Carbon emissions is why we're transitioning. Its why EVs are made mandatory. Its the premise that the EV has to fulfill. Thousands of little ICE parts have little consequence since cars, typically, die for every other reason except engine failure. This has been the case since widespread adoption of automatic transmissions and fuel injection.
The math of EVs is pretty daunting too. Take an EV and ignore its greater sin of creation (ie resources to make one vs an ICE car). Now pretend it runs on pixie dust (ie actually zero emissions).
Now compare that to taking that EV's (electrically) massive battery and, instead hybridizing N number of vehicles. Ive run the numbers, and the EV has (much) greater CO2 emissions.
If you use regulatory power to funnel those batteries to preferentially hybridize contractors' vans and trucks (ie the F-250 and 350, not the wanna be cowboys' 150) the comparison sucks even more.
Note that this analysis uses efficiency numbers from current widespread ICE engines, not rather niche (for the West) CNG cars that can run at very high compression ratios (methane has an octane rating of about 120) and have much higher energy content per gram of CO2.
And you know what the funniest part of all of this is? We could slash transportation CO2 overnight by lowering and imposing lower speed limits.
But again, this is what Ive come to believe with car manufacturer and EPA data in excel. YMMV
Hybrids also have the highest fire risk of all types (EV vs ICE vs Hybrid)
You can put 50k-100k miles on most EVs on sale today having only bought cabin air filters, tires and wiper blades in addition to the cost of the electricity - thats largely it!
With fuel injection, spark plugs can easily go 120k+ miles. I have never replaced them and no engine Ive owned ever seemed bothered by it.
Spark plug wiring? My uncle did that once on his civic... when it had 180k miles and was 25 years old. He was ready to junk the car, but he ended up driving it until he moved away and sold it.
If your ICE doesn't outlive your car (with regular oil changes) you drive like a maniac or buy cheap cars (you know the brands)
I get that on my ICE brakes too. My secret? Engine braking and taking my foot off the gas when the light ahead is red: something nobody seems to do sadly.
Are EV suspensions over-built enough to account for the extra weight they’re carrying? Imo that’s the big expense once vehicles start showing their age. Extremely dependent on road conditions though… not great in the salt belt.
He chuckled and said: "I guess you know how to use the down-shifter"
Beyond 100k, there isn't much, but you will likely need to do things like brake disc replacement or some shock work, but the costs are still minimal vs ICE car maintenance at this stage in an ICE car's lifecycle. If you do pads and discs at 100k on an EV, you will generally be good to 200k again. The shock work is no different to what a gas car might need at this stage.
Thanks to regen braking, the lifespan of the braking system consumable components is increased enormously vs combustion.
The batteries are still generally giving useable performance/range up to 300k on a lot of used Teslas, but this will vary depending how the owner looked after the battery. Lots of DC supercharging generates a lot of heat and isnt great for long term range. A tesla mainly charged on AC at home will keep great battery range for a very long time though. I'm planning to keep my EV for a crazy long period of time, given the lack of operating costs. The range loss on an mainly AC charged EV can be surprisingly minimal.
The only fluids are some coolants generally, and those are easily/cheaply replaced usually on a ~10 year cycle. Most EVs are just scaled up electric toy RC cars in terms of their architecture - really! - the number of drivetrain components is incredibly small.
I think its critically important we have managed to profitably make EVs at scale - no one has ever turned a profit on fuel cell cars, and indeed often sold them at enormous losses. See any of the ones Toyota shipped - the Mirai is sold at an incredible loss.
This isn't to say these can't be fixed, but the best fuel cell cars simply haven't been as good as the best EVs to date accross a number of objective/subjective measures.
The problem with BEVs is that they have gigantic resource requirements. It is very much replacing one problematic resource base with another. Fuel cell cars lack this problem. It is not inconceivable that this fundamental problem will force our hand in the future.
Also, like I said, a fuel cell car is an EV. Your story about the Mirai losing money is not different than accusing Tesla of doing the same. Arguably even more absurd, since Mirai should cost less to make.
