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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Modern gasoline cars are remarkably well designed to have everything fall apart at once. They come with an 5 year / 100,000 mile warranty and fall apart at 15 years / 200,000 miles. This not-a-coincidence is a combination of both increasing the reliability of unreliable power train components over the decades and cost cutting in others.

But an electric motor can easily last 1,000,000 miles, and we've got some battery technologies (LFP) that can also get close to that. The rest of the car could be engineered to go that far, but isn't because there has been no demand for it.

But taxis, Ubers and self-driving cars do, so I wonder if we'll see cars with a 250,000 mile / 5 year warranty. What kind of premium would the market for such a car bear?

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I drive a mercedes diesel van whose engine is likely to last 1M miles. The problem is that engineering the rest of a vehicle to last even half that is incredibly challenging. Suspension systems, steering, braking, even just body panel fit over 500k miles are all subject to incredible demands. At this point, I feel that the 1M target is a bit silly. Given technological change (often but not always progress), a 20 year target seems like a sensible compromise.

Class 8 trucks regularly do > 1 million miles and Toyota taxis regularly do > 500,000 miles.

It's certainly not easy, but it is possible.

Yeah, it is clearly possible. But trucks have the benefit of generally accumulating huge amounts of highway miles, which is substantially easier on the entire vehicle than family hauling and commuting. Those taxis are amazing, but I wonder if that's the right model given technological change over their lifetimes.

Also, particularly for trucks, the economics of a vehicle used to make money look a bit different than one that is purely for transportation utility.

When I lived in the Bay Area I used to use a driving service to go to the airport and the owner had an early Model S. We had several conversations about how many hundreds of thousands of miles he already had on it and how well it was holding up. He said that he wouldn’t be surprised if it lasted a million miles. Obviously the battery was degrading over time but the powertrain was so much more reliable than an ICE.

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