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I decided a few years ago that I was sick of standing in the snow at a gas station waiting for the person inside the building to finish selling that lottery ticket and turn the pump on so I can stand there some more babysitting it while it fills up and I freeze. The answer, of course, was to buy a car that didn't need gasoline, one I could plug into the house and go inside where it's warm.
I'm not a rich man, I'm a pensioner who is still paying a mortgage, so I looked for an affordable EV. Used ones are almost nonexistent, and I found out why when I finally bought one: it has a ten year warranty. They haven't been making them much longer than that.
I swore off new cars decades ago when my month old VW stranded me ninety miles from home with a bad alternator, but if you want an EV, new is your only choice. I kept seeing the Chevy Bolt advertised, but could never find one for sale at all. Then I found that they had stopped making them two years earlier.
Why? Well, battery problems, they claimed. Why just the not so expensive one, $30,000? GM is still selling electric Cadillacs and Corvettes, why no cheap cars?
I discovered after buying an EV that the only two advantages of a piston car to an electric one are the lack of infrastructure for long trips, and the high purchase price of the vehicle. Why high? Because only their flagship autos have electric motors, the ones that formerly had V8s.
My car cost $40,000. It's absolutely the nicest, roomiest (except for the minivans) car I ever owned. My Dad had a Checker when I was about ten, they no longer make them. They were designed for taxicabs and I've never seen more back seat leg room than in one. My new Hyundai has more leg room except Dad's Checker than any other car I've ever seen, and although the '74 LeMans was a much bigger car, my new EV is much roomier. It's a lot roomier than the '02 Concorde that was the same size as my new car on the outside. Why aren't the auto companies advertising how roomy EVs are? I never realized how much space engines, transmissions, and gas tanks take up.
I started trying to buy one when I realized that you don't have to babysit them when you're charging. I didn't want to stand there in the snow filling a gas tank, but judging from most Facebook comments I've seen, I must be the only one who realized that. People seem to think you have to stand there when they charge. Why aren't they advertising this benefit?
Why aren't they telling you that your car can now heat your garage, unlike a piston car? Why aren't they advertising the fact that rather than the heat coming on when you get to where you're going, you have heat before you're out of the driveway?
Why aren't they telling you how well EVs handle, thanks to its crazy low center of gravity? Or how much faster they can stop, thanks to having two sets of brakes?
Why aren't they advertising the fact that electricity is five times cheaper than gasoline and diesel? The only way I found out was by buying one.
Why aren't they advertising all the advantages of EVs?
Why are only the top of the line autos like the Mustang or Cadillac EVs? That's an easy question to answer. The automakers are under laws from our and other governments that their fuel mileage average of all the vehicles they sell has to be under a certain number. The easiest way to do that is to make the expensive cars, the ones with big V-8s, electric. When your fastest car doesn't use traditional fuel...
But this, of course, begs a second question: why only the expensive ones? Because they don't want to make electric cars at all. The obvious reason is that they hate EVs. But why do they hate them and love the incredibly inefficient (my car will go 20 miles on the electricity it takes to refine a gallon of gasoline), obsolete Rube Goldberg device with thousands of moving parts to wear and break?
EVs threaten their business model. The businesses are set up so that GM makes almost as much profit from aftermarket parts, like spark plugs, belts, hoses, pumps, and so forth as they do on the cars themselves.
Gasoline and diesel vehicles all need periodic maintenance. They're needy things, expensive to maintain, and the car company gets a cut of every repair of every car they sell. The drive train is a Rube Goldberg mess with thousands of moving, interlocking parts, any one of which fails can cripple the vehicle. A bad fuel pump stranded me in the bad part of town last year, and the repair was nearly $900 not counting the towing charge. The repair shop got half, Pontiac and other companies got the rest.
My new car doesn't have a fuel pump. Or spark plugs, or belts, or fuel injectors, or any of the other moving parts all the other cars I've owned since 1968 had and needed replacing. The motor's shaft IS its drive train! When was the last time your ceiling fan needed servicing?
