My last breakdown was when all the transmission fluid in my car drained out because the mechanic that did my tuneup didn’t replace the drain plug properly. What tools should I carry in my car to do a complete transmission replacement while on the side of the highway?
Why would you need to carry the tools when they breakdown half as often?
If you look at the statistics other than lightning which is skewed because it includes bulb failures, the top failures aren't really stuff you want to be doing on the side of the road.
Realistically, the only roadside repair the average ICE car comes equipped to do is a tire change. In that regard, EVs are on par with ICE vehicles as far as "roadside repairability" goes.
Combustion engines are super complex. They have tons of parts that move and rub together causing lots of issues. Electric cars have electric motors that use magnets and very few parts. Leaving less to break.
All this tells is car producer haven't reached peak profit yet. As with every product in capitalist humanity, they'll now tweak the quality to be in line with the combustion engine cars. Anyone remember the story about light bulbs? How they'd last almost forever, but it was secretly decided that this is bad, as customers would never need to buy a new one, so they intentionally made them worse. eCars are still too new, so they are not daring enough yet.
Leds bulbs are definitely made to be break in a few 1000 hours. They push them to their max specs so they don't last as long. But this way of course they sell more, no one wants to sell a bulb that lasts 10 years of continuous use.
As always, dependa what you buy. Initially, LED lamps were advertised as lasting 25 years, but nowadays you have much cheaper lamps, and more expensive ones.
GP is actually not totally wrong. The crappy light bulbs of the EVs is called Tesla.
Anyone remember the story about light bulbs? How they'd last almost forever, but it was secretly decided that this is bad, as customers would never need to buy a new one, so they intentionally made them worse.
WTF are you smoking? I think I've replaced 1 led bulb since switching to them 10 years ago.
As far as I know he's talking about the old filament bulbs. And it's actually a myth or at least a bad example of planned obsolescence. It is possible to make a light bulb that lasts virtually forever, but they would be expensive. It was a compromise between lifetime and production costs.
And where do you get those led bulbs? Mine break all the time...
The light bulbs being designed to fail is a myth. Light bulbs can last theoretically forever but when they are extremely dim. Ever seen the centennial light? You need to view it in a darkened room because it produces almost no visible light. The lifespan of a lightbulb is a function of the required brightness and power consumption.
Teslas have one of the highest owner satisfactions. I know a lot of people who have them and not a single one of them has ever told me a major complaint.
They arent the garbage cars you are being tricked into believing they are. It's just that some people hate (for good reason) musk, so every failure they can link to him is going to be posted here.
So you're mistaking hearing about it more with it actually happening more.
Reminds me of the Ohio train derailment...all of a sudden train derailments were front and center and every one of them was being posted to reddit...and then plenty of people thinking that means it was happening way more.
The media currently loves shitting on Tesla because Elon is a dick. The cars aren’t bad and a lot of the issues you hear about were early iteration problems that happen to all hardware manufacturers… that’s why you see a lot of the legacy auto brands backing off production despite the actual sales and adoption numbers. I wouldn’t buy a cybertruck for a few years, but most of their other cars are mature enough to be good purchases that save money over the life of the purchase.
I have a 2017 model s with 107k miles on it that I haven’t had any major issues with. I’ll never go back to an ICE vehicle and am waiting on a good electric motorcycle to hit the market.
Teslas have one of the highest owner satisfactions.
Well, they're excellent dick substitutes. Most of the gearheads I talk to find them to be kinda janky just as a car.
I don't actually have hard data or personal experience either, but any luxury product is going to get great reviews from owners, so that's not much of a help.
But where were you getting the idea that luxury brands were always well liked if it wasn't from data? I have two possible take aways from this: you either just made it up, or you have some data you are hypocritically not providing.
I have pretty strong anecdotal and theoretical data, which is inferior to hard empirical data, but better than nothing. I think most users would agree they've never heard someone say "I've never liked this Gucci bag". It's there to show off, and be proud of, even if it's the exact same bag as a cheaper brand. Even if they don't like it, it's a Gucci bag, and a huge sunk cost, so they aren't likely to admit it.
My impression of Tesla is similar. People buy them to show off. I know people who own cars from the nicer brands like Mercedes-Benz, but to them that's normal and more mainstream brands are cheap crap, so I asked about Lambos. In your data, Porsche is also high up, which makes sense, and maybe BMW. Cadillac is surprisingly low, though.
How convenient that your "theoretical data" supports your point. Unfortunately, my theoretical data - that people think Teslas are bad cars either because they hate Musk or because they think anything that even sniffs of green is some kind of scam and would never admit they are any good - completely contradicts yours.
Oh well, we'll have to use actual data...and look at that, it appears that luxury brands cars are not all well loved, which also contradicts your theoretical data, but not mine.
Convenient? I made my point because of my theory and experience. It would be weird if my reasons contradicted my conclusion. I don't really care what your opinion of my logic is, for the record. I stand by it.
You're allowed your own take on why people like or dislike Teslas, but there's options from other brands if you want to go electric. There's a lot of people that wouldn't buy a Tesla because burning dinosaurs makes them feel like a man, but there's also folks like me who wouldn't buy a Tesla out of quality and price concerns, but who would totally consider a Leaf.
