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> Which is understandable, ICE cars have 2000+ moving parts and tons of repairs, EVs have 20 moving parts and zero repairs. This is wildly exaggerated, as in c

by jjav 3y ago

> Which is understandable, ICE cars have 2000+ moving parts and tons of repairs, EVs have 20 moving parts and zero repairs. This is wildly exaggerated, as in completely made-up. The only significant difference is combustion engine internals vs. electric motor, which has a large difference in moving parts. But not two orders of magnitude. The thing is, the ICE has had well over a century of perfecting, so while it is a lot more complex, it is so mature that stuff does not break. In over 35 years of owning many many cars, the number of times I've had an ICE internal component go bad is.. zero. Statistical noise aside, that's not a thing anymore and has not been since the 60s/70s. The car that I've had which has spent by far (far) the most time at the dealer for repairs, was an EV. Nothing to do with the powertrain, just the usual stuff that breaks on cars like window regulators, electrical switches and hatch actuators. All things that are exactly the same regardless of ICE or EV powertrain.

theshrike79 3y ago
OK, separate the drive train and just focus on the engine. That's completely fair. All engines need to distribute power to the wheels and those parts are identical. If we don't count the ball bearings, an EV has 1 moving part. A combustion engine easily has an "order of magnitude" more components. And I'm not even counting the gearbox here, which - in a modern automatic car - is clockwork levels of crazy gearing and technology.
- 01100011 3y ago
  My father in law is a mechanic. He just changed a cooling pump and coolant on an EV. There are also other motors to actuate various components.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    The actual engine is just magnets and driveshaft. Very little can go wrong. It either works or doesn't. A combustion engine has camshafts and pistons and valve lifters and timing chains (or belts) and dozens more. Every single of those moving parts is a potential failure mode. Add to that all the electronics and sensors we need to run a modern combustion engine, the complexity goes up exponentially. Granted, we have been perfecting the metallurgy and construction of combustion engines for 100 years so they're amazingly reliable considering they work by inducing thousands of explosions a minute while every part moves at insane speeds.
    - 01100011 3y ago
      I keep hearing about these things from people telling me how great it is that EVs have so few moving parts yet in almost 3 decades of owning ICE vehicles I've never had to do more repair work under the hood than change a starter, a water pump and an alternator(once each). I've been stranded thanks to bad software, but that's not specific to ICE. Owning an ICE isn't all that much work. Oh wait, oil changes, but those are pretty easy.
      - theshrike79 3y ago
        The last time I owned an ICE vehicle (a diesel VW Passat station wagon) I had to replace during the 4(?) years I owned it: - Diesel Particulate filter - Turbo - Clutch - Dual-mass Flywheel - Radiator Each was 1000-2000€ except for the radiator. The DPF would've been a 2k€ operation, but I found a sketchy mechanic who just drilled it out and chipped the car to think the DPF was just fine. I paid in cash, didn't get a receipt =) Then a tiny hex shaft broke in the bottom of the engine. It was the only thing running the oil pump to the engine and the only official repair was to replace the whole bottom part of the engine as a whole. Estimate: 2000€++. It was fixed with liquid metal or something by a different sketchy car mechanic and I sold it immediately.
      - magicalhippo 3y ago
        It isn't more work until it is. Modern ICEs have been refined for over 100 years. Most are very reliable. But if a timing belt or valve breaks, or the automatic transmission, or... yeah you're looking at a very, very expensive repair most of the time.
        user_7832 3y ago
        Yeah, a well maintained reliable ICE engine isn't a problem but once issues start coming, they don't stop.
        theshrike79 3y ago
        And there's the "well maintained" -bit. Unless you know to do it yourself, you're gonna get gouged by Jiffy Lube or something.
