Your electric car will fall apart before its battery pack does, study finds

“Actually the battery will probably lose the exact amount every year, and nothing will ever go wrong with any parts of it, and also they’ll also break the rest of the car at the same rate as a gas car, which is 20 years, which we’re going to call 15 years. Which means in 12 years the car will be useless, but the battery will still be at 80%. MATHS.”

Fucking. What.

Doesn’t need maintenance is an under-reported significance.
- What do you mean?
I had to dig deep to find this:
an average EV battery degrades at 1.8% per year, it will still have over 80% state of health after 12 years, generally beyond the usual life of a fleet vehicle.
You still have to assume they're using average fleet vehicles use as their comparison, but at the same time also that they're using 80% battery as comparable.
- Yeah just the article goes from saying cars last 20 years to you’ll probably buy a new one in 15 to quoting this. Was a wild ride.

I'll buy an electric car when

A) it won't spy on me and

B) I won't have to sign away my soul and first born to whatever car company I'm buying from

I hate to break it to you, but nowadays neither of those are exclusive to electric cars. Just sounds like you might never be buying a new car again.
- It’s still easy to disconnect the cellular antenna if you’re fine with losing features like self driving and map updates.
- I guess there just aren't many old enough electric cars out there.
I'm sorry. Do you think that gas cars don't spy on you. Literally every car manufactured since 2000 has its own GSM/CMDA radio that is constantly connected and sending telemetry data to private corporations contracted by car manufacturers.
Those companies are constantly having security breaches too. Constantly
- Get a Dacia Spring. Its like a classic car but BEV. And has a manual button that switches off all data transfer to the cloud.
- At least some companies let you use the data too (eg https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/bmw_connected_drive/). Mainly European companies.
Buy one from China, The only people spying on you then will have a miniscule impact on you, ever.
- lol, I wouldn't bet on that. They wouldn't be spying on you if they didn't think they had something to gain. Just learn where the attenna or comm unit is and pull the wire/fuse. Check online for any electrical engineers who already disabled theirs.
- Chinese car companies sell their data to anyone who will pay. Including American companies who then resell your data.. and so on. There are no protections and all your data is it out there
I agree with your terms, and would add one more:
C) when they don't all weigh 6000+ lbs
- Hey, good news - they don't. Now back to your cave.

Nope. My car had not mechanical defects at all but cost $23k to repair when the battery failed.

Your battery wasn’t still under its 10 year / 100000 mile warranty?
- Some people keep their cars for a long time.
"fall apart" is a very careful choice of words here.
The battery may fail, individual cells may fail, but it will still be one unit.
- And so will I.
And you saved more on gas and maintenance than the cost of that repair if it happened outside of warranty (which is 10 years on batteries)
- $23 grand for a battery plus the cost of the car? I don't think they would have spent more on gas and maintenance.
- Your math falls apart when people, like me, have long drives. I could make my daily commute with an EV especially since my work has charging stations, but the 100000 mile warranty kills it for me. I do that in three years. I spend $50 a week in fuel which is $7800 for three years. I haven't even come close to spending another $14000 in maintenance during that time. I also expect to get at least another 3-5 years out of this vehicle.

Corporate sponsored study finds in favor of corporation.

Stay tuned for the news at 7.

And don't miss tonight's special report: Asbestos, Safe after All? Stay tuned.
Yeah wtf. The steel frame is going to last an order of magnitude longer than the batteries
- I see someone's never lived near salt water or snowy winters.

MG started offering a lifetime warranty for the battery and drivetrains in Thailand.

It confirms what the article is saying, manufacturers know with their experience that the rest of the car will break before the battery or the motor does.

How long does MG consider to be a lifetime? I'm daily driving a 32 year old car.
Edit: Ok, I looked it up. It's an unlimited-mile warranty for the first 12 months. After that, it lasts up to 80,000 miles or 7 years, whichever comes first. This is less than the battery warranty for many other brands. This kind of advertising should be illegal, but they placed "lifetime" in quotes, so I guess everyone's cool with it. Actually, it looks like that might be the old warranty, effective in 2019. I'm having trouble finding the actual terms for the new warranty, but I wanted to correct myself first.
MG is still making cars? I haven't seen anything from them in decades!
- It was bought out by a Chinese company from what I'd heard.
- They're fairly popular in the UK

I've had my ev 5 years. I've had the tires changed and had the windshield replaced because it got a chip in it.
There are barely any moving parts to make the thing go. No waste heat or slamming around of pistons to worry about. At one point I quite literally forgot cars need maintenance because with an EV, it's just not a thing (largely).
The idea that ICE vehicles are even on the same planet as EVs in terms of reliability and maintenance is utterly laughable. It's very very very simple. Fewer moving parts, no waste heat to manage, no pumps or multiple fluid systems, so no seals and gaskets.
Toyota ? Doesn't need maintenance is an under-reported significance.

