However, a gasoline powered car also takes engine oil and transmission fluid if it's an automatic. It will also require regular servicing of the engine and eventual replacement of worn seals etc.
If the fuel cost per mile is the same the electric car could still be cheaper. I can't say how much though, because that depends on the servicing cost per year vs the battery replacement cost and that depends on your local service department.
The battery decay is going to be gradual, even though noticeable in a Model S, given its huge battery, it would still be a drivable vehicle even if it loses 50% of the battery capacity. So that 14-20K expenditure will not kick in till 15 years or so with a patient owner, which is pretty much lifetime of many cars in US.
You do. But keep in mind they have way less parts, moving or otherwise. Spark plugs, cables, the entire engine cooling system, fuel pumps, all of that is missing.
It boils down to: battery (big unknown, but seem to be holding up surprisingly well), engine (incredibly simple!), no transmission or a very simple one (Nissan Leaf has a single gear), inverter, charger, brakes, and the standard 12V battery you find in all cars (which doesn't have to drive a starter motor, so should last longer).
Wow, electirc cars are so simple it is surprising that so few companies make them! The moving parts in a car are pieces that 1) have multiple manufacturers and are relatively cheap to replace, and 2) can be replaced by a wide range of repair shops so that competition can keep a check on the overall replacement costs. What you left out of your electric car list are all of the specialized electronics and only-for-this-car equipment that are all very expensive to replace and will all only be supplied by the manufacturer. The idea that you can just go online and shop around for an inverter for your Tesla or run down to the auto parts store to pick up the right 12V battery is laughable.
False comparison. Your gas car also has specialized electronics, namely the ECU, the ABS system, the SRS system, which are all needed for the car to be operational. Good luck finding an aftermarket ECU for your car.
There's no more "only-for-this-car" equipment in an EV than in any other car; the main difference is that with so many models of gas cars made by each maker, they reuse a lot of parts between models, so there's economies of scale. In an EV future, the same would be true for EVs. You're not going to swap an axle from a Chevy into a Honda, or from a Honda Civic into a Honda Ridgeline, so even here it's limited. And you're not going to swap a door panel from a 2017 Civic into any other car at all, or from any other car into that one; those are only-for-this-car items; every car has those.
There are lots of aftermarket ECUs [1]. Usually only performance tuners buy them, but there's no reason you couldn't get one for other reasons. That said a junkyard ECU is going to be a much easier fix.
Your aftermarket ECU won't pass emissions tests in most places that have them, so this really doesn't exist for practical purposes. Aftermarket ECUs are for race cars.
As for the junkyard ECU, why do you think that won't be also true for EVs?
>You can usually choose different maps with aftermarket ECUs, there's no reason you couldn't load one that passes emissions tests.
Will it look exactly like the factory ECU? Most emissions tests now consist of plugging in a device into the OBD-II jack and ensuring the factory emissions equipment has not been tampered with. An aftermarket ECU would fail this; it's "tampering" by definition. Emissions laws generally do no allow any deviation from factory spec or factory equipment. They don't just test the actual emissions levels, and they don't test the levels at all in many places.
>Anyway, this is a stupid argument, I hardly think that emissions tests will be a reason you can't put an aftermarket ECU into an electric car!
It is stupid, because that's not what I claimed at all. One poster claimed that EVs would be too expensive to fix because of non-standard, "only-for-this-car" electronics. I pointed out that this is already true for gasoline cars, with ECUs being an example. Then someone else jumped in and claimed that aftermarket ECUs exist, when in reality they're horribly expensive and only racecars use them, so that claim was irrelevant, and then they admitted that you can just buy a junkyard ECU cheap. I pointed out that this would also be true of EVs, which was just ignored, even though it completely invalidates the argument about EVs being expensive to fix.
Face it: every car has specialized parts, especially electronics. You can't just take an ABS module from a Nissan and slap it into a Ford. You can't take a wheel bearing from an H2 and slap it into a Prius. Parts for mass-market cars have always been available from different places: dealerships for OEM parts at high prices, aftermarket parts for popular models from parts stores, junkyard parts for everything if you can find them and are OK with them being used. This will be no different for EVs; it's stupid to think it would be. And it's also stupid that several different people jumped in here with completely incoherent arguments, all so they could bash EVs.
Yes this whole ECU thread has nothing to do with the original discussion comparing EV and gasoline vehicles wrt how easy it is to get replacement parts.
>> I hardly think that emissions tests will be a reason you can't put an aftermarket ECU into an electric car!
> It is stupid, because that's not what I claimed at all.
Yes you did:
> Your aftermarket ECU won't pass emissions tests
You brought up aftermarket ECUs not passing emissions tests, I just (incorrectly) commented that you could probably load a stock (or what I thought would be emissions-passing) map onto an aftermarket ECU because I wasn't aware about the tampering part. I naively assumed they actually tested the emissions from the car when testing it for emissions. :P
For what it's worth, I agree with you about replacement parts being specialized for all types of cars, and for the record I'd be very surprised if an aftermarket ECU ever appeared for the Tesla, given how closed and hostile to any modification (or even repairs!) they are. You can't even get a service manual if you don't live in Massachusetts, and even then you can only buy access to it on a subscription basis! [1]
In fact, at the moment I'd never even consider buying a Tesla because who knows what it's like to own one after the warranty is up? If my Tesla ECU failed, there's nothing to say it would even be possible to put a legitimate Tesla junkyard ECU in there and have it work without their blessing.
Out of curiosity, do places that have emissions testing actually keep testing cars regularly every year?
> You do. But keep in mind they have way less parts, moving or otherwise. Spark plugs, cables, the entire engine cooling system, fuel pumps, all of that is missing.
My hybrid actually has two independent liquid cooling circuits: one for the ICE, one for the electronics.
But other than that nit, I agree with your argument.
If the fuel cost per mile is the same the electric car could still be cheaper. I can't say how much though, because that depends on the servicing cost per year vs the battery replacement cost and that depends on your local service department.