- Someone 3y ago
  > If we don't count the ball bearings, an EV has 1 moving part. They have four wheels (with, if you’re nitpicking, have many parts: the wheel itself, the tire, disc brake, brake pads, electronics for ABS, screws to put them together), and suspension (probably a more heavy one than ICE cars), don’t they? (and doors and a trunk that can be opened, and handles to open the doors and trunk, and a steering wheel that has to be turned, and sun visors, and fans for cooling and heating, and, for modern cars, AC, likely with moving parts, and probably a few more moving parts)
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    The "EV" was referring to the electric motor. We're talking about engines here, not the moving parts in the seats. The actual electric MOTOR has one moving part. An internal combustion engine has hundreds or thousands, depending on the model.
    - Someone 3y ago
      Sorry, misread your statement because it used the term EV incorrectly and replied to a statement that said the number of parts in an engine doesn’t matter because that tech is so well-understood that it rarely breaks down. Because of that, I think saying the engine has only one moving part isn’t a good argument in a discussion of “Electric cars require much less maintenance than ICE cars”
    - jjav 3y ago
      > An internal combustion engine has hundreds or thousands, depending on the model. Can you tell me which ICE has thousands of moving parts? I've rebuilt several engines and can't think of anything that comes close. In fact I have a fully disassembled (top and bottom) 4 cylinder engine sitting in the garage as a long term project and I'm pretty sure it's less than a hundred parts, although I haven't really counted. Certainly not multiple hundreds.
    - singleshot_ 3y ago
      There's a manner of thinking wherein a car's engine is a part that you replace if it breaks. The fact that it has a lot of components inside it does not matter, from a certain point of view. One or a million, if it breaks, you yank it and replace it. Another point of view of course is that each piece is one more way to break.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
giva 3y ago
> The thing is, the ICE has had well over a century of perfecting Just a reminder that EV has had well over a century of perfecting too.
- Toutouxc 3y ago
  You know perfectly well that that isn't true. There wasn't any perfecting going on because the relevant class of EVs simply didn't exist and wasn't technologically possible for most of that century.
  - mythhabit 3y ago
    Electric motors have had well over a century of research, development and production. Same with batteries and specifically lithium batteries has been commercially available for over 3 decades.
  - giva 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl... A combination of battery and electric motor is an obvious solution for powering a vehicle. This is nothing new, revolutionary or disruptive. It has been tried many times before and has always failed for certain reasons. It will win, but not overnight.
Tade0 3y ago
> The thing is, the ICE has had well over a century of perfecting, so while it is a lot more complex, it is so mature that stuff does not break. Actually, it's so mature that it breaks exactly when the manufacturers want it to - after warranty. Just like you can optimise a 3D-printed shelf to have a shape that's almost fully load-bearing and thus uses less material, you can produce a part that can be stressed a certain number of times before it breaks. This practice crossed some kind of threshold in the latter half of the last decade, because every manufacturer is now in on it. So cars are indeed "getting worse", because the margins of reliability are now much thinner than e.g. 20 years ago.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Which is a problem why ? Is it such a cartel that there is no competition on providing marginally more expensive parts with a meaningfully longer warranty ?
- jjav 3y ago
  > Actually, it's so mature that it breaks exactly when the manufacturers want it to - after warranty. Not sure, all of my cars are way out of warranty (in nearly every case I've bought them way out of warranty already) and they keep going strong. But you say the latter half of the last decade, so perhaps. My newest car is a 2013 (oldest is 1988).
