Rather than having a shorter lifespan than internal combustion engines, EV batteries are lasting way longer than expected, surprising even the automakers themselves.
8 years on an internal combustion engine is nothing if you preventative maintenance properly.
My newest car is 18 years old and the only thing wrong at the moment is the seals around 2 of the windows is finally leaking. All the work I’ve done is preventative maintenance and it’s got about 180k miles on it. The previous owner did the same. I put about 20k miles a year on it since I bought it.
My other car is 25 years old and it’s basically the same story except it’s passing 200k miles soon, and I’m the 4th owner. And the previous owners neglected the hell out of the poor thing. I’ve only put about 15k miles on this one.
While that is true for some cars, not all cars, EV or ICE, are built equally. One of my previous cars got all the preventative maintainance, but it still started to break down constantly at 120k miles (Saab 9-5 if you’re curious). The issue is that while we have a lot of reliability data for ICE cars, there isn’t much for EVs. Ideally they would have higher reliability since they are relatively more simple, but at this point we do not have long term data.
Also, and this is an article problem, not a you problem, years owned is not as helpful as miles driven. Even in EVs, the slight degradation you see YoY could be amplified by driving 50k miles in a year.
8 years on an internal combustion engine is nothing if you preventative maintenance properly.
My newest car is 18 years old and the only thing wrong at the moment is the seals around 2 of the windows is finally leaking. All the work I’ve done is preventative maintenance and it’s got about 180k miles on it. The previous owner did the same. I put about 20k miles a year on it since I bought it.
My other car is 25 years old and it’s basically the same story except it’s passing 200k miles soon, and I’m the 4th owner. And the previous owners neglected the hell out of the poor thing. I’ve only put about 15k miles on this one.
I’m going to drive them until I can’t fix them.
While that is true for some cars, not all cars, EV or ICE, are built equally. One of my previous cars got all the preventative maintainance, but it still started to break down constantly at 120k miles (Saab 9-5 if you’re curious). The issue is that while we have a lot of reliability data for ICE cars, there isn’t much for EVs. Ideally they would have higher reliability since they are relatively more simple, but at this point we do not have long term data.
Also, and this is an article problem, not a you problem, years owned is not as helpful as miles driven. Even in EVs, the slight degradation you see YoY could be amplified by driving 50k miles in a year.
Also depends on the type and amount of driving you do.