this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Count all the maintenance you would be spending on an ICE over that same time period. Oil changes, spark plugs, coolant. Brakes also have less wear on EVs due to regen braking. It's too the point where they may last the life of the vehicle.
Ever look at the suggested maintenance schedule for an EV? Dealerships do, and it's part of why they're aggressively lobbying the government to keep ICEs on the road longer.
Largely overblown, and also solvable in time. Based on how long humans can go without a food and piss break, plus some padding for 80% charge time and cold weather, there isn't much point to an EV with more than about 400 miles of range--and this is a very high end estimate. Past that, any further improvements in battery tech can be used to reduce weight. There are EVs on the market that are almost there already.
I don't know where you're getting that. Transportation is 28% of US CO2 emissions.
So in your mind, we can't do more than one thing at a time? We can't have EVs until we have renewable power, and presumably an extensive charging network?
Its a classic argument a lot of Americans love to make about anything they hate "If it cant be absolutely, positively, flawlessly perfect immediately upon launch, then we should never use it even if its infinitely superior to what we already have"
Progress? Investment over time? What are you talking about. /s
I love this.
Plugs are once every 100,000 miles well call it three times in 15 years.
EVs have coolant and it also needs replaced (lol)
Brakes do need changed less. Maybe 2 times over 15 years as opposed to 4 times. Like spark plugs, brakes are cheap. You know what isn't cheap? The $2,500 inverter that makes the regen work on your ev. Better hope that doesn't go out. Oops, that $2,500 isn't including labor. Maybe you can do it yourself.
You got me on oil. Over 15 years there'd be 30 or 40 oil changes. Somewhere around $1,200 total.
Now be sure to add the things in that go out more often on evs. Shocks, struts, tires, tie rods, ball joints...oh, and that insurance on EVs is more expensive. The insurance alone more than offsets the $1,200 for oil changes. Then with tires costing about $700 a set to have mounted I'd sure hate having to do that 15% more often. And that rubber pollution is bad stuff. I just read an article last year about how badly it was harming fish. Ah well. Fuck em, right?
The heat levels of that coolant is far less than in an ICE. It rarely needs replacing. Occasional topping up. A lot of EV maintenance schedules never bother with it.
https://www.progressive.com/answers/car-insurance-electric-vehicles/
"However, it's important to note that, while electric vehicles are currently far from the cheapest cars to insure — as they become more commonplace, and the availability of parts and qualified repair shops grows — the cost to fix them should go down, as should electric car insurance rates"
Again, nothing that can't be solved in time.
Compared to the pollution output of an ICE? Really? You found one thing that polluted more and ran with it without considering anything else or how it would be solved.
In the future, evs will have better batteries, which has been my entire point. This is now, and now, evs are more expensive to insure.
You don't replace coolant because it stops cooling or looses it's ability to not freeze. It lubricates less effectively and can slowly start to pick up electrical currents over long periods of time. So you still need to change it. If you want to have that one over an ice vehicle though, then I guess "oh noooo. I have to spend $25 every 7 years and replace my radiator fluid"
Tires are less about pollution to me and more about the cost, but either way, you only brought it up because you wanted to complain about me pointing it out, and it being true, and how dare I bring up something true? Whatever, man. You think you're part of this big thing to help the environment, but really you're just naive and jumping on a bandwagon that's forcing something before it's actually going to be beneficial. Most every ev built today is going to be a net loss on the environment. We need clean energy first, then battery tech for EV's (this may be just a few years away if a couple different auto manufacturers aren't blowing smoke about their solid state batteries) and we need a charging infrastructure.
No, cole, that is horseshit and you know it. Coolant contamination is a result of extremes in temperature, same with oil breakdown. Because EVs are not heat engines, whose efficiency directly correlates to the Carnot cycle's rules, they are inherently more efficient. Stop spreading misinformation and pretending to be an engineer.
