I don't think it's intrinsic to EVs, is what I'm saying. But more to how Tesla has positioned themselves re: market segment.
e.g. the Chevy Volt is now in its 10th year and only now are people starting to have real difficulties with gen-1 10 year old Volts and battery packs and getting GM to service and replace them. Prior to that it was just smooth sailing. Most are not seeing serious degradation and the warranty has been excellent on them up to 8 years or so. A third party market is building up around older Volt battery servicing in some cities, despite not many Volts having been sold.
I think it's entirely feasible we will see the equivalent of a fully electric Toyota Corolla in the next 5-10 years. I don't think Toyota will make it though.
* Parts are always available and inexpensive for the mass-market models and any repair ship can get you sorted.
* If I get into an accident the most I can ever be out is $8-10k but with depreciation more likely $4-5k.
* If they don't offer you 0% interest you just buy the car outright.
* Insurance is cheeeeap because the car isn't worth anything and it's not the kind of car anyone will drive fast or target for vandalism or theft.
* You can buy cars with high mileage and still easily get another 100k miles out of it. If the thing is a scrap heap by the end who cares?
We're currently at a point where 15-year old vehicles have ~144 deaths per million registered vehicles [1], and 5-year old vehicles have ~40 deaths per million registered vehicles [2]. Sure, you may be willing to pay a premium to get 40 down to 10, but are you willing to pay as much of a premium to get that 10 down to 2.5? 2.5 down to 0.6?
[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... (~2004 - 14.4 occupant deaths per 100,000 vehicles)
[2] https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-... (~2016 - 14 to 64 driver deaths per 1,000,000 vehicles)
Given some of the manufactures are starting to sell crate electric motors, I am a lot more interested in the Ford F-150 Lightning and anything Honda builds than Tesla given the repair stories of time and expense.
It's not fair at all to compare any Tesla even to a 20 year old Toyota. The Toyota will embarrass even respectable, older car makers.
It seems like Teslas (and other EVs) have a different typical cycle of costs than typical ICE cars. In the ICE world, maintenance and repair costs start fairly low, then become moderate, and eventually moderate to high ("I'm tired of throwing a couple grand at this car every 6 months, I'll just put that towards a new car", says the American consumer). EVs start with incredibly low cost maintenance, then continue with incredibly low cost maintenance, and then even more low cost maintenance ... until WHAM! the battery bill hits.
This isn't really a surprise to folks who have been paying attention to electric cars, but as more and more people go EV, it seems newsworthy to point it out, as well as to encourage Tesla to play nice with third-party repair shops.
What's remarkable about Tesla (but should be entirely obvious) is that given their small market share relative to ICE vehicles, this marketplace doesn't really exist. Your options are to 'wing it' with DIY or somewhat iffy greymarket fixes (such as the one described here), or deal with Tesla, which from an outsider's perspective seems to have some severe quality and customer service issues when it comes to maintenance and repairs.
From another outsider's perspective they have these same issues when it comes to just getting you a decent car in the first place. Some big tech influencer was posting on Twitter the other day about how he was accepting his new Model Y even though it was a piece of crap, because he was worried he'd get an even worse piece of crap if he sent it back based on photos he'd seen from other Model Y owners. Seems real cool...
That was the main reason car dealers did not want to touch an electric car, they make more than half of their income from the repair shop, and they know with electric cars that business is mostly gone.
New business will be created, though. Changing the batteries, balancing them when dead, putting a new technology when batteries improve,or improving the driving assistant will be necessary.
I've also owned cars for a long time, from new to 300k miles, and typically the expensive fixes that start to creep up are due to components wearing out. Things like rubber seals in the suspension, brake lines rusting out due to the salt used on the roads or a manufacturing defect leading to premature rust, electrical harnesses needing replacing. I don't think electric cars are immune to these issues since they have nothing to do with the powerplant, usually that part of the car is bulletproof in my experiences if you buy from reliable manufacturers like Honda.
From cross-threaded drain plugs to unnecessary access holes cut in aero panels out of laziness, there's enough examples out there to be concerned.
Even when I lived in an apartment with no garage, I could easily change the oil in my car (mk4 VW Jetta TDI) out in the parking lot. I use an oil extractor to suck it out the dipstick hole, and since the filter is front and centre, I don't need to get under the car at all. In fact, I've never removed the oilpan drain plug.
You see, I had brought quality Mobil 1 full synthetic oil in quart bottles, which the career oil changers didn't seem to understand how to pour without spilling everywhere. Pro-tip: the offset spout is supposed to be at the top, not the bottom orientation.
Oil changes are inherently a probable interaction with either children or clowns. And I'm saying this as someone who did oil changes as a summer job, back before I had a driver's license. The things I've seen... I pity the fool who relies on random third parties for maintenance. EVs are a potentially huge improvement in this department.
There's nothing weird about a 1-quart bottle of Mobil 1, it's the same basic form factor retail oil quarts have been sold in since they stopped being steel cans, i.e. before most Jiffy Lube employees were born.
The problem isn't the bottle, the problem is a combination of carelessness and incompetence. Which is what you're going to get with a high probability at these low-level positions, good luck with that.
He sold Mazda's for a living and literally had no idea the oil needed to be changed....
Shouldn't you have rotated your tires a few times at least?
A tire rotation would probably be a good idea, though.
25k over 2 years is over-average at least. I did 15k/year but I drove 75mi/day back then (pre-COVID).
New ICE cars are lower maintenance, for sure. But they're nowhere near 0-maintenance like an EV. I've spent like $250 on maintenance activities on my EV over 4 years.
Not having to visit a dirty gas station or repair shop (the than tires) is quite liberating.
I had to replace the O2 sensor too, but that was about $50 IIRC, and it took me 15 minutes in my driveway after O'Reilly diagnosed it for free using OBD2. No $3k/yr "Toolbox" sub required.
Live outside of a small bubble, and it adds up pretty quick... then again, leases aren't very popular around here.
Certainly an EV will have less maintenance, but even ICE cars have practically zero maintenance outside of the occasional 15 minutes at a quick lube oil change place before they hit 50k miles. Not having to fill the truck up with gas would be nice, if it could last a day logging in the forest on a single charge.
Average yearly mileage is greatly affected by where you live. Someone who lives in a rural area is almost guaranteed to put far more miles on a vehicle than a person who lives in the city. It's the difference between a 15 mile trip to the nearest grocery store and a 45 minute commute on open roads to taking the bus to work and only using the car on some weekends.
[0] https://www.thinkmoney.co.uk/blog/what-is-the-average-miles-...
They measured each tire tread and said they are wearing very even, and suggested I wait longer to get them rotated.
Likely something a dealership wouldn't have recommended during an oil change of a vehicle purchased from them ;-)
I do need to replace our cabin air filter. Likely sooner than typical, since we've driven on a number of very, very dirty roads on camping trips.
No other serious maintenance in sight! https://www.tesla.com/support/car-maintenance
I’m in the $9k used car camp. How much pleasure do you derive from your car? For me driving is somewhere between absolutely miserable to slightly uncomfortable and the things that determines where my experience falls outside factors such as how much traffic is on the road, how far do I have to be, how much of a hurry I am in, and how long I’ve been in the car. I’ve driven all sorts of things: trucks, suvs, sport cars, luxury sedans, jeeps, and the economy sedan. As long as I trust the reliability and the AC/heat is working none of other aspects of a car make it more or less pleasurable for me. Driving sucks hard stop.
The total cost difference between a base model Tesla and my $9k sedan is about $25k, and having an extra 25k in my brokerage account at my age reduces my estimated retirement age by 1 year. With the opportunity cost in mind owning a Tesla would actually reduce my overall pleasure from life.
What am I missing? How are people getting so much pleasure from their cars? Do people actually like driving? Do you live in a place with no traffic and perfect roads?
I bought a Hyundai EV about a year ago and I actually kinda like driving now. The electric drive train is somehow more logical to my brain. I tell it to go faster and it does without any fuss or noise. No switching gears manually or alternating engine RPMs from the automatic gearbox.
The best part is the lane keeping assistant and smart cruise. When I'm on a bigger road with proper markings, I can just lightly hold the wheel and the car does the annoying minutiae of driving.
Now I can easily drive 400km+ in a single day and not feel completely drained afterwards.
Something about the need to slightly manage the steering wheel every second while also maintaining a safe distance to the car in front of me drained my brain. I was unable relax at the wheel. Now I can focus on actually following the traffic around me.
That said, my "sporty" car is a Chevy Volt in sport mode, not a Tesla Model S Plaid. I'd still like to be able to retire someday.
Would I gain what I subjectively consider to be $45,000 worth of additional comfort and pleasure by buying a model 3? Or $85,000 of comfort and pleasure by buying a model S?
At the end of the day you still wind up with an asset that was 85k. If you bought say a 3/4 year old car and bought wisely, it will have minimum depreciation. So while you are certainly out more money, it's not like you've lost 85k, it's more like 10-30. Whereas you probably are only going to be able to sell your corolla for let's say 4. We're now talking about the comfort/pleasure of ~25k, but the cost between the vehicles of between 9k - 85k. Let's say you have this car for 5 years, the difference in ownership is 4/5k per year. If you can afford this, even if I'm off by a factor of 2/3, it's really not that bad.
by far their biggest cost was the liability insurance.
But to each their own.
I think your charge could be leveled against most hobbies, especially collectibles. It seems a bit mean-spirited.
Avoiding driving altogether should be step 1, though.
Unless you have a truly ridiculously high salary/net worth and can afford to buy something like a model S plaid edition on a whim, for fun. At which point you're into the territory of people who do things like buy Nissan GT-R for fun and then pay aftermarket modification shops to make $65,000 of additional enhancements to them.