this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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Most of those fears aren't completely valid anymore.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect 10+ years or more out of a car without shelling out a large sum of money for a battery swap. This is probably my only concern. Repairability and the cost of those repairs.
I don't think I said that's an unreasonable concern anywhere. If the EV offering doesn't meet your requirements now, don't get one.
Current EVs meet a lot of people's requirement, so they're getting more popular. They're also getting better, cheaper, charge faster, last longer, have longer range, and weigh less every year. They're literally getting better in every way faster than anyone thought possible thanks to how popular they are.
Hopefully soon there will be an EV that does match your requirement. Maybe there never will be, but you'll probably be in the minority and that's for the best because we need to get ICE passenger vehicles off the road and into niche applications where nothing else works.
That's it exactly. 7 years ago EV's were way out of my price range and, to my mind, did not offer me value for money. This year when we went shopping, they were cheaper, there were way more options, but they were not available without a significant lead time and I wasn't fully sold on their reliability. I fully expect^hope that in 7 years from now we'll need to shop around to find a ICE car.
I agree that all of those things are improving but repairability or even the right to repair new electric vehicles is flaky at best and that's my concern. I don't want to own a vehicle that I'm unable to repair. Not to mention manufacturers locking features behind paywalls.
If you have street parking in a urban area there's a good chance you can't get a outlet connected to your car without running a extension cord from your window, across a sidewalk, and then to the port.
That's a different situation than OP, so what I said to him isn't going to work for you.
There are so many public charging options now, just go to your grocery store and charge while getting groceries. My workplace has a few as well.
You could try the portable battery options, but not sure how you prevent someone from taking it.
I live in a small town in a rural area. There is one charger in my town, but it's at the county building and is for county employees. There are chargers at grocery stores, but those are 50kms away.
My house still has a fuse box, I don't have any available holes. The whole system needs changed and I will, but that's $10k and that's not a very exciting purchase.
I guess I didn't mean lease, I meant financing. I definitely hope to have a vehicle at least 7 years. I just upgraded my paid off corolla because we needed all wheel drive vehicle for our winters here. Otherwise I'd have kept it till it died in 20 years (corolla joke). The electric car would have to be comparable to that and I'm not sold that they will be. We bought one of the few cars available to us without a multi month wait.
I'm sure many of my fears are unjustified, but I require further evidence. I'm not an early adopter type.
You really only have 1 problem (aside from perceptions), but it's a real one. You need to be able to charge at home, and it sounds like you probably can't do that. You'd be stuck on trickle charging (3 miles of range per hour on the charger), and even that's questionable.
The car will keep the battery warm whenever it's plugged in. If you take care of the battery (rarely let it go all the to 0% or 100%), it will easily last over 100k miles, and probably to 200k. When it does start to wear out, it's not a hard cutoff- just like your phone, you'll notice the capacity (range) starts to drop.
FWIW, there are very significant federal rebates/tax credits in the US for EVs. That specifically includes upgrading electrical service to support an EV charger. But given that you said kms, I have to assume you are in a different country. Many have their own incentives, but you'd have to check into those yourself.
From what I understand our incentives ended a couple years ago and my Premier is a dick. I'm definitely not against electric cars, but I think the car we bought was a good choice for our current situation. I hope our car is the last ICE we buy. Much of my needs are met with my ebike and I try to structure my life to need a car as little as possible. Winter's a bitch though.
I had a 87 corolla for the longest time. I sold it to a teenager a over a decade ago and I still see it rolling around town. Great car if you are only worried about going a-b and don't need fancy things like usb chargers or A/C.
Mine was a '16 and had more features lol. Great car. The only "repairs" it needed in 7 years were the brakes. I was sorry to let it go.
I get the old house rural life. I wouldn't worry about the lasting 7 years right now. That being said driving a relatively efficient car for a couple decades is definitely environmentally friendly by comparison to getting a new truck every 5 years. Probably not too far from buying a new EV every 7 years once you add the embodied energy.
In a few years things will come around so make sure you've upgraded your electrical panel by then.