More than likely that new 1976 Vega that cost $3,000 garnered more than that for GM in aftermarket parts. There may still be some on the road still earning money for GM. An EV has few aftermarket parts; tires, brake pads, windshield wiper blades are all I can think of. Hyundai won't make any more money from my new EV like they would if it had a big six cylinder piston engine.
Which is a shame, because electric motors are all far, far superior to piston engines and transmissions in every way. But the nearly zero cost of maintenance is why the thieving billionaire car companies don't want to sell affordable EVs. In fact, they want to sell as few EVs as possible. If it wasn't for fuel mileage restrictions, Tesla and the Chinese would likely be the only electric cars you could buy.
But isn't this just a conspiracy theory? No, there was never a conspiracy, nothing needed to be said. Those people aren't moral, but they're not stupid, either. Ford and Chevy aren't making cars for a hobby, nor are they charitable organizations. All they care about is profit, and EVs threaten their gravy train.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday December 07 2023, @11:01PM (4 children)
"An EV has few aftermarket parts; tires, brake pads, windshield wiper blades are all I can think of."
That's all you can think of eh?
EV maintenance comparisons always seem to look at 'consumables'; but that's not quite accurate is it?
The vast majority of my households multiple vehicles service expenses over the last 10 years have all been 'issues that would have affected an EV the same - for example
ICE or EV repairs
- headlight assembly replacement due to failure of the beam leveling sensors
- brakelight LED assembly due to failure of some of the LEDs
- sunroof switch
- passenger seat adjustment switch failure
- drivers seat adjustment mechanism jam/derailment
- broken interior trim part (seat recliner hinge cover)
- drivers seatbelt retraction mechanism
- passenger power window switch
- rear passenger door handle (interior)
- hood hydraulic support (the things wot holds the hood open)
- replacement key and programming
- replacement battery to alternator cable (corrosion) -- technically an ICE repair, but i imagine it's possible for a battery lead to a motor to also suffer corrosion
- rear suspension springs
- brake pads (EVs need them less often due to regenerative braking)
- replacement tires (EVs actually need replacement tires more often due to higher weight higher tire wear)
- replacement bulbs
- air conditioning compressor and replacement coolant
ICE specific repairs
- clutch
- o2 sensor
- water pump
- oil changes (including wiper, and hvac filter changes etc -- the latter two apply to EVs)
Look at that list, yeah the consumables are there, but other than the clutch pretty much everything I had to that was expensive could have broken on an EV too. The air conditioning repair and the headlight assembly, those were both upwards of $1500, the replacement key/remote was over $500, the sunroof repair was $800.
ICE manufacturers typically give ridiculously good drive train warranties because honestly despite the complexity they're pretty bullet proof. It's the other shit, so amply represented in my list -- switches and latches and fancy LED assemblies, suspension parts, and air conditioning fans and compressors that breaks that both types of car use.
And then you've got the big consumables in your tires and brakes which both use -- EVs go through pads slower, but go through tires faster. And the tires tend to be more expensive specialty purpose tires.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 08 2023, @04:00AM (1 child)
Wow, that's a lot of things that failed. How many cars & drivers? Are any drivers/passengers what I call "hard on the machinery"? How many of them were luxury cars and from where, Euro/US/Japanese brands?
Here most of the failures happen after years of winter salt and are corrosion related, we have five cars spread over four drivers, newest car is 2014 and all are currently Japanese.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday December 08 2023, @06:14PM
If you separate out the expected consumables (tires, bulbs, pads..) it's 15 repairs in 10 years over 3 cars.
That averages 1 repair every 8 months, or each car needing something fixed once every 2 years.
I don't think its that bad at all. And several of the repairs were ... for user error -- the seat derailment was due to old dried up french fries for example. And the seatbelt getting gummed up was also foreign objects but i can't recall what. The replacement key was just straight up lost. The broken trim was due to kids getting in and out. Two of the repairs were necessary when we bought the cars as the previous owners hadn't done them.