thelastgallon 3y ago
> In over 35 years of owning many many cars, the number of times I've had an ICE internal component go bad is.. zero. Statistical noise aside, that's not a thing anymore and has not been since the 60s/70s. If ICE cars never fail, I wonder what all the auto mechanics are doing? 282,637 automotive repair companies are currently in business, with 614,433 employees. How are they surviving is nobody is getting their ICE cars repaired? I've had interactions with a few hundred people (at least) over 2 decades and every single person had their ICE car in the shop for repairs, small and large. ICE cars also have major scheduled maintenance, somewhere around 90 - 120K, you have to replace timing belt and a bunch of things. Car dealers don't make any money on selling new cars. Nobody buys a new car unless its priced a few thousand below MSRP (the past 2 years are an aberration). Dealerships make money on service. This is the same model as inkjet printers. ICE cars are so horribly unreliable and bad, even new ones, there exist special laws just for them: lemon laws.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  > ICE cars are so horribly unreliable and bad, even new ones, there exist special laws just for them: lemon laws. Cars in general are complex and expensive, Tesla EVs run afoul of lemon laws all the time: https://insideevs.com/news/433383/tesla-warranty-repairs-goodwill-lemon-laundering/ https://insideevs.com/news/433383/tesla-warranty-repairs-goo... > 282,637 automotive repair companies are currently in business, with 614,433 employees. How are they surviving is nobody is getting their ICE cars repaired? Collisions. The most expensive repair I've had is bodywork after a small fender bender. Way more expensive than maintenance or even pretty substantial repairs like an alternator replacement. That's not to say that ICE cars don't ever need repairs for mechanical failures, but for such a complex machine they're extremely reliable.
- jjav 3y ago
  > If ICE cars never fail Well I never said that. I said that components of the IC engine itself fail exceedingly rarely (in my personal experience, never). "The car" is a far greater system than just the engine or motor. The powerplant (IC or electric) is a tiny percentage of the car as a whole. It's all the other stuff that fails and keeps cars in the repair shop. My second EV spent multiple weeks at the dealer to fix a window regulator that kept failing. Other things that often fail are electronics, actuator motors, wiring glitches, shocks, etc. All parts which are common to all cars, regardless of how it happens to produce horsepower. > ICE cars are so horribly unreliable and bad, even new ones, there exist special laws just for them: lemon laws. Ok you're clearly biased, since the above is not true. Lemon laws are not specific to ICE cars. They apply to EVs and plenty of EVs get repurchased due to lemon law criteria. I personally know someone who lemon law'd a Tesla. Lemons laws trigger if a new car spends an inordinate time at the dealer being repaired for whatever reason. Our EV (with the window regulator problem) came within a week of meeting lemon law criteria.
anarticle 3y ago
I think for very well maintained and new cars, maintenance is low. For a normal human used car, there are unknown unknowns! :D Consider the engine + transmission + exhaust + fuel, many moving parts all that can cause a fail closed of your car. Fuel system alone has a pump, filter, injectors, injector booster (looking at you bmw!). All that goes in the trash. I will grant that EVs have new exciting things like coolant loop and pump for batteries so we don't get off that easy. Zero belts however, not a timing anything in sight, and the old coolant vs oil battle for heat movement is over. Transmissions too can be a huge source of pain, modern ones are great, but if you end up with something <2012 or a CVT, who knows what could go wrong? Ton of solenoids, some fluid that can burn, for CVTs a lame belt... It's a lot, EVs totally simplify that. In my mind my biggest worry is that all that stuff is software controlled now, which could be better but might be worse if we look at the average quality of code...

