will be much less effective at lubricating your engine.

Odor is a better wear indicator. It'll smell burnt when it's ready to be changed.

I heard it is a hangover from the days of using mineral oil.

Modern synthetic oils last much longer.

Synthetics last for so long that the breakdown of oil is not really a concern anymore. The primary reason to change a synthetic oil is due to contamination.

Modern engines are designed with much, much better tolerances than before and crank cases no longer vent into the atmosphere. If you use new synthetic oil in an old small-block Chevy, the oil will hold up for a long time, but it will be so contaminated by gasoline, moisture, and debris that it will still require shorter replacement intervals.

It's due to people wanting to make more money, and succeeding.

I've mostly had older cars 5-10 years old and I rarely had issues with anything in the engine. It was typically suspension, brakes, lights, the starter battery etc.

Tesla make it's difficult to fix their cars by restricting parts or bricking their cars that have been in a crash. Whilst you can get your traditional car fixed pretty much anywhere, likely to get your Tesla fixed you need the dealership more than ever.

Information based on the Rich Rebuilds YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfV0_wbjG8KJADuZT2ct4SA

I have had just as many issues with things braking unrelated to the engine. Eg washer fluid bottle leaking, air conditioning, disk breaks needing replacing, tire sensors breaking, tires going bald, etc.

Out of the engine related problems, the cam belt and clutch are the things that's caused issues in the last 5 years across my various cars.

I just kind of realized that any part that lives under the hood of an ICE car is in a pretty harsh environment.

Those are far easier to handle than, for example, changing a timing belt on a gasoline engine. Faster too...

You need less qualified people, less time, less parts, less often for repairs that a handy person can often do themselves and save on labor and parts. Significant sources of income are therefore shrunk for dealerships.

Sure, you can replace brake pads yourself. But few people want to do it; let alone are capable. Saying "significant sources of income are therefore shrunk" significantly overstates just how many people would do their maintenance work on that level.

I know people who have paid people to replace the bulbs on a car. My wife rarely even bothers to refill the washer and I can count on 1 hand the number of times she's checker her oil in the nearly 20 years of owning a car.

Most people either don't care how cars work, don't have the technical capabilities to fix their own car or simply don't want to.

>I know people who have paid people to replace the bulbs on a car.

To be fair most newer cars need a fair amount of front bodywork pulled to change a bulb and most crossovers require pulling tail light housings which can be kind of intimidating for someone who's never done anything more than changed windshield wipers.

Engine and trans stuff isn't a significant source of income for them though. If anything ICE specific parts are a break even waste of a bay because for every person dumb enough to have a dealer do a timing belt out of warranty there's another person getting some leaking gasket replaced under warranty. Dealerships probably stand to make more money on EVs. Independent mechanics will probably lose out some though.

But the number of required service stations is also a function of how many customers you have and how they are distributed gographically, not only of how often they visit a station?

Surely you don't want people to drive 200km to the nearest service station, no matter if that's once a year or once every 3 years? Maybe that's the difference - customers expect EVs to be bleeding edge, so the service can be a hassle, and you can still get away with it?

Less wear on brakes due to regenerative braking. No clutch, which is another wear item. No regular fluid / plug changes like ICE engines (and far fewer moving parts to go wrong generally). Essentially all you're left with are wipers and tyres, which don't really require a specialist / main dealer.

Clutches will last 80,000 miles on most cars unless driven unsympathetically by either dumping the clutch or riding it frequently. Fluid and spark plugs are some of the cheapest maintenance you can do on ICE cars. Timing belts, aux belts, water pumps, bearings are much more expensive wear items and I'd be much more concerned about those personally.

You should however be changing your brake fluid every 2 years regardless of whether or not you have regenerative braking. Brake fluid degrades over time as water gets absorbed.

>spark plugs are some of the cheapest maintenance you can do on ICE cars.

Let me introduce you to the transverse mounted V6...

>You should however be changing your brake fluid every 2 years regardless of whether or not you have regenerative braking. Brake fluid degrades over time as water gets absorbed.

Yeah you should replace it every now and then but two years is BS though. In many states the fluid never gets touched until the brake lines rust out which can be a decade or more. Brake fluid is one of those things that people really harp on (cynically I think this is because harping on anything that's safety related tends to earn internet points) but unless you're driving on a track or riding the brake down a mountain you would probably never notice if your brake fluid was 1/3rd water.

