People don't care about getting rid of the ICE. They care about power, enough range to get where they want (including recharge time, and the recharging network), and total cost.

Getting rid of the ICE is only an indirect benefit. It makes the car lighter and cheaper. If you don't need gas for anything, then getting rid of it is worth it. However if you need the gas for something (long trips?) then you need it.

> If you don't need gas for anything, then getting rid of it is worth it. However if you need the gas for something (long trips?) then you need it.

Seems likely that it won't be long until 90% of people won't need gas for anything. Just a single doubling of range from current levels, and a reasonably build out of charging infrastructure would do the trick. I'd be surprised if we don't see both of those in the next 20-30 years.

And of course for many people the tipping point will come earlier.

> People don't care about getting rid of the ICE.

People didn't care about getting rid of the horse at first, either.

Mostly because the horse was a rich person's toy that most people could not afford. Horses as farm animals was only really a thing for maybe 70 years, for most the ox was much better: it ate less and was more mild mannered. The American prairie need the faster speed of the horse to make the plow needed work, otherwise they wouldn't use them. Coyboys also used the horse for roundup, both niches that started in the mid 1800s.

My grandpa remembered the horses and didn't miss them at all. They had an ugly temper and you had to feed them daily even if you didn't leave the farm. They were purely a cost sink worse than a car or tractor.

I know it's beside the point, but that's surprising. I live with horses and draft horses by far have the mildest, most gentle temperaments. But then again, they aren't working.

I guess I'd get pissy too if I had to pull a plow all day long :-(

People disagree, people don't want to deal with ICE maintenance.

You bring it in for an oil change every few months, that isn't a big deal. Modern ICEs are very reliable in general, and there are many other parts on a car to break that are common to the EV.

Who changes their oil every few months?

Locations will become more difficult to find once society reaches 30% ev adoption, maybe even less. Much of the 100k mile maintenance programs is because people don't like making the choice.

I'm not sure you understood my point. I was pointing out that oil changes are less frequent than this. I take my ICE in once every two years, and my PHEV even less than that.

It may be true that when 30% of vehicles are EVs, oil change locations will be hard to find, but I doubt it. Even if dedicated oil change chains cease to exist, people will still need tires, alignment, etc, and those shops will presumably provide oil change services.

Regardless, it's going to be a while before 30% of vehicles on the road are EVs — isn't it like 1-2% of new cars sold? If vehicles stay on the road for 20 years, then EVs won't be 30% of the total fleet for a long time.

Globally, 10% of sales are EVs. For the European Union it's 12% and the United States 6%.

The EU has a lot of variance (Sweden 32%) and I assume the USA does too.

https://www.wri.org/insights/countries-adopting-electric-veh...

Average car age in the EU is 12 years.

You change your oil once every two years ? Do your cars die at 40k miles ? ICEs in my experience deteriorate pretty rapidly if you keep driving them on dirty oil

Every two years for the average US car is like 26,000mi oil change interval. Insane they think an oil change every two years is normal.

Synthetic oils can do that.

No expert is going to suggest any normal car should operate for 26,000mi per oil change. Even modern synthetics and modern engines recommend 7,500 or so miles, and can often be stretched for a bit over 10,000mi, but 26,000mi as a normal interval is way beyond that.

My modern car recommends synthetic changes at 7,500 miles by the book. Sending off samples to the labs, it looked good at that point but started to get some bad degradation at about 11,000mi. It would be sludge a little after 15,000mi and would have probably destroyed the engine before 25,000mi

Not all synthetics can do that of course, but some can. There are people who have gone several hundred thousand miles without an oil change and an oil analysis says they are still good.

Oil analysis is about the cost of an oil change for most people and sometimes says change the oil so most people just change the oil. For some it makes sense to do oil analysis.

Please show me a single car manual for an ICE advising a 26,000mi oil change interval or any normal motor oil sold advertising its good for 26,000mi.

Otherwise you're talking about extremely rare one-off cases where someone's car happened to be in just the right environment and built just perfectly the whole time. I'm not talking about "that one time one guy in a forum five years ago said his car lasted 120,000mi without an oil change", I'm talking about normal advice for normal car drivers.

https://www.amsoil.com/ their 25000 mile oil when combined with their bypass filter and regular oil tests.

No OEM car manual says this is recommended.

Crazy to see them recommend it, but they do:

> Normal Service – Up to 25,000 miles (40,200 km), 700 hours of operation or one year, whichever comes first, in personal vehicles not operating under severe service.

That said, this still goes against the person who I was originally commenting about. They suggested going 2+ years between oil changes, and while the mileage does fit here for the average car the timeframe doesn't.

