What do you do when, say, the insulation on the motor’s windings disintegrates over night on a whole production run of thousands of cars.
Or the batteries turn out to a fail at some yet to be revealed number of charge cycles.
ICE engines eat themselves in many more different kinds of weird ways: timing chains and belts, coolant leaks, any number of problems with valves and actuators. They're extraordinarily complex devices and it's a testament to engineering genius (and persistence) that we've made them this reliable. But they fail much more often than batteries or motors. They have many more moving parts. It's just the devil we know.
I've got two EVs. Basically zero problems. I've known one or two people who have had issues, but never with the drive train. Always something dumb like the "infotainment system" or (for a Tesla owning friend) stupid buzzing and vibration they couldn't make go away and stupid problems with door handles.
The Tesla weirdness is part of why I went with Nissans. They're 100% normal cars except for the electric drive train. All the other parts can be purchased at AutoZone and everything else can be worked on by a normal mechanic.
There's some mechanics in my area that have been learning how to do stuff with EVs like aftermarket battery upgrades on older models, but it's a bit expensive. Mine are 5 and 13 years old respectively and both batteries are fine. The 5yo one is the same as the day it was bought. The latter's lost some capacity but still very usable as a city car.
Also just about the only shade tree mechanic EV. Even swapping a battery is doable by the typical car guy. Rebuilding one isn't much harder due to no cooling.
You don’t know that. None of the most recent EV sales are even ten years old yet.
We don’t know what the common failure modes are.
file:///home/blarsen/Downloads/How-durable-are-electric-vehicles-BVRLA-report-by-New-Automotive-September-2026.pdf
Your download folder path is leaking : D
The main batteries most often have a 8y/160,000km guarantee. (Some even more.) There a enough affordable, used BEVs that are only a quarter through that milages and age.