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Comment by rrwo | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, since EVs supposedly have lower maintenance costs overall https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_maintenance.html

> All-electric vehicles typically require less maintenance than conventional vehicles because:

> The battery, motor, and associated electronics require little to no regular maintenance

> - There are fewer fluids, such as engine oil, that require regular maintenance

> - Brake wear is significantly reduced due to regenerative braking

> - There are far fewer moving parts relative to a conventional fuel engine.

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Maintenance <> reliability

Maintenance is planned. Reliability issues are unplanned failures.

An EV may have brakes that last longer and no oil changes, but some EV manufacturers are adding gimmicky and buggy electronics, or poorly designed body hardware that fails.

My cousin recently had a flat tire in her EV. Roadside Assistance did not have a spare, required an expensive tow & her day was a total loss. Dragging a toddler along made a stressful experience worse, as well. I did not previously realize most(?) EVs have no spare tire included.

Many new cars do not come with a spare either. I had a family friend I needed to help, and their Dodge caravan minivan, only came with an air pump that had a sealant to patch holes in the tire.

Was that standard, or an instance of the dealer stripping the accessories and marketing them as as add-ons? First I've heard of this.

(Minivans often mount the spare in weird places around the undercarriage, not anywhere obvious...)

Could have been the dealer stripping the accessory, I do not buy cars often enough to know.

Some caravans have the spare in a strange place under the middle of the van, and you might not find it unless you read the owners manual a couple times while scratching your head saying "wait, it's there?" Later vans had no spare at all from the factory. It's very common these days for vehicles to come without a spare. The fact that many people don't realize this is exactly why they do it.

My 2016 Toyota Sienna came with run flat tires. No spare, no can of sealant.

I haven't had a spare tire in my last 6 cars going back 16 years. Manufacturers cut the cost and no longer supply them. 3 of those cars have been EVs, 3 have been ICE.

I had the same experience and I was livid. I was 4 hours from home and had to rent a car to get back. It was out in a less populated area without a lot of options and it was a holiday weekend. I had such a hard time finding a car. Some less than reputable place ended up letting me take a slightly crashed car. It was the only thing left that could drive.

My car was towed to a Tesla service center and I had to pay like $400 for a new tire. Then I had to rent another car to go pick mine up a couple days later. I was ready to set the damn thing on fire by the end of it.

The lack of a spare tire isn't exclusive to EV's though. Most don't include a spare anymore.

The lack of spare tires is correlated with the increase in tire size, IMO. My first car was a 1987 Mazda with 14" tires. It was a two seat sports car, with a tiny spare mounted vertically. They could do that since it was 14".

Modern sports cars are 18-20" and the spare tire is a big cargo compromise.

Makes me mad that my mustang has a spot for a spare... But no actual spare

They give you a fix it kit and some good wishes

edit: I suspect it's something to do with tire size as you say, but also brakes. Can't fit a donut with what's on the hub

For > $40k I would've liked they throw in a real spare wheel/tire lol

That’s actually a good thing, because you have a place to put one if you want to buy one.

At that point it was a cost cut. They engineered for a spare but the accountants gave you a can of foam.

The engineers may have pulled the spare to hit CAFE targets, but left the spare well as a cost cut to avoid retooling costs.

I'm sure it depends on the car as to the reason. My RX-8 does not have a spare, but does have space for one. The kit would take up over half the trunk space, though!

I wonder if another constraint is AWD and modern stability control systems not being able to handle a difference in circumference at one corner, so space saver tires are not an option.

Doesn't excuse RWD and FWD cars not having one.

Probably just weight/cost

That's a good point. Modern spare has struggled with some of their Tesla spare tire kits because of traction control issues. Even a small difference in diameter will make the car thing one or more wheels are slipping.

And that was the new fancy wheel size. From 1979 to 1985 that car came with 13” wheels.

I wonder if another aspect of it is an effort to minimize weight, in order to offset the weight of the battery. The Tesla model 3 long-range battery is 1060 lb. To put that in perspective, that's essentially hauling around the equivalent of almost half the curb weight of a Honda Fit just for the battery.