You're also technically 1,000mi short from my ask but I'll grant if it actually is OK at 20,000mi it's probably still OK at 26,000mi.

You missed the bypass filter. If you add that to your engine you can replace the yearly / 25000 oil change with oil analysis, if that comes out okay just change the filters (replacing only the oil in the filter), thus not doing a full oil change. . If you only use their oil then 25000 miles is 1000 miles short.

For most people oil analysis and their filters is more expensive than just changing the oil.

We mostly drive our PHEV. The ICE gets maybe 4k miles/yr. I realize this is less than most, but my point was that changing oil every few months would be very uncommon (and either due to someone driving 20k mi/yr, or a misunderstanding about how frequently it’s needed).

> I realize this is less than most,

It's not just that it's a bit less, it's like a few standard deviations less.

The average US car goes a hair over 13,000mi/yr.

The stores I get tires from haven't offered auxiliary services for the last decade.

Agreed. My point was that the claim that it will become hard to get oil changes is laughable. Even if dedicated shops disappear, other places that offer adjacent services (and have lifts that would make it trivial to do oil changes) would start offering the service.

If oil change places start to disappear the cost for an oil change is going to go way up. Just about any shop will give you an oil change today, see how much more expensive they'll charge for their master certified mechanic to change your oil versus the barely trained fresh out of highschool grad that still needs to always stop and say "lefty loosey..." every time they pick up a wrench.

I don't follow. You think there won't be barely-trained people working in auto shops? The people who put put on tires and do alignments would be pretty similar to the people who do oil changes. They'll just do oil changes in addition to putting on tires.

Yeah, and go to a shop like that and see their prices compared to the places that only do oil changes. They're usually twice the labor price compared to low cost oil change places in my experience.

Even just putting the car on the lift and jacking it up is already more work, requires more training, and has more risk than having someone in the pit at a fast oil change place.

A pit is more risk than a lift. Both have their dangers, but a lift is easy to inspect and tends to have redundant safeties so that it doesn't fail and kill people. A pit by contrast can fill with deadly gas (from the exhaust of the car) that you can't tell are there until someone passes out.

It's not a big deal, but that doesn't mean people do it.

Oil changes are a tremendous burden and expense and this is one of my top three reasons, almost the reason, I bought an EV.

$100 every few months is not what I'd call a tremendous burden. Even dealers when you pay extra for synthetic oil don't charge $100 for an oil change. Quick lube places are all over and are cheaper with no appointment needed.

A super-minor pain point, to be sure. But one that's just gone for me. That's pretty sweet, imho.

The EV still requires tire maintenance-- I think the trouble of dealing with that utterly dwarfs oil changes.

It's one of those things you don't really get until you experience it.

No oil changes. No finding a gas station just to refuel. No worrying about whether the engine is warm enough for setting off in the morning. No smell before the cats light off. Instant heat. Instant torque. Dead silent. The list goes on and on.

After you get used to it, the idea of going back to ICE again is unfathomable. Why would I want to give up the convenience I have now? For road trips? Ha! I have both ICEV and EV at the moment and it is the EV that is the preferred road trip car, not the ICEV.

You actually don't want to wait for your engine to warm up beforehand unless you are going to immediately punch it or go on the highway. Your engine warms up multiple times faster under a light load than it does idling.

Sure, but you have to be aware that it's still cold and it affects how you drive. It affects how the car feels. Is it a huge deal? Nope, not by itself. But it's just another one of those anachronistic things you do today that you will chuckle about in the future.

Tesla owner in California since 2020. For the most part, you don't need an ICE car for long road trips anymore. Even in places like Big Sur, Mendocino, there are superchargers. Even in the worst situations, like near Carmel, rolling up to a supercharger on a busy weekend that's packed, with a line of a dozen cars, you're still in an out in an amount of time I normally see with rest stops. Biggest problem for me has always been just wrangling everyone back into the car!

I've almost never spent longer than 15 minutes charging on long car trips, unless we're also going to a restaurant. And even then, we usually don't have to, and could have made it a 15 minute stop if we wanted to. Most of the time, the car is done charging enough faster than we could stop for coffee, and I have to extend the charge using my app.

That said, there was one occasion in a trip through Big Sur, when the Ventana supercharger went offline, when I did a 45 minute charge session, and I drove 30 minutes out of the way to catch a supercharger on another occasion. So 2 occasions like that in nearly 3 years.

The situation is pretty good now. In another few years, it will be even better!

