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A gas car costs twice as much as a gas car after like 100k miles or so... you end up paying for some random ass shit that broke every couple months. Alternator here, transmission there, radiator, head gasket, O2 sensors, rusted out muffler, injectors... it's not like your gas motor just keeps on trucking forever and doesn't nickel and dime the fuck out of you as it ages. An EV is mainly just gonna lose some capacity as it gets elderly, and isn't likely to have random little repairs as often.
If you ain't super well off, you roll your shit til the wheels fall off, and with an EV, that's just going to mean that the Tesla that goes 300 miles on a charge today, in ten years, is gonna be a Tesla that goes 150 miles on a charge, and there's going to be people that will rock that old ass battery pack for as long as itll keep rocking, and a lot of those packs aren't actually going to get replaced at the age everyone is claiming they will be.
Battery pack might be the whole ass cost of the car, but poo-pooing EVs over it is disingenuous if you ask me.
That 150 mile battery pack is still hugely useful with zero refurbishment as a stationary utility power battery. A Tesla model 3 Long Range (330 mile version) is 75kwh. A brand new Tesla Powerwall is 13.5kwh. So that old 150 mile battery is equal to the capacity of 5 and half brand new Tesla Powerwalls.
There's already a solar power generating company using old Nissan Leaf batteries to store excess generated electricity, then putting that electricity back on the grid at peak times to earn money.
The main counter to that is that EVs are very difficult to repair on your own, so when something breaks, you're going to be taking it to a specialist shop. While you're right in saying that ICE components break, let's not act like electric motors are indestructible pieces of machinery
I have never in my life repaired a car on my own, so that means nothing to me.
Bought an electric car in early 2020. Costs me a few bucks a months to keep charged, tops. I have spent literally 0 dollars on maintenance for it. There are just plain fewer moving parts. It's a battery, an electric motor, and that's about it.
So that's 3.5 years (so far) of paying practically nothing to operate a smooth-driving, quiet vehicle that still gets almost 300 miles per charge and operates primarily off the wind power I buy from my utility company.
I expect to drive this one until it can't hold a charge anymore, and then I'll get another one.
How is an EV harder to repair on your own than an ICE? I think you're wildly underestimating the shade tree tinkerers of the world.
Sure, an EV contains a bunch of proprietary software and configuration, but so do ICE vehicles, and people have been hacking that shit for decades. They'll swap out the whole ass controller if that's what it takes :)
And we all know the ass controller is the most important part.
Only if you can control the whole ass, though. There nothing worse than a half-ass controller. . .
But there is sooo little to break on an EV. Mechanically, they are very simple machines. The only repairs we've payed for on our 2017 bolt has been a set of tires and wiper blades.
Home maintenance is the same (but far less needed). Major maintenance might be slightly more difficult in terms of the parts being heavier, but it's also less common to need to service an electric motor than a combination engine.
Battery lifetimes are specced as 80% capacity remaining. So a 300 mile range becomes 240 miles. Still highly usable.
My smaller battery MX Tesla, after 7 years, has gone from 330km to 308km. The degradation is a lot slower than you indicate.
I'm planning on buying a ~ $20k EV and rock it until the battery can't take me for;m work and back over and I doubt that happens before I sell it to buy a (for realsies) cheap EV truck.