The hood hydraulics -- eyeroll at the 911 -- any sensible car would have just had a one of those little rods you flip up that would never fail. :p But even the Porsche maintenance really has not been worse -- yeah parts cost more, and the shop rate where i take it is higher, but it's just as reliable as the hatchback (which is to say: very)
I know people with EVs that are having the same sorts of feature/trim/interior/electronics issues on their cars. My neighbour had to spend thousands on a computer module of some sort this year. The touchscreen on a tesla only has a 2year warranty I'm told.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Friday December 08 2023, @02:46PM
It's also notable that today's EVs are *not* the dead simple EV conversions we saw in the 90s and early 00s. The big innovation Tesla whipped out is active cooling of the motor stator and rotor. That means those motors have coolant flowing through them and rotating seals. When these seals fail, and they do, stator and rotor corrosion becomes a big problem.
Simplicity drives reliability, and neither ICE or EV cars have that today.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday December 09 2023, @01:47AM
None of which disables the automobile like a bad fuel pump or a slipped serpentine belt, and most of which aren't on all cars.
Are the Republicans really in favor of genocide, or are they just cowards terrified of terrorist twit Trump?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PhilSalkie on Friday December 08 2023, @05:54AM
Bought a December 2016 Model S Certified Pre-Owned from Tesla with 50K miles on the clock, now at 142K. In five years and 92K miles I've had the trunk latch mechanism replaced (Tesla Ranger came to the house to fix it.) Replaced the tires once, ready to do it again. Had the original brake pads replaced because I just wasn't comfortable with brake pads being in service for over 6 years (they still had meat on them, though, and the rotors are perfect.) Just got a warning that the 12V battery needs changed - 7 years in service. That's basically it for the maintenance that's been required. (I _chose_ to have them do a "check it over and change whatever fluids and filters" at 130K miles - but it wasn't required, just for my peace of mind.) There's no rust or corrosion in the aluminum body panels, the car looks perfect save for some center-city scrapes, and I fully expect it to exceed 300K miles without serious issues.
Not an inexpensive car, because it's got full self-drive (beta) and lifetime free supercharging (saved about $5K US in fast-charging costs so far) but can't argue with the operating costs - my power expenses work out to about 4 cents a mile at our expensive city rate of 18 cents a KWH, could easily have been half that if I lived elsewhere in the country. Traction battery and drivetrain still under warranty for another year. House power plan is 100% wind and solar, so fairly low-carbon transport.
Given my druthers, I will never again:
Buy a car from a dealer.
Buy a combustion-engine car.
Buy a car that doesn't have self-drive.
Buy a car that doesn't get over-the-air firmware updates on a regular basis - the difference between the car I bought and the car I currently own is tremendous, many new features and capabilities have been added free-of-charge.
Dealers recognize that there's no money in selling EVs unless they can add up-front markup - there's no regular maintenance to rip customers off with, nor filter change plans to sell. They don't understand EVs, don't _want_ to understand EVs, and do everything they can to avoid selling them.
Once you've spent time driving an EV - Tesla, Chevy Bolt, even a Leaf - when you try to drive a fart-cart, it feels like some combination of a lawn-mower and a 737, noisy and rattly, but has a million buttons that you have to keep track of. Step on the throttle, nothing happens while the engine spools up and the transmission downshifts, then eventually it decides to accelerate. (When Tesla first shipped the Model S, there were a number of front-end collisions with fixed objects, seemed to be due to drivers just stomping their foot to the floor to make the car go, and not realizing that their 4-door sedan would hit 60 MPH in under 4 seconds.) Doesn't fill itself up in the driveway overnight - every time I've had to drive a rental when traveling, I forget that the car's not magically full each morning.
