Tesla has high insurance and potentially repair costs (in the case of an accident) because of how they construct their vehicles; lots of glue and permanent bond

Tesla has high insurance and potentially repair costs (in the case of an accident) because of how they construct their vehicles; lots of glue and permanent bonding of components. They prioritized ease of construction and not repairability in case of body damage. They would have this issue if they built ICE vehicles too. Mechanical/drivetrain components are repairable. Modern cars in general are quick to be totaled when they get into an accident because of this general trend. It's not isolated to EVs. EVs are very repairable, but also just have far fewer moving parts and those they have are put through far less stress than comparable components in an ICE vehicle. It was obvious that they would be more reliable as long as the batteries were not an issue. The batteries aren't an issue, so EVs are way more reliable and will last a lot longer than ICE vehicles. The remaining issue to be solved is infrastructure for people in multi family buildings and road trips. We'll get there. There's a Consumer Reports survey (note: not a study as widely mis-reported) that gets all the Google results when you search about EV reliability, which paints a terrible "80% worse than ICE" picture. But this is extremely misleading. First, it's lumping together any and all issues with cars from software glitches to a busted transmission. Obviously severity needs to be taken into account, but also many EVs are being either made by start ups like Rivian and Lucid or are on totally new platforms by legacy manufacturers and have had buggy software due to those issues like the VW iD4. But most of these issues do not make the car undrivable and get fixed via software updates, and should not be thought of in the same way as traditional car problems like "my check engine light came on and now the timing has been pulled back and my car is slow." Also, keeo in mind, it is a totally unscientific, self reported survey. So, I would not use it for purchasing decisions. Instead, I'd look for scientific studies which are unfortunately much hardee to find on today's Google which is so biased for recency and wide reporting. One good resource is this site which at least addressed the battery reliability myth: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths