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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Your costs for a ICE car wouldn't be much more. There were be a few oil changes in there, but they are not expensive.

After 20 years, I'd expect it to be different. We have a '99 Honda CRV, and a significant chunk of the money we've paid for maintenance in the 12 yrs we've had it has been for the exhaust system. Over time, on any car, brakes will eventually need replacing, electrical bits will fail and need replacing, bits of your suspension will need replacing, and so on.

After 10-15yr the Tesla (or any EV) will probably need a battery. After 20yr it is basically a certainty.

yet my 2001 tahoe ICE gas guzzler has required only oil changes, brakes and tires.

260k miles and it still goes strong, diesels easily get to 500k miles

An interesting twist would be using a hydrogen fuel in an ICE.

The 4l60 in that Tahoe is on borrowed time. That's on the same order of cost magnitude as a battery.

For people who have to pay other people to do maintenance (i.e. most people) whether or not you buy a POS that eats suspension wear items for breakfast and how anal you are about getting every little scratch fixed will dominate long term cost. A couple grand for a battery or transmission spread out over more than a decade really isn't that much. Shelling out a grand every time your vehicle gets humped by a shopping cart will add up quick.

You can get a new tesla battery for 1400 ? granted most folks cant replace one but I can. I cant work on or replace a tesla battery. I have also rebuilt transmissions and that gets you a fraction of the cost because the clutch packs are typically the only wear out part... that and seals.

https://www.transdepot.net/Stage-1-4L60E-98-05_p_215.html

Look at Prius batteries. You can get cells for $25 a pop and rebuilt batteries for a grand.

Tesla will probably never reach that price point because they're a bigger battery and more on the luxury end of things (indeed a reman engine for a German car will hit your wallet harder than a crate SBC) but there's no reason to believe that the industry will all be hard/expensive to service like Tesla and other luxury brands. Also Tesla is particularly terrible about parts supply chain and locking everything down so you'll probably never see aftermarket batteries apply downward price pressure there.

I can essentially haul a Prius around on/behind my Tahoe with 6 people plus the driver. Not sure we are apples to apples here

Your Tahoe may as well be a Prius for the purposes of major component cost. Its major components are about the cheapest there are since it's basically a GM truck. It doesn't get any cheaper than that. The Prius is a valid comparison.

When a proper cheap mass market EV comes along it will likely have similar maintenance costs as a comparable ICE vehicles.

My question around EV is arent we switching fossil fuels from petroleum (gas) to minerals (batteries) ?

It seems suboptimal to not use something like hemp biodeisel or hydrogen ICE

diesels easily get to 500k miles

They also cost on the order of five figures extra over gas engines.

I see usually 4 figures over and the standard saying goes it takes 5 years to see the cost equalized. Owning a diesel will save you money but buying or leasing wont.

You expect owning an electric car to be different, yet Teslas also have the very systems you mention will wear out -- brakes, electric bits, etc -- making them comparably consumable to any ICE or hybrid, especially after 20 years of daily driving (like your CRV).

I would imagine any car heavily dependent on advanced sensors and electronics to cost more to maintain than traditional cars, especially after the first few years. And those parts will likely cost more than a muffler.

Yeah, but these days, _every_ car is coming along with complex electronic systems that will be expensive to maintain. Which is one of the reasons we keep our old Honda running.

The real question is: how are we going to maintain the geopolitical/industrial system necessary to keep gas flowing ? And why should we?

Tesla brakes are rarely used because the majority of your braking is regenerative. They're rated to about 150k miles before needing service for the Model 3.

For comparison - also a small city car, VW Polo 2016, 1.2L TSI - so far(3 years in), we only paid for a single service(two initial ones were free) - £159, plus £20/year in tax. So a total cost of ownership(except for petrol of course) in those three years is barely over £200. We didn't even buy winter tyres for it, which I normally do for my other cars.

Don't know where you live but a regular yearly service with oil and cabin filter change is around €200 for a basic ICE car at a dealership in Austria. €290 for a Tesla would definitely be cheaper here.

YMMV. I change my own oil - it takes me less time because I can get the parts as part of a different errand, and I can do something else while waiting for the oil to drain out. If I go to the dealer I spend an hour in their waiting room with nothing to do, plus travel time for a special trip.

You can do a lot better than dealer prices for oil changes if you don't do your own maintenance.

You don't understand the difference.

Just look at the cost of brakes. An ICE car will need them every 30-60k miles depending on various factors, but an electric car will need them every 100-200k miles.

People do understand the difference, my household drives around 3000 miles per year, so telling me that a brake change once every 10 years is important is kind of ridiculous.

It gets down almost entirely to personal behaviour.

Agreed. I just replaced my wife's brakes, rotors and pads, at a grand total of $350. The old pads probably had about 50% left after 50k miles.

If you don't tailgate and slam your brakes all the time, they last a long time, even on an ICE.

So your ICE car doesn't need any gas?

Gas is cheap. Unless you are driving a lot of miles (at which point electric cars don't have the range you need) this is really significant compared to the initial cost of the car.

Gas is cheap when you don't count the externalities like fucking up the planet or the whole military-industrial complex and wars to guarantee oil supply.

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