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But the overall maintenance is going to cost much more on a well maintained engine. Oil changes, fan belts, flywheels, spark plugs, alternators, starters, etc
by SEJeff 7y ago
But the overall maintenance is going to cost much more on a well maintained engine.
Oil changes, fan belts, flywheels, spark plugs, alternators, starters, etc don't exist in an EV. These are all components I have paid to have replaced in an ICE I've owned. Additionally, if your EV has regenerative braking (such as all Tesla vehicles), it is kind of like an ICE standard "engine braking" resulting in recharging the battery. This results in a much longer lifetime for brakes and brake pads.
My Model 3 requires scheduled maintenance every 2 years and they recommend a tire rotation every 6,000 miles or so. Good luck finding that little maintenance in a traditional ICE vehicle.
This is not the case for all EVs, but for Tesla, the battery is made up of thousands of individual cells which are grouped into individual "packs". The entire battery doesn't just go bad because the entire battery is thousands of small batteries. Tesla now will replace an individual pack that might go bad, making it cost less.
- WillPostForFood 7y agoThis is true, but not what I was responding to, which was parent post about replacement cost. The low maintenance is one of the main reasons I drive a BEV. But the high replacement costs is a major factor in why I lease it.
- clarry 7y ago> This results in a much longer lifetime for brakes and brake pads. My issue with brakes is that they rust because I don't apparently use them enough.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago>But the overall maintenance is going to cost much more on a well maintained engine. Oil changes, fan belts, flywheels, spark plugs, alternators, starters, etc don't exist in an EV. Not to burst your bubble but just because a Tesla has fewer moving mechanical parts that can break in a traditional ICE car does not make it automatically more reliable, it's just that the points if failure are now electrical and mostly silicon based. IIRC there was a story posted here a couple of days ago where someone's Tesla broke down while parked. That doesn't prove anything but just like how in a ICE car a fan belt can fail, so can a flash chip, MOSFET or sensor in a Tesla causing it to break down. Remember when people thought SSDs would be way more reliable than HDDs just on the basis of having no moving parts? Boy were we wrong. The failure rate of(some) SSDs is staggering, just that now it's caused by electrical faults rather than mechanical. Right now we have too few out of warranty Teslas to draw any conclusions about reliability. At least for out of warranty ICE cars there are loads of aftermarket parts and garages that can fix things on the cheap when they break. I'm not sure we can say the same for out of warranty Teslas yet.
- petre 7y agoEven if you throw away part of the energy the engine will work as a brake in generator mode. Trains use this to limit speed down when descending.
- SEJeff 7y agoYes and manual transmission or commercial trucks use this to "engine brake".