Not putting massive 21" wheels on everything saves a lot of weight too, while making it possible to carry the spare. The giant wheels are easier to brake, easier to get a flat tire on, cost more to replace. The tires cost more to replace as well. They are really terrible in many many ways and are driven by looks more than anything else.

The massive wheels on modern cars are so big and heavy the suspension designs have had to be redone to handle them.. they add lots of unsprung weight, which makes everything harder.

Giant wheels for performance is mostly marketing. So much so that race cars held onto smaller wheels for a very long time. F1 only recently changed to big giant wheels, and the engineering teams were not happy about it, the change was marketing driven to make the F1 cars look more like street cars.

I think it's emissions and range rankings. When you are trying to shave off every last bit of weight to get your car into a lower emissions class, the spare wheel looks like a waste. Why not leave it out, the owner can always put it back in if the really want.

In Europe, the automakers are really getting card into Emission bands by the smallest possible margins, and as this effects tax buyers do care.

For EVs it's range - buyers pay a lot of attention to the headline range figures and a spare wheel plus the tire is not going to help.

The effect of a spare on range would be so miniscule as to not matter, tbh. Well, unless it was mounted outside the car for some reason. Some of the designs for mounting them on trucks might have an impact.

That’s likely a road hazard issue, not a maintenance or reliability problem. But it’s fairly common for vehicles to not include spare tires these days. My last three vehicles have not had one.

Spares are expensive, heavy, take up space, and nobody buys vehicles based on their inclusion. A vehicle without them gets better fuel mileage, has more space, and costs less.

Replying to my post to reply to all replies... that's a recipe for disaster, IMO.

I wouldn't travel outside a major metro, or on a weekend, without a spare; phone service gets sketchy when rural & the likelihood for monetary abuse by rando Roadside Service providers is likely to be very abusive, as I have experienced 1st hand. I always have a spare tire, jack, plug kit & air pump in my vehicles.

I do travel much, 20-30k miles a year, so I likely experience more issues than average... was zip-tying my shift linkage after a rock bounced up and broke it a couple months back.

Is that unique to EVs? I'm pretty sure the lack of a spare is trend with new cars in general.

Most new non-EVs don't have spares anymore.

Here's your not-equal-to symbol:

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Didn't work for me.

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Seems like most of the issue is just that Tesla does shoddy construction, not anything inherent to EVs

I've had a few minor unplanned maintenance issues on a Tesla. Maybe slightly more than my gas cars now that I think about it, but not often enough that I'm thinking about it. Each one was handled at my house so it never really struck me as a significant inconvenience. In one case, they were the ones who showed up to replace a battery before I even knew there was an issue.

Overall, planned maintenance is significantly less on my Tesla than on my gas cars. It's a pretty easy car to own and drive. As others have pointed out, build quality isn't the greatest - at least not commensurate with the price. Now that other options are available, I think it's pretty hard to recommend Tesla, but I wouldn't call it a bad car. It's better than most out there despite its flaws.

Without a doubt, EV is better than gas in most situations. They are just easier, drive better, lower cost to operate, etc. I'm not buying what this article is selling.

That makes sense, but I can't imagine that brake wear in particular moves the needle very much. I typically just change the brake pads every 60,000 miles or so and that's like a $50 expense if you buy the nice pads and new hardware set for my car. Of course, I don't drive some exotic car with carbon ceramic stuff that costs $8K to replace (my car seems to stop well enough regardless).

>That makes sense, but I can't imagine that brake wear in particular moves the needle very much

It only matters if you're doing a TCO comparison that's time constrained to the first 100-150k where nothing expensive happens anyway. The difference between 2 vs 3 brake jobs or pad slaps vs pad slaps and rotors in that time will dominate the cost.

I'm also thinking about DIY vs going to a retail mechanic which will probably add a couple hundred dollars to the cost.

The problem is the next 150k, where you have to replace a timing belt and maybe a clutch, while a battery replacement is still practically impossible on many EV models.

How long to batteries last?

A quick google search shows that average age of a car in USA is ~12 years... oldtimers and crashed newish cars skew that number away from the median, but generally batteries will lose capacity way sooner than that, and replacement is currently either very expensive or even impossible in some models.

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