5 ms·

The article is making a huge mistake though, comparing apples to oranges. Resale value of EVs doesn't depend on mileage nowhere near as much as ICE cars. EVs a

• natbobc 1y ago
  The article is comparing 2 scenarios that have other explanations: a fire sale of a large fleet and Tesla which has an image problem because of its leadership. I’m not saying the article is wrong I’d just like to see broader representation (Chevy bolt, lucid air, etc).
  • mortoc 1y ago
    Worse than that, the main vehicle it compares everything to is the Model Y. There may have been one or two things related to Tesla this year, and not other EVs, that might have hurt resale values for some reason...
• interstice 1y ago
  Not sure I understand the part about differentials being single speed, aren’t they unrelated?
  • IAmBroom 1y ago
    My take was: the only lube-requiring, wear-out-fast part was the differential, and on EVs they are much simpler, with less to wear out. ICEs have MANY wear-out-fast parts (where "fast" is relative) requiring lube, and lube itself suggests the risk of frictional degradation.
    • dahfizz 1y ago
      The differential on an EV is the same as on an ICE car. It does the same job either way, it doesn't care whether the power source is gas or electricity. But on an EV, that's basically the only thing that needs somewhat regular "oil changes". Whereas ICE motors & transmissions also need fluid changes regularly.
    • goalieca 1y ago
      Control rods, suspension, alignment, etc are significant costs where I live. Winter climate and road conditions impact this.
      • avn2109 1y ago
        Underrated point! Heavier EV's typically burn through tires and wear components in the suspension faster.
        • rootusrootus 1y ago
          Most EVs aren't enough heavier for this to be a big factor. The only reason some people burn through tires faster is because when you have all-the-torque-all-the-time and can use it silently, it is addicting to do so. This is hard on tires. Boring drivers routinely get the same wear life from tires as they did before.
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      Regardless of drivetrain type vehicle repair is absolutely dominated by brake/wheel/hub/steering/suspension components (i.e. the drive force bearing bits between the car and the road). The EV needs less regular maintenance because it has less fluids though.
• cogman10 1y ago
  My battery is starting to get to unacceptable degradation; I have a 7 year old EV and my top battery percentage is 78% of the purchase. I inquired about a battery swap and it's around $10->12k. I'm seriously considering it in the next couple of years as I see that as buying another 9->10 years of life for my car. I might grab a used EV instead, though, as the one thing my car lacks is a heat pump, which kinda sucks in the winter.
  • rickydroll 1y ago
    Your warranty should cover the battery swap. I know my Chevy Volt's warranty is 150,000 miles or 10 years. It may only be 100,000. The length of the warranty depends on whether you live in a CARB state. If a dealer charges you between $10K to $12K for a swap out, that's the "fuck you for not buying a car that makes the dealership more money" price. Several third-party vendors refurbish and sell EV batteries for much less. I know what you mean by not having a heat pump sucking. The Volt has resistive heating for wintertime, and it definitely drains the battery. I dress warm and use the seat heaters when I'm driving by myself.
    • toast0 1y ago
      > The length of the warranty depends on whether you live in a CARB state. Does it matter where you live, or where the vehicle was originally purchased/registered?
    • cogman10 1y ago
      I'm outside the range. I have 170,000 miles
  • sowbug 1y ago
    Lithium-ion batteries have fallen in price at least 40% since you bought your car in 2018 (https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/charted-lithium-ion-batteries-keep-getting-cheaper/ https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/charted-lithium-ion-ba...). Assuming there's some correlation between that decline and the replacement price you're facing, which is unfortunately not a given, it would be worth it to hold out as long as you can. We can only dream of a day when battery packs are a standardized commodity, and as easy to change as motor oil. But modern industry is far too extractive.
• Joker_vD 1y ago
  > comparing apples to oranges. In a situation when we're being told to completely give up on apples (ICE cars) and switch entirely to oranges (EVs), I am afraid we'd have to make exactly the comparison you find so distasteful for some strange reason. They are both vehicles, sorry, fruits, after all.
  • FabCH 1y ago
    You do not need to use age on the X-axis. It's fine to compare ICE and EV. It's not fine to be shoddy with data.
• TechRemarker 1y ago
  "which is influenced more by recharge cycles and straight up passage of time" would seem similar to "mileage" since both increase in general the passage of time and driving. But yes, driving two cars equal amount of time presumably the ICE will wear down far more than the equivalent EV so the title is quite misleading to those looking at a glance.