The electricity grid gets cleaner and stronger every year. Fast charging and destination charging infrastructure increases and improves continually - ten years ago, you could count the available chargers between Philly and DC on your fingers, today there are so many you'd be hard-pressed to count them all. Cells and battery packs continue to get cheaper to produce, have higher energy densities, and can be charged faster. There's a constant stream of news articles about this or that battery innovation giving a 10% improvement in one factor or another - as each of those improvements goes from lab to production, that just makes the cells more robust, more powerful, quicker charging, cheaper. And just like utility companies installing solar panels instead of fossil fuel generation because it's now cheaper to stand up solar than it is to buy coal for the plant you already own, the economics will drive the transition faster and faster. Companies will either make the vehicles that take fewer parts and less labor, or they will throw good money after bad and not realize they're sitting on intellectual property and manufacturing capability that is nothing but stranded assets (looking at you, Toyota) and will then fall to bankruptcy and irrelevance.
There were plenty of horse-and-cart people complaining about the automobile when it first came out, and with good reason - but the fairly rapid transition from a rich person's toy machine which required constant tending, adjustment, and maintenance into something which everyone could own and use for pleasure and work meant that horse carts are now a piece of history. It won't be many years until combustion cars are as rare as stick-shifts are today, and at some point soon there won't be enough money in selling fuel to make it worth the trouble of keeping the tanks in the ground, which will only accelerate the demise of conventional cars as it becomes harder and harder to find a gas station. (Survivalists, take note - solar panels on the roof and an electric vehicle means not relying on a long and complex fossil fuel supply chain.)
So far in 2023, BEVs were around 9% of auto sales in the USA - that's over a million units in 11 months. In 2024, likely 15%, and as more manufacturers get production problems ironed out and figure out how to work around their recalcitrant dealer networks, the numbers will continue a steep upward trend.
Interestingly, the US has sold about a million electric bicycles so far this year, as well - electric micromobility is an up-and-coming thing as well, and it doesn't take many commuter e-bike trips to have a noticeable improvement in car traffic flow.
So in 90K miles, maybe one extra set of tires and one less set of brake pads than I would expect on a gas car, no "regular maintenance" oil changes/air filters and the time lost to get that taken care of. No trips to the gas station and associated time spent fueling, some extra time spent on road trips (but most of that time spent is having meals, so it's not particularly painful.) Fuel is much cheaper and very convenient if you can plug in at home, not nearly as nice for most apartment dwellers. After 142K miles, battery range has decreased about 10% from original nominal, still has enough range (285 miles) that I'll want to stop for a leg stretch and bathroom break before I've run out of electrons.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by YttriumOxide on Friday December 08 2023, @06:51AM (6 children)
I find it weird that people always discuss "EV vs gasoline" when there are plenty of really good hybrid vehicles out there.
The main complaint with EVs seems to be range anxiety. Hybrids remove that entirely.
I drive a 2020/21 Ford Kuga PHEV (Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicle). I get 60km of electric driving in summer and about 40km in winter. After that, it switches on the internal combustion engine (it also does that when starting in winter, just to warm up faster).
40km about a typical day of driving for me (take kids to school; go shopping; etc).
This means that for my normal daily driving, it runs pure electric, and I simply plug in again when I get home. A full charge even of this small-ish battery can take a few hours from a normal household socket, but since I'm home and probably not going out again for a few hours, it doesn't matter. If I do happen to need to go out again soon, fine, I'll run on the ICE and burn a bit of petrol, no big deal.
Generally this means I only ever need to fill up the tank when going on long drives or once or twice during winter due to the "warm up" usage. On those longer drives, it's really no different at all to driving a purely ICE vehicle.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday December 08 2023, @03:05PM (1 child)
Plug-in Hybrids never really took off here in the US. The 1 (one) I recall was the Chevy Volt. It cost $10k more than its ICE or EV counterparts and is no longer sold.
Our non plug-in hybrids, e.g. the Prius, have tiny batteries that go a couple of miles at most.
Thee thing to recall is our car companies, by and large, don't want to sell EVs or PHEVs. They just want to meet California's fleet fuel economy standards, and that means selling (usually at a loss) some percentage of those vehicles so they can legally cover the sales of their gas guzzlers. This kind of regulation chasing is the same reason our trucks are two tons heavier and two feet larger than trucks were in the 90s.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday December 09 2023, @01:56AM
My friend's hybrid's motor is called its "transmission" apparently only used to get it up to speed.
Are the Republicans really in favor of genocide, or are they just cowards terrified of terrorist twit Trump?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday December 09 2023, @01:53AM (3 children)
Hybrids' only advantage over gas only is operating cost; you still have none of the advantages of an electric only vehicle, like the one I bought mine for. If they still had full service gas stations I'd probably not have a clue how much better they are than pistons.
Are the Republicans really in favor of genocide, or are they just cowards terrified of terrorist twit Trump?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 09 2023, @02:45AM (2 children)
>Hybrids' only advantage over gas only is operating cost;
That depends on how it is done. Stellantis is supposed to be delivering an electric pickup truck that has a V6 driven generator onboard. No mechanical transmission, that complexity is gone.
No range anxiety even with a relatively small and light and battery pack, the generator is strong enough to drive the electric drivetrain at highway speeds.
It's worth noting that diesel electric locomotives have worked this way for 100+ years. Maybe modern technology can make that technology practical in a pickup truck sized package.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday December 10 2023, @08:33PM (1 child)
There wouldn't be any range anxiety if somebody would install fast public chargers near interstates, either. The gasoline helper engine alone would still have all of the breakable parts to replace, you wouldn't have the extra interior room, you would still have to fuel it, You would still get where you're going before the heater came on...
You miss the point that the lack of a piston engine is what gives an EV all of its advantages. The piston engine is obsolete.
Are the Republicans really in favor of genocide, or are they just cowards terrified of terrorist twit Trump?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 10 2023, @09:12PM
>There wouldn't be any range anxiety if somebody would install fast public chargers near interstates, either.
Maybe for you. Our cross country driving trips specifically avoid the interstates, in large part because services like gas and food are annoyingly overcrowded / slow to serve. Even with 20 minute charge times I couldn't imagine EV charge stations being any better.
>The gasoline helper engine alone would still have all of the breakable parts to replace
Not with a direct drive generator. Also, In 40 years of driving, I have changed a lot of water pumps (also present in modern EVs), alternators (because of their status as a belt driven accessory), hoses, and ignition parts.... Otherwise, those fiddly bits inside the ICE have never given me trouble. Oh, batteries and brake pads / discs, need I say more?
>You miss the point that the lack of a piston engine is what gives an EV all of its advantages. The piston engine is obsolete
In a future that's not here yet, I agree. In this world I prefer to be able to pack and drive my own vehicle on 600 mile trips instead of having to rent one. When we drive more than 1000 miles in a week we tend to rent just to keep the miles off our cars, though rental rates have been climbing lately to the point where that's not as clear of a cost savings anymore.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Saturday December 09 2023, @03:31AM
Late to the discussion, but I've had these questions for several years...
Does anyone here have experience with EVs in cold climates?
"Standing in the snow at the pump" is one thing, but what about when it socks in at 20-30 below zero for, say, 2 weeks? It happens at least once a year at my latitude, and I'm sure more often (and colder) the farther north you go. What is the effect of extreme cold on battery life/starting/performance?
Also, how do the EVs handle blowing and drifting snow, and black ice on the highway? I expect the extra weight helps with crosswind, but how differently does it handle crosswind on packed snow?
Finally, can any current EV handle a 300-mile (with an extra 25-50 miles as a reserve) round trip in late January in a rural northern state?
OK, not finally--It just occurred to me--how do these EVs handle deer collisions? I don't think I know a household in my town that hasn't had at least one "wildlife encounter."