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Plastics. I think Plastics are going to be the biggest maintenance surprises in EV lifetimes. We tend to think of plastics as "forever products" but most plast

Plastics. I think Plastics are going to be the biggest maintenance surprises in EV lifetimes. We tend to think of plastics as "forever products" but most plastics are only truly guaranteed/rated for 15-20 years of active use. They just degrade in weird ways compared to other materials we expect to last. (And just being in a car dealing with all sorts of finger touches and all the jostle and motion of a moving vehicle can be quite "active use".) My first car was an ICE I sold near its 15 year birthday. I severely under-utilize my cars, so it was still under 70K miles. The biggest push for me to sell and replace it was that the plastic knobs for its manual A/C controls had all started to break (and I was using pliers to adjust A/C, which is not fun, and quite dangerous while on the road), and even the manual window cranks were starting to have issues, and even the glove box was plastic and started to get real finicky about opening/closing. Most EVs use touch screens and a lot of automatic controllers so there's fewer "common touch" plastics in an average EV than that first car I had, fewer manual knobs and cranks that can break, but there's still plenty of plastics holding up those touchscreens and in cup holders and other glove boxes/drawers/shelves/containers throughout the cabin interiors. Most of that is "aesthetic" problems that don't truly impact the operation of the car, but as the user of the car you spend most of your time dealing with the cabin interior and problems with the cabin interior are easy to notice and easily become annoyances. Cars aren't built to modularly replace the cabin interior (unlike some RVs which experience some of these same problems as they age but there's something of a market in refurbishing them every decade or so), so often the limits of cabin interior quality will be the "surprise" limits on car lifetime. (ETA: Just to underscore, as my ICE example suggest, plastic degradation is not a new problem at all to cars, I just think that the circumstances that lead to it being a problem to me in ICE vehicle were unusual enough, because of low mileage. A high mileage ICE vehicle has a lot more problems to deal with before anyone even notices the plastics issues in the cabin interior. An EV even with high mileage may not have anywhere near as much in the way of serious maintenance problems, so plastics degradation may be the first maintenance issue some owners see/experience.)

sebastien_b 4y ago
> We tend to think of plastics as "forever products" but most plastics are only truly guaranteed/rated for 15-20 years of active use. They just degrade in weird ways compared to other materials we expect to last That was the case for one of my cars, but only for a rarely used part: the push button for the release of the fold-down rear seats. Being exposed to the sun all the time (via rear window) caused them to deteriorate after about 7-8 years to the point where they had a huge hole in the middle of them (otherwise flat button). But plastic in the rest of the car, when I eventually got rid of it at about 11 years old, was still all fine. That said, I think more modern cars are more tolerant of environmental degradation (vs. from daily average use) now.

sebastien_b 4y ago

> We tend to think of plastics as "forever products" but most plastics are only truly guaranteed/rated for 15-20 years of active use. They just degrade in weird ways compared to other materials we expect to last That was the case for one of my cars, but only for a rarely used part: the push button for the release of the fold-down rear seats. Being exposed to the sun all the time (via rear window) caused them to deteriorate after about 7-8 years to the point where they had a huge hole in the middle of them (otherwise flat button). But plastic in the rest of the car, when I eventually got rid of it at about 11 years old, was still all fine. That said, I think more modern cars are more tolerant of environmental degradation (vs. from daily average use) now.