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> Analysts say claims costs are 25% higher for electric cars, and that they also take about 14% longer to repair than a diesel or petrol equivalent. That seems
by rdtsc 3y ago
> Analysts say claims costs are 25% higher for electric cars, and that they also take about 14% longer to repair than a diesel or petrol equivalent.
That seems odd. One of the main things about having an electric vehicle was supposed to be theirs reliably and simplicity compared to the complexity of an internal combustion engine.
At the same time insurance actuaries figured something out that is counterintuitive to the general expectations around EVs. Do people in EVs drive more dangerously? I can see the repairs being more expensive due to needing specialized skills, but it would seem higher reliability should have offset that, but perhaps it didn’t.
- Uvix 3y agoThe reliability under day-to-day usage is higher, but the costs of repairs for issues under ordinary use are borne by the owner. Insurance is only concerned with the repair costs for catastrophic accidents, which involve far more than just the engine.
- coderenegade 3y agoI'd put money on it being the difference in failure modes between an ICE and a BEV. If there's even the whiff of a possibility that the battery has been compromised, that's probably a write off. Prangs that wouldn't phase an ordinary car suddenly make a future thermal runaway a possibility, and you have to eat the loss of the value of the car. I'd also question the whole reliability angle. In my current car, the engine is comfortably outlasting the electronics, because engines are easy to service and maintain. The equivalent doesn't really exist for electronics. You aren't going to rewind an electric motor every service interval; you just use it until it fails and then replace it. But the whole point of servicing is to prevent those failures before they happen. And a maintained engine probably lasts longer than electrical components that don't have preventative maintenance done on them.
- rdtsc 3y agoThe failure mode makes sense to me. The battery pack replacement, motor replacement, blocks of electronic control systems and so on. Yeah, those would cost quite a bit.
- RhodesianHunter 3y agoI have to imagine the availability of replacement parts and skilled mechanics are contributing factors.
- gizmo 3y agoGas cars are very safe to work on relative to EVs. Electric car batteries are very dangerous when damaged, and any high voltage work requires extreme caution. The whole simplicity argument for electric cars was just a marketing spiel. Every car manufacturer has to make trade-offs between production and assembly costs and repairability. Tesla has made perfectly reasonable choices that optimize for cheaper production but that also result in 10k repair bills for fender benders. Another issue is that EVs are very high torque, much like motorcycles and go carts. Teslas especially so. Most people are poor drivers and not capable of driving cars like that safely. People tend to panic and hit the throttle instead of the brake pedal when the torque takes them by surprise. More crashes -> higher insurance premiums.
- rdtsc 3y ago> The whole simplicity argument for electric cars was just a marketing spiel. That's what it feels like, at least with the current models. With IC cars there can still be a choice replacing the larger system, or spend more in labor to open it and replace just the broken inner component. When EVs were starting up I thought, given the touted simplicity, we'd have cheaper models, for say $8-10k or so, with a higher reliability. It turns out they are more or just as expensive to buy and maintain. The cheapest Chevy Bolt is $26k, while a Honda Civic is $23k.
- lithos 3y agoEverything part of an electric car is filled with DRM and anti repair bullshit. So even if it should technically be easier to repair, it's not.