We’ve all had nights like that.
We’ve all had nights like that.
Personally, I tend to buy something one to three years old so that it’s already dropped 10k off the new price, then run it for ten years or so until it starts getting unreliable then move on to the next one. It then costs me about 3k to 4k a year to have a car with no problems at all. I honestly don’t know when my electric car will start to get unreliable, but I’m not going back to noisy, smelly and slow ever, I’m sticking with quiet, clean and fast and never using a petrol station again in my life. My partner was a bit more sceptical at first but has very much come round and in a few years we’ll be a two EV household.
Yes. The person I was replying to thought it was somehow bad for the battery to outlast the car. I was making the point that that’s fine. In response to your point about the cost of an engine, I should say that batteries are a far bigger part of the cost of an electric car - it’s really just not very complicated apart from that - very few moving parts indeed compared to a combustion engine. That’s why the car companies aren’t very keen - unless they make their own batteries, they’re not adding as much value when they manufacture them. They prefer to push the hybrids which have the complexity of both and a lot less battery capacity (but very much don’t have the advantages of both for the driver).
Well the original model Nissan Leaf has been available in the UK since about early 2011, which is more like 13.5 years than 11, and I did a quick search for the 2017 Nissan LEAF on more than 100k miles on autotrader and only one of them had lost any battery capacity at all, and it had over 90%. Another one had 120k miles on the clock and was still at 100% battery capacity. You can mistreat a car and it won’t last as long, yes, but it really is the older model that has the common battery problems. The new ones don’t. And there are brands that have much better battery care than the Leafs, with active cooling etc.
You see, the reason we know they’re lasting longer is, you know, science and math, where they measure stuff and do the sums, and given that the old type of battery declined a lot in the first 8 years and the new type isn’t declining, then all you’ve got left on your hands at the end is just an awful lot of FUD about battery life peddled by an awful lot of people who don’t actually know.
When did you last lose a car to engine failure? Electronics, gears, suspension, stuff like that, but not the engine. They have to over engineer the battery because the earlier popular electric cars had bad batteries and they have to over-compensate. Hence today’s batteries.
Battery replacement after ten years is for very old EVs shrub much shorter range. The old model Nissan Leaf is what makes these stories. More recent cars have already outlasted the usage that the old pretty bad ones had by a significant amount. Your criticism is like saying you don’t want a mobile phone because the buttons are so fiddly.
I think you’re talking about batteries from nearly 15 years ago, which did degrade significantly with age and/or use. There has been a significant and noticeable improvement since then. The person you were taking to did say today’s batteries.
I feel like you missed the point. The point is that you probably want to stop every few hours anyway so there’s not a lot of point getting a PHEV. You’re buying two engines for the price of two, with the maintenance costs of a gas engine (higher) and extra weight. It’s just fear that gets people to buy PHEV. There’s hardly any mpg benefit over a gas car in real world usage, and there’s hardly any of the lively acceleration of a proper EV. No fun, no cost savings, just all initial expense. Get an EV or stick with your old gas car, PHEV is absolutely not the best of both.
I’ve got bad news for you. I found out that if you fill in the survey it still comes back on every click.
If ever there were a problem that is ripe for fixing with the first version of the software upgrade, not a future one, this was it.