by jjav 3y ago

theshrike79 3y ago

OK, separate the drive train and just focus on the engine. That's completely fair. All engines need to distribute power to the wheels and those parts are identical. If we don't count the ball bearings, an EV has 1 moving part. A combustion engine easily has an "order of magnitude" more components. And I'm not even counting the gearbox here, which - in a modern automatic car - is clockwork levels of crazy gearing and technology.

01100011 3y ago
My father in law is a mechanic. He just changed a cooling pump and coolant on an EV. There are also other motors to actuate various components.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  The actual engine is just magnets and driveshaft. Very little can go wrong. It either works or doesn't. A combustion engine has camshafts and pistons and valve lifters and timing chains (or belts) and dozens more. Every single of those moving parts is a potential failure mode. Add to that all the electronics and sensors we need to run a modern combustion engine, the complexity goes up exponentially. Granted, we have been perfecting the metallurgy and construction of combustion engines for 100 years so they're amazingly reliable considering they work by inducing thousands of explosions a minute while every part moves at insane speeds.
  - 01100011 3y ago
    I keep hearing about these things from people telling me how great it is that EVs have so few moving parts yet in almost 3 decades of owning ICE vehicles I've never had to do more repair work under the hood than change a starter, a water pump and an alternator(once each). I've been stranded thanks to bad software, but that's not specific to ICE. Owning an ICE isn't all that much work. Oh wait, oil changes, but those are pretty easy.
    - theshrike79 3y ago
      The last time I owned an ICE vehicle (a diesel VW Passat station wagon) I had to replace during the 4(?) years I owned it: - Diesel Particulate filter - Turbo - Clutch - Dual-mass Flywheel - Radiator Each was 1000-2000€ except for the radiator. The DPF would've been a 2k€ operation, but I found a sketchy mechanic who just drilled it out and chipped the car to think the DPF was just fine. I paid in cash, didn't get a receipt =) Then a tiny hex shaft broke in the bottom of the engine. It was the only thing running the oil pump to the engine and the only official repair was to replace the whole bottom part of the engine as a whole. Estimate: 2000€++. It was fixed with liquid metal or something by a different sketchy car mechanic and I sold it immediately.
    - magicalhippo 3y ago
      It isn't more work until it is. Modern ICEs have been refined for over 100 years. Most are very reliable. But if a timing belt or valve breaks, or the automatic transmission, or... yeah you're looking at a very, very expensive repair most of the time.
      - user_7832 3y ago
        Yeah, a well maintained reliable ICE engine isn't a problem but once issues start coming, they don't stop.
        theshrike79 3y ago
        And there's the "well maintained" -bit. Unless you know to do it yourself, you're gonna get gouged by Jiffy Lube or something.
Someone 3y ago
> If we don't count the ball bearings, an EV has 1 moving part. They have four wheels (with, if you’re nitpicking, have many parts: the wheel itself, the tire, disc brake, brake pads, electronics for ABS, screws to put them together), and suspension (probably a more heavy one than ICE cars), don’t they? (and doors and a trunk that can be opened, and handles to open the doors and trunk, and a steering wheel that has to be turned, and sun visors, and fans for cooling and heating, and, for modern cars, AC, likely with moving parts, and probably a few more moving parts)
- theshrike79 3y ago
  The "EV" was referring to the electric motor. We're talking about engines here, not the moving parts in the seats. The actual electric MOTOR has one moving part. An internal combustion engine has hundreds or thousands, depending on the model.
  - Someone 3y ago
    Sorry, misread your statement because it used the term EV incorrectly and replied to a statement that said the number of parts in an engine doesn’t matter because that tech is so well-understood that it rarely breaks down. Because of that, I think saying the engine has only one moving part isn’t a good argument in a discussion of “Electric cars require much less maintenance than ICE cars”
  - jjav 3y ago
    > An internal combustion engine has hundreds or thousands, depending on the model. Can you tell me which ICE has thousands of moving parts? I've rebuilt several engines and can't think of anything that comes close. In fact I have a fully disassembled (top and bottom) 4 cylinder engine sitting in the garage as a long term project and I'm pretty sure it's less than a hundred parts, although I haven't really counted. Certainly not multiple hundreds.
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    There's a manner of thinking wherein a car's engine is a part that you replace if it breaks. The fact that it has a lot of components inside it does not matter, from a certain point of view. One or a million, if it breaks, you yank it and replace it. Another point of view of course is that each piece is one more way to break.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

giva 3y ago

> The thing is, the ICE has had well over a century of perfecting Just a reminder that EV has had well over a century of perfecting too.

Toutouxc 3y ago
You know perfectly well that that isn't true. There wasn't any perfecting going on because the relevant class of EVs simply didn't exist and wasn't technologically possible for most of that century.
- mythhabit 3y ago
  Electric motors have had well over a century of research, development and production. Same with batteries and specifically lithium batteries has been commercially available for over 3 decades.
- giva 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl... A combination of battery and electric motor is an obvious solution for powering a vehicle. This is nothing new, revolutionary or disruptive. It has been tried many times before and has always failed for certain reasons. It will win, but not overnight.

