My maintenance costs per year would be about $200 not counting tires. But I do all my own work and vet my vehicles well before purchasing them. Most people’s would be higher, though, since most don’t do their own work.

But in comparison to all electrics, the savings aren’t as much as you’re thinking. There’s still a huge load of things that can/will break down on an electric. Shocks, struts, wheel bearings moreso than an ice vehicle.

To give an example, I’ll use the 3rd most sold all electric of last year; the mustang mach-e. I’m skipping the first two because they’re teslas and absolutely ridiculous in high prices to get parts for.

I’ll start things off with the worst one.

So the battery itself (I’m looking these up as I go) is a holy shit $23,000 just for the part itself and only has a 100,000 mile warranty that it will have at least 70% capacity from when you buy the vehicle new. Wow, would that absolutely suck. You can buy new ice engines and have them installed for you for under $10,000. Way under in many cases.

Looks like the electric motor itself is around $4,000 if you got the all wheel drive version you have two of these to worry about. Then theres the inverters for the motors. Those are $1,700 a piece. I’m not traking down prices for the rest of this stuff. You get the idea.

You still have a single gear transmission to worry about that needs fluid changes.

Also antifreeze and a pump.

Brakes and brake fluid

Calipers

Several different control modules

Sensors

Etc etc.

Basically your maintenance free stuff that you don’t have to do to an electric you do have to mess with on an ice consists of plugs, ignition coils, serpentine belt, oil, injectors, fuel pump, and a timing belt if you got a vehicle with a belt and not a chain, throttle body, air filter and a few sensors. Aside from the oil and air filter, most of that stuff are things that need addressed every 80,000 miles or if they break.

That’s close to about it on what you no longer need to mess with. An electrics transmission should almost never break down so long as it’s fluid gets changed, at least. They’re quite simple bits.

So most “maintenance” and upkeep still exists for electrics. You just don’t have to spend 30 minutes changing oil every 4 to 8 thousand miles. There’s also a lot of extra that can break and cost a lot to fix on an electric. Then other things that break faster.

While most of your big ticket items like the electric motors and the inverters are left to a chance at going out, just like a chance of an ice blowing a rod out. It’s an absolute fact that your evs battery will die and that every single month that goes along you’ll get less and less capacity.

You want to save the environment? Instead of being forced to spend thousands more on an electric vehicle, buying a small ice vehicle and taking the $10k you saved and installing solar panels to your houses roof will do more.

Never said it would.

I’ve rebuilt ev batteries before, I do all my own automotive work and repairs, I’ve kept close eyes on the emerging battery tech for vehicles and know the battery chemistry used in current and older EV’s and own stocks in two different battery companies (any idiot can own stock, but I just mention it to say I have money on the line in paying attention to batteries. I keep a fairly tight portfolio). I’ve been working on electronics for 30 years and vehicles for over 20 years.

I’m not outstanding or anything, but that still puts me in a pretty narrow demographic on Lemmy, and evs are a subject of interest to me, while my job grants me a lot of free time to do what I want, which is often reading about things.

So the deal with the batteries: there’s been a handful of different types of ev batteries used over the past 15 years. Some lithium iron phosphate, some nickel metal hydride, some lithium, or nickel Cobalt aluminum.

Each has some positives and negatives but the overreaching delima with any of these is that they all need a lot of small individual cells to make up the entire battery pack (teslas can have 2,800 batteries all tied together to make their battery pack, for instance) and they all suffer from being charged/discharged. At current, lithium based batteries (most all of the newer EV’s) can last about 1500 full charge/discharge cycles before failure. But every single charge/discharge cycle does a small amount of damage in the formation of what is called dendrites. Dendrites rob a battery of capacity and eventually will short out the battery cell, making it go completely bad.

The damage to the batteries is worse at times of full charge and full discharge. And is lessened if kept in between. EVs use this to their advantage and will cut your vehicles power off showing 0%, even though there’s capacity left in the batteries to go several more miles, and “100% fully charged” when plugged in, will actually be only around 90% of the batteries max capacity. If you owned an EV and kept it between about 30% and 80% the entire time, and avoided fast charging, which also makes batteries go bad faster, your battery should last longer than most anyone else’s.

But anyhow, every battery used in an electric only vehicle today is 100% fact going to lose a bit of max range with every single charge, because every single charge causes a slight amount of build-up/damage to the batteries inside. Aside from that, no manufacturing process for those batteries is perfect, so not all of those hundreds or thousands of battery cells that make up the ev battery are perfectly the same, so they won’t all start to go bad a once. Once enough of those cells go completely bad (today’s evs track the cells and can compensate for the bad ones for a while) your battery, all 1,200 to 2,000 pounds of it will need to be replaced, and replacing them with a used/refurbished battery pack is a temporary bandaid after paying a large labor cost, or a new battery pack which will cost you more than what you would expect to pay for an entire 10 year old used car.

Manufacturers (and real world info as all electric evs are starting to get pretty old) expect the batteries to last 10 to 20 years. It’s looking like that’s a pretty good estimate. 20 years being a stretch, but doable for someone who slow charges at home , only charges to 80%, and doesn’t take trips that take them down too low on charge.

To give you an idea of how well auto manufacturers are aware of this, just look at a Ford mustang mach e. The most popular ev after tesla. They have a 8 year or 100,000 mile warranty on the battery. The mach e has a claimed range of 290 miles. Their warranty doesn’t take effect unless the battery capacity is less than 70% of what it was when new. Imagine having a car you paid $50,000 for, expected to get 290 miles with, and then 4 years later with 95,000 miles on it you can only go 210 miles and ford tells you to go kick rocks. Currently, that battery pack is about $23,000 dollars(most batteries arent this stupid high). Plus install. I just got rid of a mini van that was supposed to get 22 mpg. It was 16 years old, had 245,000 miles on it, and it still got 22 mpg. It was also still worth something. How much will a 16 year old EV that needs a $12,000 battery to work again be worth? Pretty much nothing after people learn how expensive and how guaranteed it is that they’ll need to have a new battery. I wouldn’t spend $12,000 on most 15 year old vehicles that are in great condition. The thought of paying to get a 15 year old vehicles that would still need a battery put in it is asinine.