new cars are in many ways more reliable for the first say 100,000 miles or 6 years (that is why most new cars come with a 5 year / 100,000 mile warranty where they used to be much shorter)
However after that point, when they become unreliable due to age they become economically unfeasible to maintain due to their complexity. This problem is increased as car technicians become more in demand and as such increase demand higher wages (which they should get)
For example, changing the head gasket on a old chevy 350 one could do easily in a weekend with no special tools, on a more modern engine? Good luck. You probably have to take 1/2 the car apart just to start disassembly of the engine, and will cost several times more than the older engines to have done in a shop, often "totaling" the car
Long gone are the days for a car to have 4 or 5 owners over a 30 year serviceable life, Now they are going in to the junk yard to be parted out after their 2nd owner and maybe 10-15 years of serviceable life
And very rarely do we see or talk about the environmental impact of that. I shutter to think what is going to happen to all the BEV that will end up in the junk yard where ever component on the car is serviceable except the battery which costs $25000 to replace on a car worth $15,000
You're not wrong on those first parts, but I do want to quickly address that last part...
Manufacturing of electric and non-electric vehicles makes up a tiny portion of total CO2 emissions, so we're looking just at the car itself.
The first EVs are starting to get old enough that we're seeing what happens: as the cars lose range (especially the old Nissan Leafs with air cooled batteries that degraded fast), they go to owners that need less and less range from those cars. They don't get scrapped, they just get sold to someone who needs less range. The Leafs are an accelerated timeline example because of the poor cooling on those batteries.
Yes, it's 100% true that a car with a proper battery failure (not just age) will need expensive battery replacement to restore the car, but if the car truly is fully operable then that cost to install a new battery will still be cheaper than buying a new car off the road. When cars get totaled for other reasons, their batteries go on the used market and can be tested/verified for safety.
Looking online, batteries for EVs are selling for 5-15k (depending on the capacity, mostly) in the scrap market, which means that an old car can be restored to full range for that price. If the car is in good shape, that's cheaper than buying a new car...
>>Looking online, batteries for EVs are selling for 5-15k (depending on the capacity, mostly) in the scrap market, which means that an old car can be restored to full range for that price. If the car is in good shape, that's cheaper than buying a new car...
Can it though? Tesla only recently started allowing rebuilt cars on their network, and there are tons of stories of software limited features and functionality because people replaced components outside the dealer network
Cars today with the ability to Software enable and disable parts or the entire car are a whole new trend and how many manufacturers are going to allow 3rd party battery replacements? Even if they do today when BEV's are a small fraction of their sales the recent actions of many manufacturers tell you they want nothing more then to lock you down to their network, their parts, their techs, and their subscription models (Looking at Benz with their Subscription for acceleration) .
So the idea "well just replace it with a scrap battery" sounds good, i doubt that will be the reality
>Manufacturing of electric and non-electric vehicles makes up a tiny portion of total CO2 emissions
I want to address this, why do we believe the only environmental impact of concern is CO2 emissions, have we go so far over the bend that no other environmental impacts are of concern now except CO2, even with that said I am not sure I buy the numbers or the research methodology that goes into to creating that statement. Seems to be alot of cherry picking of data to fit a narrative to me
That's why I said that we're looking just at the physical components, not the emissions component. There are of course environmental concerns from not recycling or reusing the other components in the car.
> Looking online, batteries for EVs are selling for 5-15k (depending on the capacity, mostly) in the scrap market, which means that an old car can be restored to full range for that price.
Very few of those batteries are new; they're coming out of scrapped cars for the most part, which means you would be restoring your old car to a partial range condition for that price (plus shipping of the part and some installation labor, which is relatively low for a like-for-like full battery swap, minus the scrap value of your own battery pack).
Correct, but remember that in most properly cooled batteries, degradation is not substantial.
Based on some quick searching, a Tesla with 100,000 miles (many of which done DC fast charging, worse on the battery) retained 90% of its battery capacity and still goes over 200 miles on a single charge. (https://insideevs.com/reviews/573397/tesla-model-3-100k-batt...)
Most people do not need long range cars so this would still be worth it to buy and resell. Furthermore, as the price of new EVs drops, the battery price will also drop. The battery cannot be more expensive than the car's MSRP.
However after that point, when they become unreliable due to age they become economically unfeasible to maintain due to their complexity. This problem is increased as car technicians become more in demand and as such increase demand higher wages (which they should get)
For example, changing the head gasket on a old chevy 350 one could do easily in a weekend with no special tools, on a more modern engine? Good luck. You probably have to take 1/2 the car apart just to start disassembly of the engine, and will cost several times more than the older engines to have done in a shop, often "totaling" the car
Long gone are the days for a car to have 4 or 5 owners over a 30 year serviceable life, Now they are going in to the junk yard to be parted out after their 2nd owner and maybe 10-15 years of serviceable life
And very rarely do we see or talk about the environmental impact of that. I shutter to think what is going to happen to all the BEV that will end up in the junk yard where ever component on the car is serviceable except the battery which costs $25000 to replace on a car worth $15,000