Cynical view: maintenance burden will stay roughly similar, because fault rate is not ultimately driven by technology, but by how much the market is willing to bear. In other words, companies under competitive pressure will cheap out on materials and cut corners in the manufacturing process, making their cars as faulty as they can get away with, and unless something changes structurally in the market (e.g. death of used cars market, much less car ownership, much more leasing), the existing fault rate of petroleum-powered cars tells you what the market is willing to accept.

I think that a pretty good argument against this view is to note that the fault rate has been steadily decreasing over time. This suggests that minimizing the fault rate is a strong competitive advantage, and the limiting factor is therefore not what the market will bear, but what is technically possible right now (without sacrificing other things that matter for competitiveness). Should a new technology arise that will increase reliability and durability, it will be rapidly adopted and push fault rates down across the board.

I don't think the decreased maintenance costs will actually happen initially.

Big design changes like the shift to EV require lots of new parts to be designed, and every new part has a non-zero chance of a reliability issue. 5 years time, we'll be talking about the motor mount point which rusts through and causes a chunk of EV cars to fail.

A 2nd effect is as cars get more computerized, 3rd party repairs will get much harder, and manufacturers will drop support for first party repairs when it no longer makes financial sense, so a lot of otherwise good cars will get sent to the scrapheap because they couldn't get some firmware update etc. That will overall increase the cost of motoring.

Disagree with maintenance: electric motors are enormously simpler than ICE, and really well understood. Removing high temperatures, fuel, lubrication and exhaust from the system is a huge advantage.

Agree on digital scrapheap, although this applies to a lesser extent to ICE vehicle too. We should be demanding open sourcing of car code after warranty expires.

The electric drivetrain is simpler, but electric cars tend to require more parts in order to replace the heat and rotational power you get "for free" with a combustion engine.

Electric cars need to have separate motors to drive the AC compressor instead of a simple belt.

Electric cars need resistive and/or reverse cycle heating instead of using engine heat.

Electric cars (if they care about battery longevity) need elaborate heating/cooling systems for the battery.

> elaborate heating/cooling systems

Nearly every car over 10 years old has failed AC. In most EV cars, the AC is critical to maintaining battery health. I could imagine a failed AC unit causing the battery to over/under heat, and the resulting damage causing the entire car be scrapped.

I realize it's only one anecdotal datapoint, but my 4.5 year old electric LEAF has literally never the dealership or any other mechanic since delivery and all I've had to do is charge it, add washer fluid, plug a tire leak, and change the wiper blades once.

I think that a fleet of 10 electric cars owned over 10 years is likely to cost less than half in maintenance costs than a comparable fleet of 10 ICE cars over 10 years.

I disagree. The ICE car after 10 years will have seen less maintenance costs after 10 years. The electric car will have had the battery replaced, which will eat up all the cost of oil changes.

Of course batteries are coming down in price. Time will tell how this plays out.

I think of battery replacements more as fuel cost than maintenance cost. But I guess that's debatable.

EV batteries should last much longer than 10 years. Ideally, they should last the lifetime of the vehicle.

Most manufacturers, including Tesla, provide an 8 year warranty on battery and drivetrain.

I believe the 8 year warranty is driven by the federal requirement to warrant emissions systems for 8 years/80K miles. I think that all EV manufacturers are providing at least that level of warranty for battery and electric motor and think that it's likely linked to the federal emissions control warranty requirement.

There's a school of thought that past the warranty period, the traction battery is likely going to last the lifetime of the vehicle, by definition (in that when the battery dies, there is likely no economically sound way to replace with a new battery, so the choices are fit a junkyard battery or junk the car).

> when the battery dies, there is likely no economically sound way to replace with a new battery

While I can imagine that being a very likely scenario; I can also imagine a future where someone down at the local shopping mall will change the battery out for a Chinese compatible unit while you do your shopping. In the same way the currently do for phone batteries, screens etc.

It would be great for standard agencies / governments to get out in front of the electric car industry and demand standardised form factors for batteries and charging infrastructure. At the moment it would probably limit innovation too much though.

Exactly. In a decade or two, I can imagine thriving third-party shops specialising in battery upgrades for all popular electric vehicles.

They don't really exist today, because contrary to what anti-EV FUDsters believe, there just aren't many EVs with worn out batteries yet. Perhaps there are a few, but the number of EVs written off in accidents (and thus making donor batteries available) is much, much greater.

I wouldn't call them thriving. I agree they will exist, but unless the price of batteries come down a lot they won't be cost effective. By the time a car needs a new battery it will already have a lot of other wear and not be worth much. Spending $5000 on a battery for a car worth $3000 after the fix isn't a good deal for most people. (if you keep the car for 10 more years it is, which is why the industry will exist) Of course both dollar values are made up, they are realistic with today's prices but subject to change.

Tesla's warranty is 8 years at 70% original capacity for the Model 3. For the X and S they don't warrant the capacity at all:

https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty

You'll be getting less range over time as the battery degrades. Eventually you'll have to replace the battery to get the range back.

They don't explicitly state a warranted capacity for the Model S/X, but I've never heard of an S/X battery with more than ~20% degradation that wasn't considered faulty by Tesla. Whatever Tesla's reason is for not stating a specific capacity, it's not to screw over S/X owners, and I'm sure that 30% capacity loss within 8 years would be considered a fault.

We don't yet know how they stand up over >8 years of service, of course, but there are many examples of very high milage Tesla vehicles (> 200,000 miles) that are still on their original battery and show only modest degradation.

> I'm sure that 30% capacity loss within 8 years would be considered a fault.

Why are you sure? If it's not under warranty, it's not under warranty. If it's considered a fault then it would be warranted.

Cars are already filled with computers. The ECU unit alone controls most of the functions. I am sure it only gets simpler in electric.

Your second point equally applies to ICE cars and EVs.