> Let me introduce you to the transverse mounted V6...

Fair point! V6s were never really suitable for transverse layouts, but it did at least give us some wonderful sounding cars from the likes of Alfa Romeo and others.

My 2012 Subaru needed a new clutch recently. To your point, it was at about 80k miles. Mitigating that point, it was going to cost $2500 in parts and labor to get it replaced at the dealership (and it wasn't all that cheaper at the mom and pops).

Having said that, I also own a Tesla Model 3. It's probably a myth that maintenance is much less. Something about the weight distribution (or maybe it's the sheer torque) causes tires to last less than 30k miles. I'm finding this to be true in my own experience. And a set of tires will set us back nearly $1000.

Lots of great reasons to own a Model 3. Significantly reduced maintenance costs probably isn't one of them.

Well, depends on where you live. A lot o wear on my break calipers are from really shitty and sandy places :)

Depends on your vehicle as well. When I had a Jeep Wrangler the rear pads AND rotors needed changed about every 3 years.

Service intervals are very limited. Let me use my Model 3 as an example, I only need tire rotations until 25,000 miles. At that point I need the cabin and HVAC air filters replaced, then 25k later I do it again.

Not only will dealership service centers be impacted, oil change shops will have little work if any as the number of petrol cars wind down, general service shops face the same issue as the numbers decline.

Now there are jobs that will become important similar to how renewable energy solutions ended some jobs and made new. Electricians for business and home needs will increase because of both industries.

That's not super different from long lasting oil? Some Petrol cars do 30'000km without and service?

I just read up on 3'000 to 5'00 mile intervals that might be prevalent in the US?

To me that sounds crazy. Many synthetic oils are officially approved to 15'000 miles.

Many synthetic oils _are_ fine that long.

Very few oil filters are fine that long. I know Mobil 1 makes one rated for 15k miles, but I'm not aware of any OEM components with near that lifetime.

Hopefully that changes soon, but in the meantime I'll keep changing the oil at the rate my oil filter is rated for.

oil change stores advocate 3000 miles. car manuals or cars with computers that tell you when to change the oil advocate much longer intervals.

Depends on use. My truck essily likes 4000-5000 mile oil changes. It runs noticeably worse towards the end of that mileage range. It works harder than most cars and produces a lot of power to boot.

It's possible that your filters are clogged or there is some source of contamination. You may want to buy and oil Catch Can. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-B4VRxAtbw

Maybe, I also just drive it hard. I should get a secondary filter regardless.

It is true that a lot of synthetic oils are approved for 10, 15 and even 20,000 miles in some cases.

However, if you actually look at the oil after 10,000 miles it's usually very dark brown despite the high mileage rating so I personally get mine changed more frequently than recommended.

maybe it works fine when it is dark brown

Oil changes color as it captures contaminates such as soot, carbon deposits, etc. It can operate effectively while brown-ish, but if the oil is carrying too much it will blacken and start to thicken at which point it will be much less effective at lubricating your engine.

The shop I take our cars to recommends rotating the tires every 6,000 miles. Based on the oil life indicator in the car, the oil is getting about worn out by that point as well. Makes for an easy service trip to get both done at once.

Nowadays cars use an engine life monitor and report to the owner that they need service every 8-10,000 depending on use

Recently manufactured cars we own have those oil life monitors but some research shows they simply run down a milage count. The dealership even asks me what mileage I would like it set to. Sales pitch suggests that the vehicle is monitoring actual oil characteristics but in fact it is not.

What they do is calculate an oil lifetime based on running conditions of the engine. How long it's been on, what temperatures its running at, what RPM....

Point is that nobody should be changing their oil ever 3-5k.

My car tells me when to replace the oil. I don't even think about it, the amber light tells me when to do it.

They can and will with the correct supplies and parts (and handling).

There is a reason that some oils are far more expensive than others. Oil change shops have an incentive to make you come back soon, so you will be told there is no need for the more expensive oil. The composition of the oil and the quality of the engine and its parts will of course influence the build up of slug.

There’s scheduled maintenance and service. Tesla’s aren’t exactly known for being flawless even if that doesn’t mean there are problems with the drivetrain

The real money is in repairs for poorly designed and manufactured components, not service.