  • FabCH 1y ago
    Not really in practice. A lot of charging is influenced by convenience and lifestyle rather than miles, for example: People charge at work from 68% to 75% because is convenient. People always draining the battery because they don't have charging at home. Commercial EVs being charged based on loading/unloading schedules etc. ...
    • NobodyNada 1y ago
      Isn't one "recharge cycle" a full discharge / recharge? So charging from 68% to 75% at work would just be 7% of a cycle, and about the same amount of wear as if you'd skipped that top up and just fully charged at home.
      • aclindsa 1y ago
        With a battery how fast you charge it, how "full" you charge it to, how deeply you discharge it, the temperature at which you keep it, etc., all affect the degradation rate of the battery. So, because charging a battery from 68-75% is better on the battery than charging from 93-100%, storing the battery full is worse, etc., it isn't necessarily true that "7% charging is the same as 7% charging".
    • tsimionescu 1y ago
      > People charge at work from 68% to 75% because is convenient. Isn't that almost the best possible way to charge a Li-Ion battery?
      • Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
• cyanydeez 1y ago
  So likely the resale value is more percieved tham actual. Another market failure to adequately assist us in making the best choice.
• rasz 1y ago
  >the only maintenance Suspension and tires are the biggest items for EVs. The twist is cheap owner can neglect those and keep driving past service window with ripped bushings and clapped out tires until hitting that magic 3 year goal, then you buy used EV in need of 4 of everything.
  • rootusrootus 1y ago
    You can see the tires, at least, so that will just come off the value. And if you turn in a lease at three years with clapped out tires they'll make you pay for new ones.
• FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  [dead]
• iancmceachern 1y ago
  For me, a lot of the mileage on a car is wear and tear and general "niceness" of the interior. In my previous vehicle I replaced the transition, engine, brakes, etc. but I sold it once the interior wasn't "nice" anymore. This aspect does track between EVs and conventional vehicles.
  • seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    In the future, it might be worth it to have the interior of an EV refurbished and updated. What I'm really nervous about is the infotainment system, eventually it is out of date but unless you are maybe driving a Tesla, only the original model will work in your car! It would be nice if some of the electronics could be easily upgraded after 10 years. That isn't even counting failure (mine failed and had to be replaced in the first six months, but hopefully that was a product defect that usually hits quickly rather than slowly over time). If solid state batteries actually come out, they probably won't be retrofitted into existing EVs. That's a bummer, but I guess by the time I'm ready to change cars self driving will be a real thing (the Waymo kind, not the Tesla kind).
    • ghaff 1y ago
      >the infotainment system Though this is true of ICE vehicles as well although CarPlay has eliminated that to a significant degree.
      • xp84 1y ago
        Maybe this explains one reason the OEMs hate CarPlay so much! If Apple would start arbitrarily cutting off cars over 5 years old from CarPlay, I bet suddenly GM, Rivian, etc would be all about CarPlay. Of course Apple would only do that if the carmakers agreed to give Apple 30% :D
    • Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
      > What I'm really nervous about is the infotainment system, eventually it is out of date but unless you are maybe driving a Tesla, only the original model will work in your car! tbh, it's kind of baffling to me how it seems like nobody else is interested in offering software updates to infotainment without needing to take it to a dealer's service bay, if it's even offered at all. When I bought my Tesla, at the time, "Streaming" (Which was silently powered by Slacker Radio) was the only music streaming integration, but Spotify was added shortly after my purchase. They've since added YouTube Music, Apple Music, and Tidal integrations. Map data is fetched on the fly. No need to manually install updates. Hell, how many cars even make that an option? My in-laws have an old Prius (I think first gen, maybe second gen?) with built-in Nav, but has never received a map update. Their nav doesn't even know their home street exists. It doesn't help that so many cars have lackluster infotainment systems. I had a Subaru BRZ in 2016 and was kinda stoked that I could play MP3s from a USB drive, since back then I actually somewhat maintained a collection. I figured I'd get a thumb drive with all my MP3s on it. But the interface completely flattened the directory structure and put them in alphabetical order. There'd be no way to play a single album in sequence if I had multiple albums by the same artist. My folder organization became worthless. But I've digressed...yeah, more car manufacturers should offer software updates for their infotainment.
