Maintenance costs for my gen 1 Ioniq are ca 60% compared to my previous ICE Kia. Of course this is a welcome change, but it‘s not like switching to an EV means no costs beside electricity.
The power train per se will probably never need paid maintenance, but they do check the coolant and brakes lines every year, clean the AC, resolve system warnings, replace filters etc.
And then there’s tires - you can easily pay 2k for new 22“ rims + tires, and expect a sporty EV to go through those tires quickly. In most regions you‘ll also change tires regularly, which alone can cost 200 bucks per year in a shop (including balancing which is a good idea if you‘re into driving fast).
Tire costs dilute EV savings a lot, to put it mildly.
Costco is the absolute worst for this in my experience. They won’t honor the warranty until the tread level is dangerous. Discount Tires (also branded as America’s Tires in some states) is the best and they’re all over which is handy on road trips.
I've not heard of tires that need replacing once a year, unless you are doing an insane amount of driving. Tires are generally lasting 50k, 60k, even 85k miles. Can you elaborate on the scenarios that require yearly tire replacements?
Wear for anything quality and safe is maximum 40-50k km, the better performing tire the less. Yeah cheap (mostly) chinese crappy unsafe tires will last much more, but its due to them being too hard and have very little grip, especially in wet.
It means difference between being perfectly safe in 120kmh in moderate rain/snow vs being scared shitless that next bend may kill you (and car certainly behaves like that), so you drive 70-80kmh and become an obstacle to others in very low-visibility and high danger situation.
Definitely not worth saving on tires, ever.
My coworker had a Leaf and said he went through rear tires 2x as fast.
A BMW 550i has similar horse power as a Tesla Model 3 performance, but I think like any EV the Tesla delivers even more low-end torque. So it can kill tires even faster, and it's all-wheel-drive...
I would not want to be in a car with a tire that lasts 85K miles.
Tires come in all kinds of compounds for different conditions but in general, the grippier the tire (i.e. better braking, better turning) the shorter the lifetime.
Race tires take this to the extreme, maximizing grip at all cost and they only last as little as a few hundred miles.
That would be silly for street use of course, but the general pattern stands. Less wear = less grip. I buy top performance street tires for maximum safety, the tradeoff being they'll last about 15k-25k miles depending on the car.
Other factors that have a big influence on tire life is car weight and acceleration. EVs are both very heavy and (most of them) fast accelerating. So tire life is bound to be less than on an otherwise similar ICE car.
At least the "run-flat" design is worth it for long road trips, the ability to re-inflate, and increased storage space.
[0] https://tsportline.com/products/continental-procontact-rx-25...
Probably depends on road conditions. Where I'm at good tyres — my criteria being soft ride, good grip, low noise — last at most 40k km. But then the roads here aren't exactly the best.
Not just tyres, even things like oil, filters, engine mounts etc need to be changed more frequently where I'm at, compared to Western countries.
And they're expensive. So the people who can afford them were already the kind of people driving well kept newish stuff so all they got to experience were recalls and the early part of the bathtub curve.
Parts on a car more or less wind up needing to be serviced more or less in direct correlation to hose close to the road they are. But if you're trading in every ~5yr your experience you won't see that because your experience will all be the early failures part of the bathtub curve.
Basically everyone doing all the talking right now doesn't know what they don't know.
But I do have maintenance costs associated with this type of car. It's more things like replacing tires at least once a year (which I think high torque EVs will do even faster), then at about 100k miles they replaced the wishbones / control arms.
Those things get more expensive on high-end cars with things like software damper control, larger rims etc, all of which Tesla (just picking an EV) also has.