The problem is a 50kWh battery in a car is worth more as a battery than a typical £1500 car.

The lowest end of the market won’t have electric cars unless the batteries are shagged (early Leafs)

And given how insanely cheap petrol is (15p a mile, so £450 for a low mileage runaround) the savings even if electric was free and they weren’t introducing a 3p/mile charge isn’t there.

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cogman10 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A £1500 car is £1500 because it's expected you'll need to replace the engine or transmission pretty soon. That can be up to a £4000 job (£2500 on the low end).

And, as it turns out, a brand new 50kWh battery costs around £4000 to manufacture. Used will be cheaper.

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quibono 3 hours ago | parent [-]

With most modern ICE cars everything but the transmission and the engine will fail before those two go out. Also: I don't think that's the usual case. Plenty of sub 2k cars that will happily keep driving for years (I've had 3 such cars). ~700 mark is where you start seeing 300k mile "finish-them-off"-type cars.

	▲	cogman10 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Plenty of EVs will drive for years as well (so long as they have a good thermal system for the battery). So I'm not sure what point is being made. Saying "It costs a lot of money to replace the battery" doesn't mean much as the battery, even if it has 70% of it's original capacity, is still perfectly functional. Very much the same as the engine which also costs a lot of money to replace.
	▲	g8oz an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I heard plenty of horror stories involving modern cars and their transmissions and engines.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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XorNot 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Battery prices are still falling though, it's just demand is enormous. But I works fully expect China to start having "compatible replacement packs" being built once the volume is there to support it.

A logical future market is battery-refurbished EVs, just a question of where the crossover point is.