this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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Futurology

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 7 months ago (4 children)
  1. in the currently evaluated year 2023 the battery accounts for 44.1 percent of breakdowns

  2. 3-10 year old combustion cars vs electric cars only having enough registered models to start observing their reliability in 2021

[–] [email protected] 39 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago

volts are volts and watts are watts

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

They already have third-party batteries for ebikes as well as battery repacking services for proprietary batteries.

Hopefully, such services come for cars, assuming we get comprehensive R2R for cars and bikes.

Some ebikes have proprietary stuff like proprietary motors, spokes, and batteries.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (1 children)

they explicitly only compared cars of the same ages, so only 3-4 years for both EV and gas powered

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Every single time my ICE car broke down, it was the 12V battery.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Comments like yours are why I'm trained to not bother reading the articles.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

You should mention the mileage

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

+1…I replaced the 12V battery this year too.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

With how often I read about Teslas falling apart, I kinda wonder if most of the breakdowns are just from those pieces of shit.

If the article says, lemme know. I can't read German.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I could only find the Model 3 in their statistic.

  • Year of registration: Breakdowns per 1000 vehicles
  • 2021: 1.0
  • 2020: 1.3
  • 2019: 4.0

The best value for 2021 is 0.8 by the Audi A4 and A5, whilst the worst is the Toyota RAV4 with 17.6.

Overall they rank the Model 3 with "very low" and "low" rate of failure.

Granted these cars are still pretty young so who knows what that figure will look like in 5 or 10 years.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (11 children)

With how often I read about Teslas falling apart

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Doesn't say from what I understand. It's a short article with a simple point to make. Very German.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Consider what a disservice BMW is doing to the ICE side of the statistics!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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

[–] best_username_ever 23 points 7 months ago (9 children)

EVs are cheaper to buy.

I don't undestand this. My ICE car cost 10k euros in France. Most EVs have a price around 40k. How is it cheaper?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Car insurance doesn't cover breakdowns. EVs are expensive to repair right now.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

EVs are expensive to repair right now.

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I'm sure they'll find a way to make them last exactly the length of the warranty, or come up with some bullshit regular maintenance that's required.

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