People don't have to buy an EV, it is their option. It has much lower TCO, and your point about "better hope the inverter doesn't go out..", makes me wonder if you know what exactly goes wrong with them by way of actually knowing how they work.
At any stage in history, the introduction of a new technology tends to be initially inefficient. Time resolves this kind of thing, see the much more energy efficient processor in the phone you spout drivel from vs an older model. Same lithium polymer batteries, not necessarily the same capacity, but much more advanced switching and software techniques to make the energy go much farther.
Get educated before you go sucking off the oil industry under the hilariously thin guise of "EVs aren't ready yet!".
There you go. You keep talking about things being cheaper "in the future". Well you don't live in the future, buddy. EVs have been here for over a decade and they've only gotten more expensive to replace batteries in. Not less, and unlike many other bits of tech, this has a finite and predictable lifespan that is too short and too expensive for something that currently does too little to help the environment. The government forcing their sale right now is a dumb move.
Source your falsehoods, half wit.
Everything but the battery is lower cost than it used to be. Lightweight cast or semi-monocoque construction, better purity silicon for lower resistance igbts & MOSFETs, not to mention very high speed switching configurations, a big deal that your low-quality ass isn't even aware of.
The motors have about 6 -15 parts nominally, at the upper end solely if they're liquid cooled.
I'm an engineer, and I'm calling you a liar in front of everyone. What the fuck are you going to do about it?
I'm thahalf wit, and you think some voltage regulators and better silicone make batteries never degrade, while every source available acknowledges a 1200 to 2000 cycle lifespan of ev batteries. You're a riot.
Particularly, the one who doesn't proofread.
I notice that you've retreated on your other points of expense in an EV, back to the only place you feel safe: the batteries. Looks like I'm winning so far.
Let's look at your remaining point: batteries.
Ask yourself some questions: what's the definition of a charge cycle? Does a partial discharge count as a cycle? Your statements suggest poor reading & critical thinking skills, not realizing that in the lab, battery life is tested by fully cycling the battery whereas in real life, people partially discharge their larger capacity devices. Phones are easy to fully cycle, their competing goals of slim, fast and large display requires a very unfortunate concession on battery size. Big batteries like laptops, vehicles don't see getting charged and drained, end to end, very often. Congratulations, you've misinterpreted scientific data the way big oil wanted you to.
Like your mind currently, a battery will eventually become feeble. Enough cumulative charge cycles (affected by temperature, being charged at level 2 or 3, etc), the battery will wear out. Here's the cool part: almost all of the lithium is extracted and purified for recycling into the next battery pack. Redwood materials was started by one of Tesla's actual OG co-founders, and they're not alone, there's ascend materials etc, whose sole focus is reprocessing batteries to extract lithium.
So your battery lasts you 10 years (with current in-field tech), and even then, still has about 70% of original capacity. Li-ion cells are currently about 85% cheaper than they were in 2010, and there's a lot going on behind the scenes I'm not free to share showing it'll continue, albeit on a more modest trend .
As the costs continue to decrease due to network effects such as recycling, your poorly sourced fears of replacement demonstrate how dangerous poor science writing can be for the general public.
Frankly I would've kept scrolling, not responding to your original inane comments but for that people actually seemed to be falling for your pompous charm and snakeoil, vs reality. That's not good for any of us, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
On the oil you are forgetting the externality it too poses. The oil needs to be disposed of. In addition to the externalities of the logistics of gas (gas stations, fuel deliveries, leaking Underground storage). There is a lot of these in the fuel process, from drilling oil all the way through the process.
Motor oil doesn't get disposed of. It just gets recycled, for the most part.
Good point, just read some more on that. Seems like the bulk is refined to be used in boiler furnaces and burned. A small part is reused, and then the final leftovers are so horrible they are disposed of in controversial ways.
But I must admit I thought it was all just burned outright. I have not been able to find numbers on what percentage is recycled and burned and what part is just burned, calling it recycling which is technically correct (the best kind of correct) but not what most people think of when they hear recycling.