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0 pointsRobotbeat8y ago0 comments

Yes, a whole bunch of sunk costs.

The internal combustion engine is fantastically cheap for what it entails. It's as complicated as a bloody rocket engine, but an entire vehicle can be bought for a few months California rent. It took literally trillions to engineer it to what we have today. Companies don't want to abandon that investment.

And yet... That's what they'll have to do. The electric car will be so much cheaper to make (and is so much cheaper to operate and maintain) due to its fundamental simplicity that as soon as battery costs get lower, nearly everyone will be forced to transition to electric.

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fps8y ago· 2 in thread

As far as I can tell, the internal combustion engine and related components are not the most expensive part of a modern car to build or maintain. Suspension, braking, tires, electronics, drivetrain and interior features are the parts of a car that typically increase the cost the most. They're also the parts that get the most wear and tear, and the parts that are the most expensive to replace. And they're all still present on a fully electric car. A modern internal combustion engine will last the life of every other component of the vehicle with basically no maintenance, other than an oil change every 5-10K miles. And if it ever does fail, you can get a complete replacement engine for less than the cost of a suspension system or a few hours of a shop diagnosing a computer issue.

Tesla was recently replacing $10,000 electric motors on their Model S because they were wearing out under normal usage - some customers got 3 or 4 of them, if I remember correctly. http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1101153_two-thirds-of-ea...

RobotbeatOP8y ago

Brakes and drivetrain are either much simpler or experience far less wear on an electric car.

And your point about how good internal combustion engines are for the price is exactly what I said earlier. It's pretty amazing that we HAVE been able to make ICEs so cheap and (relatively) reliable, considering how complex they are with so many moving parts.

The fact that Tesla had teething issues with their early electric motors does not change the fact that fundamentally, brushless electric motors are simpler, more wear resistant than internal combustion engines in principle by a huge margin.

Tesla isn't the only one who will be able to take advantage of the simplicity of a pure electric drivetrain.

pkulak8y ago

Yup. I can't even imagine how cheap, efficient and reliable electric motors will become after the kind of engineering effort applied to ICEs is applied to them.

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