It's widely known that maintenance costs way less on EVs than on gas-powered cars. There are plenty of data points everywhere to confirm this. EVs are much simpler with way fewer moving parts and fluids to worry about.
Most people don't own and use cars for nearly long enough to fully wear out a battery pack on an EV that they've bought new.
The average car age in the US is over 12 years. I can see why it’s much less with the current EV owners as early adopters tend to…well, adopt the next technology earlier. But wouldn’t this also imply the environmental impacts are lessened by continual churn in manufacturing?
According to Tesla, their battery packs typically exhibit less than 10% degradation after 150K miles.
That's where most of the problems come from.
A lot of mechanics are probably not ready to deal with the issues EVs face, though.
Leaks start showing up in old age and the involved parts don't typically wear out unless you ignore leaks and habitually run some subsystem low on its requisite fluid or run it dry. There are some exceptions for piss poor engineering but generally the prior sentence holds.
I will say that a rental fleet is a great "brutality test" for EVs, though. Rental cars age quickly.
Is this based on your intuition or is there more to it? The DoT tracks automobile issues and it looks like the top ones are engine, engine cooling, other power train, air bags, and brakes. [1]
Most EV's don't even have a transmission. And any battery cooling fluids are often sealed up inside the battery pack.
Some EVs have air cooled battery packs, Nissan Leaf for example.
If anything, you must be thinking about hybrids.
Battery cooling I'm not sure though, it's still circulating right ? which would mean a pump of some sort.
Anyway things are not as vanilla as they used to be in the early days, I hope that trend doesn't keep up.
Only applicable at autobahn speeds --- which explains why Porsche is the only manufacturer thus far to see a need for this.
I seriously doubt this will become typical --- simply due to cost reasons.
Battery cooling I'm not sure though, it's still circulating right
No, natural thermal convention in most cases.
Yes. In some cases, the battery pack also serves as a structural component.
https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/tesla-structural-battery-pack...
Anyways, these are rentals, which are usually sold after around 1 year/30,000-40,000 miles. So it's irrelevant for a rental car company if batteries last longer than that.