It looks like they have the BEV lasting just as long as ICE car without any battery replacement. Has it turned out that way? Seems like owning an electric car for 18 years really hasn’t been a thing since the model s was released in 2012, but is it projected to last that long.
As a data point: I’m at year 8 of Model X 100kWh with basically 0% capacity loss. If it exists at all, it’s less than 1-2%, so less than what I can reasonably measure with just the odometer and battery indicator.
Nissan Leaf gave BEV a bad name because it had much worse battery tech. Battery longevity is not a problem for modern, or even decade old cars.
4% of Toyota engines need to be replaced before 250,000 miles; 3% of Tesla batteries need to be replaced before 250,000 miles. "More reliable than a Toyota engine" is pretty high praise.
The issue is less the wear and tear of the battery and motors and more the wear and tear of everything else -- suspension and brake components are going to need replacing, along with radar and ultrasonic modules, etc. These parts will be at least partially end-of-life and hard to get by the end of that 20 year period. Federal law requires some amount of parts availability for 10 years + some release of part designs to the aftermarket after that, but I have a hard time getting parts for 21 year old Ford designs that were less than popular, so I would be surprised if early Tesla models are having an easy time 20 years on. This gets much much worse as you start to look at the number of abandoned EV models from the Big 3, the abandoned/dead/dying companies (Fiskar, Lucid, Lordstown, etc). That doesn't hit the vast majority of all EVs, which are just Tesla, but it does put a dent/makes the buying decision harder. Now expand that to not just Tesla, but what does Tesla do with a Cybertruck? Like all things, the specific product decision matters a lot, and this is a new area (even at 14 years old) so there will be lots of people who optimized for cost and not maintainability.
The surprising thing is that parts availability is even worse for new cars. Sensors are built into every part now, so it's no longer just a windscreen or a bumper. If those sensors are critical to the driver assist systems, the car can be a write-off for trivial damage because of the difficulty of getting parts. And in many places, you can't just disable those systems and get on with things, even if the car is otherwise perfectly fine, because the law states that roadworthiness requires the original safety systems to be intact.
Even more alarmingly, the speed of revisions now is such that vehicles can have parts that were only used for a very short run before being updated and replaced. Your particular vehicle batch may not necessarily have identical parts to other batches even within the same generation. We're a long, long way from the way things used to be, when parts commonality stretched for decades.
Yes.
EV Batteries Last Way Longer Than Expected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43001996 - February 2025 (2 comments)
New study shows: EV batteries last much longer than expected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228901 - November 2024 (70 comments)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Certainly not the case for hybrids like Priuses. The battery system lasts 10-15 years and 150k-200k miles. Any ICE car on the market now should be expected to last a lot longer than that; I drive cars that are 25+ years old and really don't need much significant in the way of repairs.
Hybrids are the worst of both worlds when it comes to maintenance. They have their benefits and are key to fighting climate change, but mechanically you inherit all the problems from both sides.
There is no way you are driving a 25 year old car without serious maintenance like exchanging the timing belt. Add the frequent oil changes and all other yearly maintenance and it does add up.
Compared to a BEV, where you literally only need to change the break pads, and you may or may not need to change the battery, and the batteries keep outperforming the expected lifespan. BEV are simply mechanically much simpler devices.
> Hybrids are the worst of both worlds when it comes to maintenance.
While this seems intuitively true, I have some pushback, and I think that the reliability record of e.g older generations of Prius backs me up.
While you do have effectively two cars (an EV and an ICE) crammed into one, you’re not actually using both at full capacity all the time, which cuts down a lot on wear and tear. Your ICE is almost never run under load before it warms up, and is kept running at its most efficient rpm most of the time, your transmission is running under less load since it has help from the electric motors, and is often simpler (the aforementioned Prius does not have a reverse gear for example).
No it’s not nearly as simple as a BEV, but a well implemented hybrid system is absolutely an upgrade from a full ICE vehicle.
Personal experience backs up. Had a 2009 Prius, let it go because I did a terrible job handling rust buildup. Was still running great on the original battery pack with nearly 200k miles when we sold it.
Only significant problem was pothole related damage.
Unless it's -40F, modern cars don't need to "warm up".
>you’re not actually using both at full capacity all the time, which cuts down a lot on wear and tear.
In theory this should be true. In reality hybrids eat motors compared to the same engine in an ICE. That's just what happens you have two ways of making the vehicle go to potentially mask "something's funny" type issues and your customer base is people who are buying an appliance based on an MPG number and some math.
With competent ownership (fleet vehicles provide a lot of examples, lots of hyrbrid Fords from the 00s and early examples still around) they come out about the same as an ICE car so you essentially get the hybrid system "for free" from a maintenance perspective. But that's not the median consumer.
By the time you get to variable valve lift and timing, the complexity of hybrids is either a wash or in favor of the hybrid when compared to a traditional engine. Electronics have been integrated in vehicles for generations now, and going hybrid lets you get rid of components and reduce overall mechanical complexity. It's not "two separate systems", it's just the obvious endpoint for internal combustion engines (and a process that is both a century old at this point, and already mature in other industries), because you get a strictly better machine from both a performance standpoint, and a design and engineering standpoint.
