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As long as maintenance isn't yet eating you alive, there's no new car at any price that is going to have a better TCO. But if you were getting a new car to las

As long as maintenance isn't yet eating you alive, there's no new car at any price that is going to have a better TCO. But if you were getting a new car to last a long time, it's tough to beat a compliance EV. Chevy Bolt, 260 miles of range, small but not tiny, great utility, and 26K before rebates. $11K after rebates if you're an Oregonian. Fuel is much cheaper, TCO is basically impossible to beat.

sbierwagen 4y ago
As long as it doesn't burst into flames: https://www.chevrolet.com/electric/bolt-recall https://www.chevrolet.com/electric/bolt-recall Tesla famously started building their packs out of laptop 18650 cells. To keep the voltage out of the kilovolt range while still being able to draw useful amounts of power you have to connect huge numbers of them in parallel-- the old model S had 74 in parallel. DIY battery pack HOWTOs will flat out tell you that you can't connect cells in parallel at all, while Tesla is connecting dozens of them together. Presumably they have to go to great and awful lengths to characterize/bin the cells, maintain QC during manufacture, keep pack temperature constant to avoid hot spots from aging single cells, lots and lots of balance wires to carefully charge sub-sections, etc etc etc. GM saw all this early adopter crap, and all the extra weight from the redundant steel casings on each cell, and say screw that, let's use really big lipo cells. Well, you still have all that variability and inconsistency... just hidden inside a big polymer pouch where you can't see it. Recipe for unexpectedly going fwoosh in the middle of the night while charging. GM's new Ultium platform still uses LG lipo cells. Let's hope they worked out the kinks!