This is basically like saying combustion vehicles could last nearly forever if you replaced the engine every now and then
I mean…they can, you just refresh the motor. Tons of ICE vehicles out there with 400-500k miles on them. Hell most semi trucks have millions of miles on them.
I am thinking of doing that when my civic should be legally declared dead. With the insanity that is new car prices and insurance for new cars plus the vanished used car market it just isn’t worth it. I want an EV but things have to go back to normal before that happens
It’s easy to do, and engines don’t cost much on ebay.
Fortunately Honda makes vehicles that are very durable, so it’s not like everything dies at the same age of the engine.
If they’re easy enough to work on, and the parts market is maintained, yes.
Nothing lasts forever without something going wrong, but we can make it easier to fix. It’s a little more true of EVs, because they’re mechanically simpler than ICE cars. You added an electric motor (which lasts forever if designed well), batteries (life dependent on the chemistry involved), and some electronics to drive that (caps in there go bad, much of the rest will last forever if not abused). You took away an ICE, an intake system, an exhaust system, perhaps some forced induction, a coolant system (which you might have on EVs, but not to the same level), an ignition system, a shitload of sensors (O2 sensors having particularly short life, relatively speaking), and a fuel pump.
If designed to be worked on, the EV is far, far easier.
A rebuild every x00,000 miles on a Toyota sounds nicer than paying the price of a new pilot every 100,000 miles tbh. Computers don’t last though and emissions have made it a huge pain to fix on older cars. Nothing against emissions it’s a necessary evil.
New pilot? I dunno what any of this means
Honda pilot. I don’t know how to answer vague questions.😅
Obviously they wont “let” them. Why would they ever do that? They have to be made to do it. But I hope i’m wrong, we will see.
I think people need to start being educated about how their climate influences how they can use the electric car. Many people know if they live by the sea or where roads are salted that corrosion is an issue. But people might not be aware that with some EVs, they should leave it plugged in if they’re in an extreme climate, so the car can air condition or heat the battery. I caused some battery degradation to my Volt because I wasn’t able to leave it plugged in living in Tucson.
Its really worth reading the whole Article. Im looking forward to long lasting EVs, but I really fear that, what the author also described in his article, may come true. I think we will see that car manufacturers will start to act like hardware company’s and start to force you to regularly buy a new car by making your car incompatible to new features or by designing it to fail after a few years.
I think we will see that car manufacturers will start to
They started to do this decades ago. Generally any given part in a car might be left unchanged for 5 or 6 model years before it gets changed, often for completely arbitrary reasons. For many cars, if it’s over ten years old your only hope for a replacement part is the junkyard.
Or your local friendly 3D Printer mad scientist. Provided they have a metal and a plastic printer.
The opensource edm machine that is just now gain popularity seems like a great choice for parts! LumenPNP for machine replacement circuit boards on larger scales is exciting to me too ( I hate hand soldering so maybe its just a personal thing lol).
My local maker space built a plasma tourch and table too. Honestly it feels likes all coming together for it to be done
Yeah, options open up for some massively popular models or otherwise very well loved models. I got replacement gears for headlight motors for a 90s car with pop-up headlights, because people got tired of the OEM design wearing out so easily. I suspect someone trying to keep a Pontiac Aztek going might have a harder time finding enthusiasts keeping things alive.
Or, God forbid, a Chrysler PT Cruiser. I liked the look, shame their drivetrain is universally shit.
Good luck with that. Planned obsolescence is a key ingredient in capitalism. I mean what better way to make line go up than to turn a one-time purchase into a repeat purchase? This shareholders and executives will never be able to step on the working class if they can’t gouge customers. Won’t anyone think of the shareholders?
Bad drivers like me can fix that by applying wear to bodywork. Normal driving wears the tires and all the gears, gaskets, and bearings in the system. But it can probably last 20 years.
My family bought an electric forklift for their factory in the early 90s. I think it is a Yale.
My sister has since taken over the forklift for her company and she has only replaced the batteries and the controller once.
These things are cheap to replace and not as much of a mystery as ICE engines.
I am seeing people replace old Prius hybrid batteries themselves with basic tools now.
I think the only thing I would be concern about is the crash safety for cars. Newer cars are safer. I think that would be the only draw to buy a newer vehicle.
I replaced the main battery in a Gen1 Prius. Fiddly. Had to get a strong buddy to help lift it in and out of the car, but we did it in a long weekend. A full set of ‘used but tested’ cells cost something like $750 but that was probably 8 years ago.
Exactly. Plus the newer cells are more efficient and longer-lasting. You pretty much upgraded your vehicle.
Actually the low cost part of this was that they weren’t upgraded cells. Just tested-good cells from other battery packs. Most of the time it’s just a couple cells in the bigger battery that have issues, and they take those out of the pool and make a good amount of $$$ because we were required to send back all of our cells. Assuming that of the 26 (iirc) cells that 3 or 4 were bad that’s a big profit margin for sure. The car worked great after swapping them out.
That’s awesome. This is such a simple hack.
I was going to scoff at the Prius…the battery is only 1500$.
I need a Prius frame in an El Camino body.
I’m sure someone has a kit for that.
Sometimes I think people don’t understand how capitalism works…
power density just needs to grow until someone can easily kit-swap a range of battery and motor options into any platform - then we can ev-ify whatever we want to drive around.