• mikkupikku 1y ago
  > As an anecdote, I bought all my ICE cars second hand, and would usually sell them 3-4 years later just before major maintenance was needed. My EV is now 8 years old I mean, that sounds quite poor on both counts TBQH. I bought a used 2002 Honda Accord in 2004 and drove it until last year with little more than regular oil changes. I expect to get the same kind of life out of the Mazda 3 I replaced it with. Anything less than 10 years out of a car sounds like something went terribly wrong to me.
  • rootusrootus 1y ago
    Yeah I expect to drive my Lightning for at least 10 years. Probably a lot longer since it's a pretty simple body-on-frame truck. I'm secretly hoping that since the battery just hangs between the frame rails, someone will come along in a few years and offer upgrades.
• slavik81 1y ago
  > What drives EV resale value is the health of the battery, which is influenced more by recharge cycles and straight up passage of time. The resale value drops much faster than the battery health. Hyundai has been tracking the degregation rates of the batteries in their Ioniq 5 vehicles and they've been holding up surprisingly well. Most of them have >90% battery capacity at over 100k miles. Their data was sparse for 250k miles, but half of them were still over 90% capacity. I had trouble finding the original video, but the data is included in this summary: https://youtu.be/s3DMd0e4loQ?t=17s https://youtu.be/s3DMd0e4loQ?t=17s
  • FabCH 1y ago
    Well ok, the perception of battery health :)
  • solsane 1y ago
    In that case, I’ll to cash in on this for my next car! I figured the degradation problem was much worse. My frame of reference is lithium laptop/phone batteries which definitely aren’t doing so hot 5 years in.
• RRRA 1y ago
  My EV is 3 years old, but I have no hope of being able to swap the battery every, at least not in any reasonable way. That said, it'll be fine for my use case for at least 15 years, so whatever :)
• Marsymars 1y ago
  I recently sold my 14 year-old ICE car, and like 2/3 of the maintenance costs were for things that still would have been present if it had been an EV.
  • yardie 1y ago
    Tires, brakes, and windshield washer fluid are the only regularly replaceable parts on an EV. My last ICE car, also that age, required oil, tires, coolant flush (100k miles), transmission (100k miles), water pump, thermostat, timing belt, and tensioners. And lots and lots of filters. So, either you were really lucky with ICE or extremely unlucky with EVs.
    • rootusrootus 1y ago
      Some EVs do have maintenance items beyond tires/brakes/washer fluid. The maintenance schedule for my Lightning, for example, has the first real maintenance at 125K -- for flushing the battery coolant. Fortunately it's the same standard coolant they use for all their cars, and trivial to flush.
    • dilyevsky 1y ago
      Brakes are almost never used on most EVs, you're likely not going to need a single replacement before the battery dies. I've only ever change tires and cabin filters.
    • Marsymars 1y ago
      Yes, my ICE required those things, but not including tires, those other things were only like 1/3 of the total maintenance costs. The ICE components ran under 5 cents per km and the non-ICE components ran over 9 cents per km. I don't see that I was especially lucky with the ICE components, I did all the scheduled maintenance plus some other misc things (water pump x2, bad transmission bushing, etc.) (Oil and filters just don't add up to all that much - I followed the maintenance schedule using high mileage synthetic and high-mileage filters and the total cost was under $100/year at a dealership.) I also don't see that I was especially unlucky with the non-ICE components, I've got a 13-year sample size of steady, unremarkable maintenance to tires, paint, brakes (these always corroded from salt before they wore down, so no real EV savings to be had on brakes), misc trim pieces, etc. Looking at my Excel sheet of maintenance, I'd expect these costs to be higher on nearly any EV, just because the ICE was a cheap econobox with cheap parts (e.g. tires were small, TPMS sensors were cheap, only 4 lug nuts, etc.), and any newer vehicle is going to have more parts that need replacement/repair, and those parts are going to be more expensive.
• themafia 1y ago
  > I expect I will just do a battery swap in 5-10 years. Do you expect it will be an OEM part or a remanufactured battery?
• pedalpete 1y ago
  I was hoping you would have said that the issue is that article is comparing a $50k SUV to a $30k work truck, and then turning the price drop into percentage drop. I'd like to see them compare two similarly priced SUVs. I am sure the ICE vehicle will still depreciate slower, but perhaps not as drastically different. The buyers of these two vehicles used in the example are very different.