It would be weird if my reasons contradicted my conclusion
You're missing the point. You just came up with a reason to support your conclusion. This isn't data. It isn't even really a theory, it's just an untested hypothesis. Most anyone can do this with any claim, which I demonstrated by doing it for mine as well. Which of ours is more valid? Both sound like reasonable hypotheses, at least IMO.
but there’s also folks like me who wouldn’t buy a Tesla out of quality and price concerns
Sure, but my point is that those "quality concerns" may not be the result of actual quality issues (at least relatively to any other car brand), but because some people don't like Musk, and thus will continually point to anything that makes him look like a failure. This leads to a cognitive bias of people who think that because they are hearing about it a lot, it must be happening a lot (availability heuristics). Or simply, some people don't like Musk and are looking for a reason not to buy a Tesla, so they latch onto "quality" issues they've heard of to justify not liking Teslas, when in reality they don't like Musk.
Don't get me wrong, I was seriously considering buying a Tesla, now it's way down on the list of potential cars I may buy when the time comes. So it's not like I'm trying to get you to buy a Tesla. What I'm trying to ask yourself if it's your bias or reality that is driving your disqualification of Teslas. Certainly, which is a big driver for me, price is a concern.
You’re missing the point. You just came up with a reason to support your conclusion. This isn’t data. It isn’t even really a theory, it’s just an untested hypothesis. Most anyone can do this with any claim, which I demonstrated by doing it for mine as well. Which of ours is more valid? Both sound like reasonable hypotheses, at least IMO.
I don't disagree with calling it a hypothesis. I said theory, which is synonymous in normal language. It's what I had.
It's also true that people hate Musk, and so I need to take what they say about Tesla with a grain of salt. I'm pretty sure I had heard this back when people still thought he was a savior of some sort, but as others have pointed out the cars themselves have changed.
Price is a concern, and for myself open-sourceness and repairability are a concern. Unless it's also anti-Musk hype and I'm misinformed, the Tesla ecosystem is a hell of a walled garden.
I remember reading the quality control stuff was often cosmetic. Like interior trim pieces might fall off, or the exterior body panels didn't align as well as you would like. That was ages ago though. Not sure how they are now. Elon ruined the appeal for me.
Those were problems reported early in the production development process for some lines. It’s not currently dominating the news feed because they have their process fine tuned and that problem doesn’t happen much anymore… at least not any more than any other manufacturers.
It’s like everything you heard about the cybertruck rusting for a few weeks and then found out it had to do with metal dust on the vehicle’s surface from railway shipping. You hear about the problem and the “outrageousness” that it exists at all from the media, then never hear about what the problem actually was, whether they solved it, and whether it continues happening after they execute their fix.
I wouldn’t buy a new line of theirs for 2-3 years to make sure they work through all the manufacturing issues. Ford’s EVs… I wouldn’t buy one of those for 2-3 years after they get to scale production. At this point, it’s looking like that may be a decade, if it ever happens at all. Rivian is closer on the R1T/R1S, but still a few years from scale.
I own a 2018 Nissan Leaf (40kwh). Zero issues, knock on wood. The only maintenance thus far, replace the brake fluid, replace the cabin air filter and before last winter, I decided to mount the Bridgestone Weatherpeak (All Weather) tires. The battery is still 100%. There are less parts involved and no emission control components that a re prone to failure.
I have a 2017 Tesla Model S (100kwh). I had my first maintenance issue this year. The 12v battery needed replacing (it runs the aux systems, just like an ICE vehicle) but didn’t keep me from driving while it was sending the error code. 107k miles and it’s mostly been wiper fluid, wiper blades, and 2 tire changes. I need to replace my windshield, but electrically and mechanically speaking… no major issues.
I'm very excited by the prospect of aftermarket batteries with better technology. This doesn't get discussed super often, but as an owner of a gen 1 leaf with an aging battery, I've very excited by this.
To sum up the premise: volts are volts and watts are watts. So long as can get something with a comparable battery controller into the right size and shape and space, its basically arbitrary what technology is making the angry pixies go from - to +.
This opens the door for range improvements to much older EV's.
If you tell me this while I work on electrical problem on these vehicles I'll shit yourself.
My shop spent a month yelling at our parts because they said "the alternator has the same electrical requirement. Why wouldn't it work?" We put it in, and it didn't work. Wow crazy! Did you know signals are just pulses. These shit ass companies can make it so if you use anything but proprietary garbage it just won't work.
I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at Ford once again being your typical company.
A total of 156 vehicle series from around 20 car brands were evaluated in the current breakdown statistics. All breakdowns during 2023 that affected vehicles between three and ten years old (first registered from 2014 to 2021) were taken into account. In order to be used statistically, the series must have at least 7,000 registrations in two years . If this requirement is met, all vehicle model years with at least 5,000 registrations will be displayed.
For context they seem to be specifically referencing the 12V "starter" battery not the HV battery used for the traction drive in EVs with that 44.1% figure.
Additionally this figure seems to include all vehicles in the statistic, so some part of that is contributed by ICE vehicles.
The logical follow on from this is that EV owners should have cheaper car insurance. With far fewer moving parts they will also have much cheaper maintenance costs. Added to that EVs are cheaper to buy.
China has reached the point where 50% of new car sales are EVs much quicker than anyone expected. Most people thought that was years away, but we're already there. How soon before people start talking about a "death spiral" when it comes to gasoline cars?
Relevant Data
Per 1,000 vehicles of 3 year old cars
ICE 6.4
BEV 2.8
The ADAC even noted a growing lead for electric cars in recent years. The analysis was based on the more than 3.5 million call-outs made by ADAC breakdown services last year
Citation please. I have an EV and a gas powered truck. My truck is a hole in my wallet that bleeds money. In the entirety of the time that I've had my EV, I've had to.. get the breaks done.
Same manufacturer (Nissan), same-ish years.
Also have you had an ICE vehicle repaired recently? They too are extremely expensive to be worked on.
Thanks. So if we take that headline statistic of a repair being 29% more expensive for an EV.
Lets call the average cost of a repair 1k (just for easy math). The same repair on an EV would be 1290.
This is the cost disparity for an individual repair.
We can update that with the data from this article, that EV's need to be repaired half as often. Lets say you need to do a 1k repair approximately once per year for an aging vehicle.
The EV cost per average repair per rate per year would be at ~645, while the ICE vehicle would be 1k, and would represent a 35% savings over the lifetime of the vehicle.
What would be particularly interesting to me would be more understanding of when in the lifetime of a vehicle these repairs need to be made. Are EV's more 'steady' than ICE in terms of repairs? Are they more 'frontloaded' and random? Like a bad battery controller, or whatever, and the thing just goes in short order.
Ice vehicles are predictably 'rear loaded' in time when it comes to repairs, just because you have a big hot box of shit slamming around needing lubricant and heat dissipation, and that can only go on for so long before something wears out. Just having fewer moving parts with lower heat dissipation requirements seems like such a significant advantage in the shorter and longer term.
Even without a source I can see how ICE vehicles are cheaper to repair (assuming you don't have some high-end expensive car. I had a relatively "new"-ish engine replaced in my ICE vehicle (I'll let you guess the make/model) for just under $2,200, this is including labor.
ICE vehicles are "old tech" and everyone knows how they work and where to source cheaper (new or rebuilt) parts. All bets are off if you're working directly with a dealer when trying to save money.
I'm looking forward to owning an EV at some point, but will definitely need to find someone who's competent whenever any major issues appear. Hopefully by then they're significantly more common and the industry has more people that are competent at that type of work.
If you just look at sticker price, it seems dumb to think of buying an ev. Think about all of the money you spend on top of that 10k initial purchase for an ice vehicle for maintenance and energy. Add up all of the expense associated with the car over the amount of time you use it. Now look at all of the cost associated with an EV. If the cost of the ice vehicle is less, buy that. If not, buy an ev.
I’ve saved around 2-3k a year on gas alone since I bought my ev. My electric rates are less than a third of what I was spending on gas. Never have to change the oil or flush a radiator either. If I drive it for around 1 more years, I’ll be saving money on the total purchase. If I drive it another 8 years, I’ll have saved more money than the total cost of the vehicle.
It’s all dependent on how much you buy it for, the tax incentives you can get, how much you drive, and where you can charge on whether it’s right for you. It’s not right for some and is a no-brainer for others.
That's.. that's not a car. Don't get me wrong I like that thing a lot! But it's not a fair comparison, even Citroen calls it a 'light quadricycle' or something like that, and I would say 8k€ is a bit expensive for a comfy electrical scooter you need a parking spot for.
Well, look, I don't know what the French car market is like, but Dacia Sandera starts from €16k here in the UK (£13,795), so I have no clue which car you can buy for €10k. Ami is pretty much the only choice and it's fully electric, even if it's a quad bike. Also the new Dacia Spring EV is just £1k more expensive than Sandera. So yeah, no excuse to drive an ICE car.
I'm not French, nor I live there, either, but a friend of mine bought a Hyundai i30 like 1-2 months ago under 12k€. There are plenty of second hand cars under 10k.
And I would say there are some excuses for ICE cars yet, for example virtually everybody in my country lives in an apartment, so unless charging stations are set up every 5 meters on all sidewalks (and in my neighborhood sidewalks are VERY narrow, some of them barely half a meter) most people are just bound to our polluting metal monsters.
I think it's fairer to compare new cars to used cars than new cars to new not-cars like the ami. Also I missed the part on the thread where it was specified anything about the car being brand new.
The logical follow on from this is that EV owners should have cheaper car insurance.
Yet I see a future where EVs will account for a rise in T-bone accidents. You are saved from red light runners more often because ICE have a slower acceleration. Now imagine everyone has an EV with massive acceleration from a stop. We will see many more people being hit by red light runners.
Are you saying the victims increased takeoff speed will increase their chance to be struck by someone running a red light?
My understanding is that most the time someone runs a red light, they didnt stop first and then accelerate at top speed through it before it turned green.
I could be wrong about that though
