Harpers Tate
Established Member
- Joined
- 10 May 2013
- Messages
- 1,722
Point 1 - no disagreement there - but I suspect they will fall. Any new "tech" comes at a premium.I get what you are saying though a lot of people, myself included, simply can't afford the extra capital cost of an EV. There is also the question how long do the batteries last and how much do they cost to replace.
Point 2 - my car's battery has a manufacturers warranty of 8 years/100k miles. Whilst that's not any direct indication, it does suggest that the real-world lifetime will be much, much longer. Noone is going to warranty something with any great likelihood a claim will fall due. Note that, entirely unlike most consumer electronics, EV batteries are cocooned in sophisticated management software and equipment to maintain temperature and charging speeds and so on. An entire battery pack currently costs of the order of £10k to replace, but it's often the case that a failure is caused by only one cell pack (out of many). As the market matures, I would expect to see individual cell pack replacement becoming "a thing". If you go looking, I seem to recall there is (was?) a YouTube video of exactly this being done to an otherwise unusable (old) Leaf at a cost of £1k, restoring the car to as new (electrically). Offset against this eventual expense (which, as I say, may not need to be that huge) is the almost complete lack of maintenance that is needed on ICEs. No new plugs, rings, clutch plates, turbochargers......the list goes on.