> The warranty doesn’t suggest the battery will be at 70.00001% on the first day of year 9. It says if it goes below 70% it will get replaced.
The point is that they're not confident enough to say it won't be in that range. Put another way, why don't they just make the warranty 80% instead of 70%?
If Tesla's not confident in it, I definitely am not.
> That 8 year old Toyota you bought came with a 6 year/60k mile warranty. If you are comfortable driving that to 2.5x the initial warranty then a used Tesla should be good to 250k and 20 years.
We hope so, but we don't know, which is the point. Toyota has a track record. Tesla hasn't been around long enough to have a track record.
That aside, the real point is that ICE cars don't have any particular component that costs that much to replace. How much will a new EV battery cost me? Sure, on occasion you may have to rehaul your whole engine, but that's really rare. I've only known one Toyota owner who had to do that, and it cost (in today's dollars), about $6K.
When I buy an 8 year old car, I don't expect perfection. I know things will break - soon. I buy it with the confidence that repairs will not be too expensive, and even after all the repairs I'll still save a ton of money.
The other blocker is the private party market. So far I've never bought a car from a dealer. I always go private party. The standard procedure with that is you take the car to a trusted mechanic who will examine it and inform you of any potential problems. With electric vehicles, those mechanics can't do much. I've asked them. They can look at a few things like the brakes, but stuff related to the engine is beyond their ability. So whereas I may be comfortable spending a lot of money buying an ICE car from private party, I'm not for EVs.