If we don't count the ball bearings, an EV has 1 moving part.
A combustion engine easily has an "order of magnitude" more components. And I'm not even counting the gearbox here, which - in a modern automatic car - is clockwork levels of crazy gearing and technology.
They have four wheels (with, if you’re nitpicking, have many parts: the wheel itself, the tire, disc brake, brake pads, electronics for ABS, screws to put them together), and suspension (probably a more heavy one than ICE cars), don’t they?
(and doors and a trunk that can be opened, and handles to open the doors and trunk, and a steering wheel that has to be turned, and sun visors, and fans for cooling and heating, and, for modern cars, AC, likely with moving parts, and probably a few more moving parts)
The actual electric MOTOR has one moving part. An internal combustion engine has hundreds or thousands, depending on the model.
Can you tell me which ICE has thousands of moving parts?
I've rebuilt several engines and can't think of anything that comes close.
In fact I have a fully disassembled (top and bottom) 4 cylinder engine sitting in the garage as a long term project and I'm pretty sure it's less than a hundred parts, although I haven't really counted. Certainly not multiple hundreds.
Because of that, I think saying the engine has only one moving part isn’t a good argument in a discussion of “Electric cars require much less maintenance than ICE cars”
Another point of view of course is that each piece is one more way to break.
A combustion engine has camshafts and pistons and valve lifters and timing chains (or belts) and dozens more. Every single of those moving parts is a potential failure mode. Add to that all the electronics and sensors we need to run a modern combustion engine, the complexity goes up exponentially.
Granted, we have been perfecting the metallurgy and construction of combustion engines for 100 years so they're amazingly reliable considering they work by inducing thousands of explosions a minute while every part moves at insane speeds.
Agreed! If neither electric nor IC engines existed and we started developing both from scratch today, clearly the electric motors would be reliable within a year (I'm guessing, but probably) and the IC engines would take decades of development and manufacturing maturity to match the reliability.
But, that's not the world where we are. The ICE does have more than a century of development already so Honda/Mazda/Toyota/etc can manufacture an IC engine that'll go 200K+ miles with zero problems, so for a consumer buying a car today, the powerplant is not the source of trouble (whether EV or ICE). It's the rest of the car that needs repairs.
(An ICE engine should not have any explosions occurring, that's pinging and will damage the engine. It needs to be a controlled burn. But I'm nitpicking on the word.)