They include climates in the study but only hot climates and temperate climates. Temperate climates perform the best of course, but that’s expected given the narrower temperature ranges.

I would like to see studies for cold climates. Here in Canada we have freezing temperatures for about half the year and sweltering temperatures for a quarter. The shoulder seasons bring lots of rain and temperature fluctuations. This mix of always changing temperatures and humidity (along with all the salt used to de-ice roads) is absolute havoc for ICE cars. It tends to rust them out a decades before the engines give out.

On the other hand, freezing temperatures are brutal on batteries (I know this from how my phone responds to the cold). I do know that a freezing cold battery needs a ton of extra energy to heat up before it can even begin charging. Having an EV in Canada without an indoor parking space for it is not a great experience.

A battery also needs a ton of energy to become cold. It’s like 300-500kg of mass you need to freeze. Most cars automatically warm up the battery.
I’ve had an EV in Finland for 4 years now and it’s the best winter car I’ve had. -30 C outside and it’s literally T-Shirt weather inside the car within 10 minutes. Zero issues starting after it’s been sitting outside for a few days either.
- How does heat work in EVs?
  In ICE cars it's waste heat generated by the engine, carried via antifreeze to the heater core, which air then passes through. Basically, a radiator.
  Where does the waste heat come from? Or is it resistive or a heat pump or something?
I just got back from Quebec and vas surprised to see a ton of electric cars- like California levels of full electric cars on the road. I have to assume that most of them have made it through the winter alright, otherwise we'd be hearing about it. They do test these things in very cold climates before they sell them.
- Quebec has the highest percentage of ev as new car sales of all the provinces... Electricity there costs on average around 0.09CAD/kWh..... It's surprising there isn't more, and that in big part due to cost (Quebec is rather poor), the climate, and distances (Quebec is HUGE, if it included Labrador it would be a bigger landmass than Alaska).
Almost all new cars in Norway are electric, so it seems they do really well in the cold
- Norway may be farther north than where a lot of Canadians live but it’s not colder. Where I live (Southern Ontario), it gets quite a bit colder than Oslo, despite being one of the warmer areas in Canada apart from the coastal regions.
Iirc most modern EVs have passive climate control for the battery, even when the car is "off". So for cold weather that would be trace heaters or equivalent

I thought the zoomed detail was a cheese grater.

I wish evs were just as reliable and repairable as gasoline/diesel cars are on average.

Are they not as reliable?
- They're actually more reliable and money saved on gas and maintenance is much more than the price of changing the battery every 10 years.
- The only issue I've ever had with my Ioniq 5 in 2 years was running over a screw and had to get the tire sealed. There is no oil to change, so the only regular maintenance is free tire rotations at the dealer.
- Well, the range part of the equation isn't. A fuel tank doesn't get smaller over time, and you can replace one fairly easily. Batteries die over time, and can't be replaced easily.
The repairability is a much bigger concern for me than reliability. When even opening the motor housing is grounds for warranty termination in most EVs, it's easy to understand why so many people are still buying ICEs
- EV only vehicle manufacturers are not doing a great job on the servicing side of the business with months wait times. Robison is up to 6 mo right now. That’s unacceptable when your AC fails. This is where the large manufacturers have the upper hand, if they can ever get it together and make 1) vehicles that aren’t a 2nd mortgage and 2) cheaper to repair.
  A rear quarter panel on a Rivian R1S is $20K+ as the entire side of the vehicle has to come off to get to it. Rivian only sells the quarter panel with the entire side. You can’t just get the rear quarter panel. Absolutely insane engineering.
- Far less moving parts though. No oil changes. Simpler “transmission”. Regenerative breaking means it takes forever for you to need to replace brake pads. Etc etc.
- The Magnuson-Moss Act has entered the chat.
- There's nothing really to repair.