Not to mention, much of the complexity in ICEs comes back to cooling and lubrication, both of which are also concerns in BEVs.
You are not comparing complexity to an ICE though. You are comparing to a BEV.
A plug-in hybrid is a much more complex machine than a BEV.
This is what the person that I was responding to wrote, and it's objectively wrong:
>Hybrids are the worst of both worlds when it comes to maintenance. They have their benefits and are key to fighting climate change, but mechanically you inherit all the problems from both sides.
Also, much more complex is a value judgement. Complex in what way? High voltage electronics isn't exactly "not complex", and the coolant loops in BEVs are more complex than those in regular cars, because the tolerances are tighter.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you mean mechanical complexity, but even then, that's not a given for ICEs. Gas turbines can have as little as one moving part, and there are piston engines that can get away with as few as four (the piston-conrod-crankshaft assembly and a compressor wheel).
At the end of the day, a good design has the minimum amount of complexity necessary to perform a given task, and no more. Given that BEVs are fundamentally unable to replace ICEVs in several niches (e.g. those relying on on-street parking, off-roading), maybe a little more complexity is warranted? As is, they aren't a 1:1 replacement for a standard car, and that's okay, but they're being marketed as such which is a recipe for failure.
> mechanically you inherit all the problems from both sides
Not really. The transmission is an e-CVT in hybrids which has no torque converter, the main part that breaks first in an automatic transmission. Unlike a regular CVT, the e-CVT has no belt, either. The e-CVT basically never breaks, so you basically never have a transmission go bad in a hybrid. On top of that, because the traction battery is so small, it's replaceable for $1-2k instead of $10k+ for a BEV. If anything, hybrids are the best of both worlds. Had you specified plugin hybrids you would have been correct.
The joke is that you have to replace the traction battery twice in a Prius but you never have to replace the traction battery in a Tesla. But that's an indictment of the Tesla, not the Prius.
A Prius battery will last 150k km or so, but since the car can go 500k km +, that's a couple of battery replacements. A Tesla battery will last about 300k km, but that's longer than the rest of the car will typically last, so you never have to replace it.
Non-plugin hybrids are pointless in the context of the paper from the OP, since they don’t help with climate change.
False, hybrids reduce fuel consumption and therefore emissions substantially, Toyota Sienna went from 22 mpg combined to 35 mpg combined when they switched it from gas to hybrid. Several wild claims from you today.
I stand by my statement. We have passed the point where burning fossil fuels more efficiently helps. If you think that is wild, you should see the wild_fires_ going on.
Going to 100 mpg is still strictly worse than a battery powered by renewables.
The issue with ICEs is the fossil fuel part, not the engine part. Synthetic hydrocarbons and alcohols don't contribute to climate change at all. And alcohol fuels are both easy to make and about as good as hydrocarbons.
True. But we don’t have enough synthetic hydrocarbons for the current most important usage: jet fuel.
Might as well drive a quiet, renewable powered electric vehicle and let the jets use the synth.
Or take the train.
If we're talking synthetic fuels, you'd probably run cars on methanol rather than a hydrocarbon. Planes absolutely need kerosene, but cars can claw back most of the performance of petrol with alcohol fuels, and methanol is the simplest and cheapest to make. Certainly shipping seems to be going this way.
> Synthetic hydrocarbons and alcohols don't contribute to climate change at all.
If you are able to manufacture them in a completely emissionless way. That requires huge energy input though. Certainly has its uses, but too expensive for personal cars I'd think.
What I think would make sense is to use methanol as a seasonal energy store in temperate climates. Manufacture from PV in summer, burn in winter.
Methanol is the obvious choice, because there are so many ways to make it. Shipping certainly looks to be moving in that direction, though ammonia is also being trialled. Ethanol via fermentation is also doable at scale, but most effective pathways rely on using arable land.
A modern Toyota hybrid doesn't have a transmission -- it's "eCVT" is basically a differential with a couple of embedded motors. It doesn't have a serpentine belt. It runs its engine in a highly efficient, highly reliable Atkinson cycle.
A modern Toyota hybrid is far more complex than an electric car, but the fact they are more reliable than a gasoline car is by design, not just good manufacturing.
> Compared to a BEV, where you literally only need to change the break pads
If you are not replacing your tires after decades, you and those around you should be fearing for their lives.
I mean, you also need to top up the wiper fluid and clean the floor, but that and tire change is not even maintenance, it’s just part of „use“, no?
I didn’t feel the need to mention something that everyone should be easily doing at home for the cost of materials alone.
Are you talking about rotating your tires?
Most people do not purchase new tires and mount them onto their old rims, themselves, at home. Most people do not know how to set the bead on an automotive tire. Replacing worn out tires with new ones is no less difficult maintenance than replacing brake pads.
Both, I guess. But fine, rotating tires and changing seasonal tires at least is something every car owner should be able to do.
Either way, you need to do both on both ICE and BEV equally.
Changing a timing belt is not serious maintenance. Just something that needs to be done at 100k. I just did the timing belt and water pump on my 300k tundra over the course of a weekend for 100 bucks.
It’s mechanical maintenance beyond the skill level of 99 out of a 100 car owners.
The Prius up until about 2016 uses a NiMH battery that is different than Lithium ones.