> Most of the time, the car is done charging enough faster than we could stop for coffee, and I have to extend the charge using my app.

This. The haters think that Level 3 charging takes 60+ minutes. There are times I wish it did. Instead, if I leave my car on the Supercharger next to Denny's and get seated right away, I will finish charging and have to move the car before my food comes. Every time.

Maybe someday we will actually have large numbers of free Level 2 chargers at shops and restaurants, so we can eat a leisurely lunch in peace while our cars charge.

Getting rid of ICE was the #1 factor when I bought an EV. No stinky gas fumes in my garage, no more trips to a gas station to fill up. Worth the premium IMO. ~300 mile range, charge time, and charger network hasn’t been a problem yet.

> my garage

This is one of the big issues. EVs are for the class of people who own houses with garages, in the suburbs of large metros.

The problem with BEVs isn't actually any single vehicle, BEVs really are good enough for anyone, today. The real issue is going to be scaling up battery manufacturing to the point that we make enough for everyone to have a BEV, which really is not as much of a given as people seem to assume.

EV sales are still at only around 20% of the market, which is a lot! But given that the majority of lithium batteries are already going into EVs now total battery production needs to go up by something like a factor of 5 by 2030 just to meet EV sales. That's a huge amount of growth for any industry, let alone high tech manufacturing.

I would not be surprised to see the relative growth of EV sales stall soon as manufacturers have trouble sourcing enough batteries, and in response we may see some Hybrids or EREVs coming onto the market to meet the shortfall. After all, a battery that gets you 50km is good for 90% of trips for a significant number of people, but you couldn't buy it without a range extender because of that last 10%.

> The future of personal transport vehicles is battery-electric, full stop.

If fossil hydrogen ever gets off the ground I still have hope for fuel-cell/battery hybrids. Since they generate water vapor as a side product they'd also be beneficial to a small extent for arid climates.

Hydrogen never took off for good reason. Actually, multiple reasons. Having to build yet another ecosystem for delivery might be the biggest one, though. Whereas we already have a vast network for the delivery of electric power. In fact, one of the most beautiful things about BEVs is that their energy isn't delivered via an expensive and inefficient physical supply chain, like gasoline and presumably hydrogen would be.

People will keep getting ICE cars. Do you know why? Because IT DOESN'T NEED A BATTERY.

The battery is the single most fragile, heavy, dangerous, expensive, stressful ("range anxiety") and annoying component of an EV, and one which degrades at an alarming rate, just by using it normally.

Guess what, a fuel tank doesn't shrink every time you fill it.

And it doesn't shrink even FASTER when you fill it to the top.

Or let it go empty.

Or run in cold weather.

Or hot weather.

Or you drive fast.

Or too slow.

Or when you fill the tank too fast. Where "too fast" is dripping it in for 30 to 60 minutes a pop.

Or when you don't drive the car for too long.

On top of that, the starting range of the top BEV is half an ICE car. That's on a new car, before all the magical "shrinking" happens.

Batteries are WORSE than anything the automobile industry has from the past 50+ years. And people are slowly realizing that.

Batteries aren't worse than having to breathe in exhaust or having my baby wake up at 2am because some idiot decided to rev outside my house.

Ah yes. Nothing better than waking up in the morning and smelling lead, nickel and cobalt from a li-ion battery that caught fire somewhere in your neighborhood. Or in your garage.

About the same as smelling burning tyres and diesel from a car whose tank caught fire.

Not the same at all. First, a gas car doesn't simply catch fire while sitting in a dense parking lot. That's the most likely place for an EV to catch fire, as it's charging.

Second, when a gas car catches fire, it's almost always after a car incident. Firefighters arrive, and put the fire out easily.

Do you know what firefighters do when an EV catches fire? Nothing can stop this fire. Literally nothing. So firefighters have to evacuate everyone at least half a mile in radius. Then let it burn down. Which may take a full day. Or more. Read the protocols.

> First, a gas car doesn't simply catch fire while sitting in a dense parking lot.

What an absolute joker.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-recalls-defects/hyu...

https://apnews.com/article/chevy-silverado-recall-truck-fire...

https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/jeep-cherokee-recall-fi...

https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/recall-chrysler-pacific...

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-recalls-defects/vol...

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/11/25/GM-agrees-to-recall-...

I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and on...

I've owned multiple cars which have had multiple recalls for catching fire while parked. I've had multiple neighbors have house fires from parked ICE vehicles. You're massively wrong for thinking ICE vehicles don't catch fire while parked.

I've had several neighbors houses burn down from ICE vehicles catching fire in their garage in my life. Never an EV though.