Tade0 3y ago

> The thing is, the ICE has had well over a century of perfecting, so while it is a lot more complex, it is so mature that stuff does not break. Actually, it's so mature that it breaks exactly when the manufacturers want it to - after warranty. Just like you can optimise a 3D-printed shelf to have a shape that's almost fully load-bearing and thus uses less material, you can produce a part that can be stressed a certain number of times before it breaks. This practice crossed some kind of threshold in the latter half of the last decade, because every manufacturer is now in on it. So cars are indeed "getting worse", because the margins of reliability are now much thinner than e.g. 20 years ago.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
Which is a problem why ? Is it such a cartel that there is no competition on providing marginally more expensive parts with a meaningfully longer warranty ?
jjav 3y ago
> Actually, it's so mature that it breaks exactly when the manufacturers want it to - after warranty. Not sure, all of my cars are way out of warranty (in nearly every case I've bought them way out of warranty already) and they keep going strong. But you say the latter half of the last decade, so perhaps. My newest car is a 2013 (oldest is 1988).

thelastgallon 3y ago

> In over 35 years of owning many many cars, the number of times I've had an ICE internal component go bad is.. zero. Statistical noise aside, that's not a thing anymore and has not been since the 60s/70s. If ICE cars never fail, I wonder what all the auto mechanics are doing? 282,637 automotive repair companies are currently in business, with 614,433 employees. How are they surviving is nobody is getting their ICE cars repaired? I've had interactions with a few hundred people (at least) over 2 decades and every single person had their ICE car in the shop for repairs, small and large. ICE cars also have major scheduled maintenance, somewhere around 90 - 120K, you have to replace timing belt and a bunch of things. Car dealers don't make any money on selling new cars. Nobody buys a new car unless its priced a few thousand below MSRP (the past 2 years are an aberration). Dealerships make money on service. This is the same model as inkjet printers. ICE cars are so horribly unreliable and bad, even new ones, there exist special laws just for them: lemon laws.

AlexandrB 3y ago
> ICE cars are so horribly unreliable and bad, even new ones, there exist special laws just for them: lemon laws. Cars in general are complex and expensive, Tesla EVs run afoul of lemon laws all the time: https://insideevs.com/news/433383/tesla-warranty-repairs-goodwill-lemon-laundering/ https://insideevs.com/news/433383/tesla-warranty-repairs-goo... > 282,637 automotive repair companies are currently in business, with 614,433 employees. How are they surviving is nobody is getting their ICE cars repaired? Collisions. The most expensive repair I've had is bodywork after a small fender bender. Way more expensive than maintenance or even pretty substantial repairs like an alternator replacement. That's not to say that ICE cars don't ever need repairs for mechanical failures, but for such a complex machine they're extremely reliable.
jjav 3y ago
> If ICE cars never fail Well I never said that. I said that components of the IC engine itself fail exceedingly rarely (in my personal experience, never). "The car" is a far greater system than just the engine or motor. The powerplant (IC or electric) is a tiny percentage of the car as a whole. It's all the other stuff that fails and keeps cars in the repair shop. My second EV spent multiple weeks at the dealer to fix a window regulator that kept failing. Other things that often fail are electronics, actuator motors, wiring glitches, shocks, etc. All parts which are common to all cars, regardless of how it happens to produce horsepower. > ICE cars are so horribly unreliable and bad, even new ones, there exist special laws just for them: lemon laws. Ok you're clearly biased, since the above is not true. Lemon laws are not specific to ICE cars. They apply to EVs and plenty of EVs get repurchased due to lemon law criteria. I personally know someone who lemon law'd a Tesla. Lemons laws trigger if a new car spends an inordinate time at the dealer being repaired for whatever reason. Our EV (with the window regulator problem) came within a week of meeting lemon law criteria.

anarticle 3y ago

I think for very well maintained and new cars, maintenance is low. For a normal human used car, there are unknown unknowns! :D Consider the engine + transmission + exhaust + fuel, many moving parts all that can cause a fail closed of your car. Fuel system alone has a pump, filter, injectors, injector booster (looking at you bmw!). All that goes in the trash. I will grant that EVs have new exciting things like coolant loop and pump for batteries so we don't get off that easy. Zero belts however, not a timing anything in sight, and the old coolant vs oil battle for heat movement is over. Transmissions too can be a huge source of pain, modern ones are great, but if you end up with something <2012 or a CVT, who knows what could go wrong? Ton of solenoids, some fluid that can burn, for CVTs a lame belt... It's a lot, EVs totally simplify that. In my mind my biggest worry is that all that stuff is software controlled now, which could be better but might be worse if we look at the average quality of code...