It still often ends up a bit cheaper across comparable vehicles but not a slam dunk and nowhere near as good as the headline suggests.
Honest question: how else would one interpret 'cheaper to drive', if not 'cheaper per-mile operating costs'? Wouldn't they have used plain 'cheaper than' if they would have meant 'purchase+operating'?
If the rest of the car is fine, it should be one visit to a shop to swap out old battery for new (and the shop handling recycling/disposal of the old one), and off you go with car good as new.
I vaguely remember a guy swapping modules of the battery of a Prius at home for peanuts, because the dealership asked 4K for the same service. There are a few places that do a battery refresh for 1 or 2K (eg. texashybridbatteries.com). In the future this might be a good business, today it seems to be a Prius thing... because it was the most successful car a while ago.
There is a large intersection of people who only buy second hand cars and who have to park them in the streets or in shared parkings. If you can't charge at home, owning an EV is much more a hassle, especially if there are very few chargers around (which is the case in my area) and charging at dedicated third party charging station in much less interesting from a financial point of view.
Make cars work off power tools batteries.
Take e.g. Bosch AMP Share 18V 8.8 Ah bricks[0] or equivalents. Back-of-the-napkin, you'd need about one per 1km of range (+/- various factors). Put them in racks of 5, and allow people to swap out dead racks for charged ones at gas stations[1].
This would give regular people back their favorite experience of gas stations, while preserving environmental and economical benefits. For example:
- People riding short routes could run with only 20%-40% of the racks in. Means they won't need to carry as much mass around. This is like people today who always keep their gas tank half empty or even emptier, to not waste fuel on carrying fuel around.
- People riding long routes could take extra racks in their trunk to exchange range; people operating other equipment could get extra racks for it at the station, too -- same as people today do when coming with gas canisters to the station.
- In case you run out of power in the middle of the road, for some reason, someone else can help you by lending you their battery pack - even easier than lending you gasoline.
- No more worry about battery life degradation - you're constantly swapping out packs, never using the same ones for more than few days or weeks, and it's an activity you are doing regularly - so people would finally realize that batteries are replaceable and stop complaining about used EVs being as good as used iPhones.
- Overall preserves established economics of gas stations and attached restaurants and service centers; every driver born in the last 100 years understands that and will find it intuitive.
- Bonus - the "power tool batteries" was more of a joke establishing scale; actual implementation would be probably sealed "rack-sized" packs with different trade-offs, but on the off chance it is made power-tool compatible, so much extra utility opens - from charging at home, to powering power tools :).
(I think the mistake of the OG idea of swappable battery packs of yore was to optimize for swapping time and keep battery as a unit. Breaking it down into pieces that weigh 5kg or less means you can reuse existing infrastructure.)
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[0] - Not an ad, I just have bunch of those and invent more and more silly ways to power things from them.
[1] - The new "battery passport" regulations around the world already solve some of the technical issues here.
Oil changes, break pads, oil filters, spark plugs, …
For whatever reason, my wife’s car needs yearly scheduled dealership visits that always cost a few hundred. Meanwhile, my 5 year old EV has had none of that, other than one of those recalls that required a technician to park 15 minutes on our driveway to tighten some bolt (which my wife’s car also had, but it took another visit to the dealership.)
The depreciation thing is true, but I drive my cars into the ground anyway, so it’s not a factor for me.
The only time I use brakes on my Tesla is for unpredictable events on the roads or for going from slow to standstill. For everything else, I use regenerative braking. In fact, back when I just got mine, I asked my tire/brake shop about typical brake pad lifetime. They said that they almost never service brake pads on EVs. It's just not a thing.
If your brake pads don't last at least 100k, then you're holding it wrong.
Right now the lowest depreciation is on cars like the Honda Civic. Used buyers want a right sized highly reliable vehicle. The average EV is smaller than the average petrol car, and high mileage EV's are far more reliable than high mileage petrols.
The cheapest car for sale in the UK is an EV at this point. The market is rapidly filling with EVs in essentially all price segments. Most EVs are still under warranty when they hit the second hand market for the simple reason most EVs on the market were produced in their typical warranty period.
Quite possibly China and many other countries.
(edit) There's a comment further down, cheapest car in UK is EV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49875856
It's still 12,000UKP more expensive than the paid-off ICE 15-yo I have on my driveway, which is a heck of a lot of petrol.
The EV was definitely the right choice, due to luck rather than knowing Trump was about to kick off with Iran. It costs us £8 to charge the car overnight for around 380 miles range.
The problem is that, for economy of scale reasons, Comprehensive insurance is often cheaper than third-party cover in the UK, despite people tending to never claim so as to keep their no-claims bonus and not spike their premium out of affordability. With 3rd Party the EV option would be cheaper as they tend to be involved in less accidents, and when they do they tend to dissipate more impact on their side due to more modern crumple-zones and safety features.
It's worse, there's almost no second hand market for the vehicles. There is barely anybody trained to repair them (even if they will sell you the parts) and if they are crashed significantly it's almost always a write-off.
> It still often ends up a bit cheaper across comparable vehicles but not a slam dunk and nowhere near as good as the headline suggests.
Only because of government meddling. Fuel is almost uniquely taxed 3 times, which pays for subsidies to pay for green energy initiatives.
I think I'll hold out with my diesels and petrols and see how this all goes.
No longer true at least in most decently urban/semi-urban Western countries/regions.
The parts shortage is real though, it's always been a plague for Tesla, and most established manufacturers never really recovered from Covid (and in the case of wiring harnesses, Ukraine) as a lot of their supply chain closed down shop for good.
> and if they are crashed significantly it's almost always a write-off.
That's true of all modern vehicles, no matter the engine type. Crash resiliency comes at a cost, the frame absorbs the crash energy and permanently deforms. Yes you can bend even an aluminium frame back into shape but it will never be as strong as before, and anything carbon-composite or plastic is out of the question as well.
I ended up getting an off-lease Hyundai EV because they tanked in value in part due to their ICCU failures, which are now covered under an extended warranty.
this is very simply completely untrue
Why do you think Tesla insurance is that high?
Car ownership is in any case kind of a boomer thing, not to put too fine a point on it, and maybe your reasoning reflects this. In Europe and US occasions for rental arise for younger demographics and in different ways.