Tbh I'm worrying about everything in my car except for battery degradation.

Inverter dying, charging circuit dying, the motor shorting out, some of the DC isolators going bad, charging port crapping out. Even with the battery, my concern isn't with degradation, but that one of the modules decides call it quits and that's all she wrote.

Also a lot of EV engineering brings to mind the eternal Douglas Adams quote: 'The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.'

All in all, I find the claim that EVs will outlast gasoline vehicles a rather bold and extraordinary claim, and one that won't stand the test of time.

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BLKNSLVR 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Inverter dying, charging circuit dying, the motor shorting out, some of the DC isolators going bad, charging port crapping out.

How many of those things are very settled technology though? ie. a lot of years spent iterating and manufacturing out points of failure. The battery itself is the newest technology, such is my understanding (feel free to correct me).

They feel like unnecessary worries to me. But then, unnecessary worries seem to be a defining trait of the nowadays.

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torginus 5 days ago | parent [-]

> How many of those things are very settled technology though?

None? We simply don't have the kind of reliability data on EVs going out for 10-20 years that we reasonably expect a well-made ICE car to run for (with regular maintenance and without major component failures).

These failures are not theoretical, and have been demonstrated in the wild, and can easily total your vehicle. They might affect you personally if you plan on keeping the vehicle for the long time, or the resale value if you don't.

Inverters are known to degrade and fail, solar inverters basically almost always die somewhere between the 10-20 year mark (and those switch far less wattage and don't operate under conditions as harsh), which imo is not acceptable for a car to get totaled in that amount of time.

Unfortunately EVs are one of those partisan topics on the internet which have a lot of partisan haters and lovers, which makes reliable info on them almost impossible to find.

I personally have both solar at home and drive an EV, so I guess I both into the thing, but I can't say with high confidence that my EV will make it to the 20 year mark with the equal probability a well-made ICE car would.

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BLKNSLVR 5 days ago | parent [-]

My point was more that "electric systems" are a well entrenched technology / solved problem. As in, it's not a new method of power delivery. Though, admittedly, I'm not sure how much of that transfers directly into the context of powering a car.

As more time passes I guess we'll know which parts are more likely to fail and they'll be designed around the ability to replace them or design them for robustly, or both.

> I can't say with high confidence that my EV will make it to the 20 year mark with the equal probability a well-made ICE car would.

Fair enough.

I think it's quite positive that this comparison can start to be made, however. Given the relative immaturity of EVs.

	▲	torginus 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		EVs are quite unlike most residential power systems you encounter. They use high voltage DC, which this video illustrates, is a fun topic in of itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zez2r1RPpWY To generate this, the batteries have more than a hundred cells wired in series, if any one them fails, that means your battery's dead. In addition to this, the inverter that generates the AC driving your motor needs use high powered IGBT to switch this huge current and power tens of thousands of times per second to do PWM and uses filter caps to smooth the output. Both these are wear items(and impossible to replace) , its the operating conditions that determine if they'll live for 50 years or less than 10. Which is why I think EV reliability will be no different from ICE - manufacturers who do give a damn will make them last long, and make them fixable once they break, while others will save a buck and won't.