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Everyone I know is jealous of EVs but can't afford one. Regular cars break down all kinds of dumb ways and there's great deals to be had if you can fix simple shit. EVs the battery just goes eventually and there's an inevitable ~$5k bill so that's kinda the price floor. Not much else to go wrong. 30 year old gas car I'm driving was $100 to haul out of someone's yard and $600 to get back on the road
Statically, that's not true, and is bordering on decades-old fear mongering about EVs.
In modern EVs, the battery will likely outlast the car body it is sitting installed in, or at least match the expected lifespan of the vehicle. There are a few EVs on the road right now with battery packs that have been driven many hundreds of thousands of miles.
The upfront cost of EVs is still a problem, but most people won't need to spend thousands on a new or refurbished battery pack after a few years.
Here's a well-made (and broadly pessimistic) source if you're interested: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01698-1
All coming from one PR firm in NY botting Reddit and Youtube.
Every month some Boomer tells me how my hybrid battery wiill last 2 years and cost $50,000 to replace.
Meanwhile, it has an 8 year warranty and in 8 years I saved enough $$$ that the car is free. Math, bitches.
Statistically you're using statistics wrong, that's my directly observed experience of vehicle salvage and the extreme low end of the used market. Show me a $1k EV that's still usable. Much less than 5 or so is because it needs a battery that costs around that. I've stripped packs for cells and know what even a dead core goes for/how common they are too. "Expected lifespan" is unsustainable nonrepairable anticonsumer bullshit whatever tech it's applied to, some of us are still trying to use this stuff after the lease is up and warranty's expired.
One of the reasons auto dealerships hate EVs is they are cheaper to maintain (about 2/3 the cost) and are projected to have much longer vehicle life spans since there's no internal combustion engine to fall apart.
This means repeat sales and service for EVs is substantially lower for electric vehicles. Imo if auto dealerships think they'll make less money on EVs that suggests they think EVs are actually the long term affordable option.
An internal combustion engine doesn't just fall apart though. It's a collection of smaller, less expensive parts that wear and fail and can be replaced. A monolithic, proprietary battery that must be replaced as a unit is much closer to what you're describing. What you're saying about sales and service is absolutely true for the first owner and there are even bonus maintenance pros like pretty much never having to do brakes, but that's not what I'm talking about. Same as I told the other guy, link me the cheapest EV you consider usable. It's going to cost at least as much a battery. If it doesn't, it needs one. There are potential answers to this like battery standards, modular designs, recycling programs but no one seems to push for them, electric=green, problem solved, back to consuming
Batteries don't just fall apart or stop working. They very slowly lose capacity over many charge cycles, but they very rarely just stop working. Actually, total failure of a battery pack is a lot less likely than catastrophic failure of an IC engine if something goes wrong. And I'm sorry, but engines eventually do need to be replaced, too, if you intend to keep driving the vehicle. Most people don't, though, because the cost to replace or rebuild an engine typically exceeds the value of the vehicle by a lot. The labor alone is $$$. And if you look at the lower cost of maintenance, and vastly lower cost of charging vs fuel over the lifetime of a battery pack, the cost to replace one ends up being far lower than what you will spend maintaining and driving an equivalent ICE vehicle for the same amount of time.
Yes, there are up-front costs, but they've come down a lot, and you can get a lightly used EV for a lot less than you probably think.
Lot of words, no sub–$5k EV listings. Again, my car was $700, 1 to own it 6 to fix the engine. Not at all hypothetical. I have a pretty solid idea what a used one costs and can find ICE beaters ~$500 all day. Post em if you've got em
If you have the skills and tools to repair and rebuild junkers on your own, that's great for you. The vast majority of people do not, and the economic reality is that the total cost of ownership in that case does not tilt in favor of ICE vehicles. Sub $5K? Probably not right now. Sub $10K? Absolutely. And to most people that's an amazing deal for a vehicle that will probably last at least 10 years with very little maintenance costs. That may not seem like a deal to you personally, but that was not the point.
My dad's a mechanic, most cars get junked at engine failure because it requires a ton of labor to rebuild an old engine. While there are a lot of parts, pulling an IC engine out for repare is not a cheap task.
Like battery tech tends to improve over time. It being both the major constraint with the cars and the most frequent large replaced part means there's a chance that when you do swap the batteries out your vehicle range increases beyond its original range. Imo thats a selling point.
I'm your new dad, the world has changed, and some idiot with a socket set and can-do attitude (hi) is 100% saving most of those junked cars. I've pulled motors with hand tools in gravel lots before and will likely get stuck doing it again. This is hell and the choices a lot of people face aren't about which new thing would be better to buy. There is absolutely no sub–$5k EV market and if you're clever and patient you can get a "junked" ICE car going for free
In the future, there will be more EV repair shops and aftermarket battery packs, but right now, these cars do not last as long as ICE on roads and that negates any green claims. Wrecker Tesla motors are cheap because there are so many of them.
It's worthwhile to run all the figures through a spreadsheet.
I borrowed money to get one. The savings justify the interest. Mine will break even this year after 5 years. After that, it's pure savings, so I really couldn't afford not to.
They make a lot of sense for a lot of people, but less the lower end you go or more remote you live with a pretty solid floor ~$5k. Again, my car was less than 1
I’m usually on the other side of this argument
But yeah, in the us we’re not “over the hump” yet. There are still few EV models, selling for too much, and all the exciting announcements for next year have been cancelled. We’ve slowed the buildout of trip chargers and may have entirely stopped trying to find charging answers for apartments, condos, street parking. Worst of all the politicizing of EVs and cancelling the incentive means we are also not building a used EV market. Sure, there are cheap used ones now as a consequences of supply and demand, but that will constrict again with the pullback of new vehicles, while the existing used fleet rapidly obsolesces
Lot of downvotes, not one link to a sub-5k EV. "Anyone with their own home" and "batteries stay useful through 15 years" demonstrate an unimaginably privileged lifestyle from here. I rarely see vehicles that new and often end up sleeping in my car, which again cost less than a grand, a rounding error in your household budget. There are no EV options anywhere near this price point. The best deal I've ever seen was $950 for a Leaf self-estimating 30 miles of range. Refurbished small battery $4k, big one 6. The politicization is dumb as hell, both in terms of people they'd be a perfect fit for refusing to even consider them and the tribal immune response I got pointing out the high price floor has left me behind