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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

Electric engines are much simpler and should last a lot longer than ICE, so that extra upfront cost will be divided over a lot more miles, and there will be a lot less maintenance expense.

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If the electronics and computer industries are any guide the manufacturers will "recover" those savings through desupporting software / forced upgrades. Either that or go to a pure leasing model since the car's software driven propulsion is now completely proprietary protected IP that you won't be able to have fixed except through them.

Yeah I think for EVs especially, leasing is going to be pushed hard, maybe even the only option.

The motor yes, but a gas tank lasts forever while a battery doesn't. Batteries have gotten a lot better, but I think you need to look at the whole car, not just the motor, to make a fair assessment of durability.

I do think that electric has a lower maintenance cost, even accounting for the battery, but it's not that low that i think you can make up a 30k price difference.

If you plan on keeping the car for 10 years and drive 1000km per month. The up front 30k are 3k per year or 250 per month. That's quite a lot of an additional fixed cost for not having moved yet.

you can replace a tesla battery pack for 12K (after the warranty expires at 120K miles or 8 years), which i would imagine is probably be close to/less than the maintenance costs of a ICE vehicle after 120K miles/8 years

But if it's similar to the maintenance cost, you've not gained anything on the initial cost differential. Making it still the worse investment.

You can get a four year old ICE car with 40K miles for ~$12K, so that’s probably too much to spend on maintaining a much older car (unless you’re sentimental about it).

Do you think they'll still be making the batteries for an 8 year old car then? Ideally you'd be able to swap a newer battery that is better in some way in then, and maybe even have it a little cheaper than it is today if battery tech continues to get better, gonna be interesting to see how that plays out.

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