“Unlike gas-powered engines—which are made up of thousands of parts that shift against one other—a typical EV has only a few dozen moving parts. That means lessdamage and maintenance, making it easier and cheaper to keep a car on the road well past the approximately 200,000-mile average lifespan of a gas-powered vehicle. And EVs are only getting better. “There are certain technologies that are coming down the pipeline that will get us toward that million-mile EV,” Scott Moura, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley, told me. That many miles would cover the average American driver for 74 years. The first EV you buy could be the last car you ever need to purchase.“
No way a car would last me and my family 74 years. First year I owned my car I put on almost 35k. Was driving 100 miles back and forth to work at that time. We typically take a road trip from colorado to near Vermont every year for a vacation.
A lot of midwesterns will drive 14 hours to get some where
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At best case 60 miles an hour… Your commute was more than 90 mins? Ugh. That’s awful.
You weren’t clear if that was round trip or not, so possibly more than 180 mins? How did you find time to sleep!?
Round trip was 100 miles every day. This was rural Ohio driving to Columbus so it was not to bad 2 and 4 lane roads till you hit the city most of them time. If we got a lot of snowfall it could super suck but I was from NE Ohio so most of the time it was not that much white knuckle driving. You just listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts or call some friends on your hour or so drive home
In the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s not uncommon for people that work here but can’t afford to live here to have commutes of over an hour with good traffic (2+ hours with heavy traffic) each way. That’s the case in a few major metro areas in countries like the USA and Australia.
Yeah Bay Area and LA traffic is next level. My condolences to those souls who make that drive every day
My commute in the Bay Area is 15-20 mins without traffic, but it can be 50 minutes if there’s some incident on the 101 or if I accidentally try to commute during the highest peak period.
I’d love to take a train to work, and I used to take Caltrain every day, but it’s just not feasible where I live now.
I think LA is even worse than the Bay.
Sure, there’s always going to be outliers. Most people live and work in the same metropolitan area though - they’re not driving 50,000km+ a year. Besides, having a vehicle with 5 times the effective lifetime is going to be a big win regardless of how much you drive it.
Last nearly forever? That needs to be broken down into details. Aren’t batteries for EV limited to about 10 years of use? And they’re a costly replacement?
A good solution would be to make EV batteries easily swappable instead of “charge stations”…
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I think we will stick with built-in batteries rather than any kind of swapping. I always thought the battery swapping idea was neat, but the real world cares about money more than anything.
To have ubiquitous battery swapping stations would be a huge amount of infrastructure. But to have ubiquitous vehicle charging you basically just have to run wires to existing parking spots.
That is combined with the fact that I think batteries, especially LFP batteries, have a lot more cycles in their lifetime than your 10 year estimate would suggest. I’ve read 4000 cycles for LFP in a few places. That’s more than a decade even if you fully charge and discharge the battery every single day. Drive a more realistic number of miles/kms per day and then the chronological age of the battery might be more important than how many cycles are on it.
Swappable batteries are a giant headache, charging is better.
Batteries are lasting longer and longer, LFP are already able to last 20 times as long as typical lithium ion, while using less cobalt.
Modern EV tech is still relatively new. It took combustion cars a long time to get to present day longevity and efficiency. EVs will catch up.
Not really. They’re quite popular in Asian countries.
There’s a couple thousand in China for Nio, but they haven’t really taken off anywhere else.
By contrast there’s over 1.8 million public EV chargers in China alone.
Batteries are heavy, which makes them hard to move and requires secure attachment to the vehicle. EV chargers have no moving parts and require much less maintenance.
The thing is you don’t need heavy batteries if you can swap them every 100-150km or so.
150km of range usually requires about 200kg of lithium ion batteries. More for larger vehicles.
What’s wrong with charging? At 350KW you can get 150km of range in 5 minutes.
Not if your car is a small one ala Fiat 500E. And bigger cars should not exist.
The Fiat 500e’s battery weighs 295kg.
Wear and tear doesn’t kill a car; rust does.
Climate change is getting rid of snow. No more salted roads. Cars will last forever
You know humidity causes rust too, right? And rain. Lol
Back in the day you could buy whole (but small) parts, cut away the rusy one and solder in the new one (paint with anti rust paint). Did it on my cheap ass volvo 142 :-)
Maybe you can’t do that any more because of complex crumple zones, but I bet we can do better. A car shouldn’t just have a life span of 6-10 years.
You can still do that. They’re called body repair panels. They are usually plain metal. You have to cut out the old, weld in the new, grind them flat, prime and paint them. This isn’t cost efficient if your car is worth less than the paint you’d need. The parts usually are around $100-$300 bucks (if you don’t need OEM parts) but the labor is expensive. And if you do it for cheap it will look like crap.
If you do it for cheap it sure will look like crap.
Source: me doing it in the nineties without really knowing welding :-D
A car shouldn’t just have a life span of 6-10 years.
They don’t.
My current daily driver is 18 years old. I expect at least another 10 barring an accident, maybe 30 more years as a spare vehicle. It got a new transmission at 200,000 miles. Engine seems like it’ll make it to at least 400k. A replacement is $1500, far less than a new car.
Most cars in my family (approximately 30 cars) are between ten and thirty years old.
I’ve had 3 cars since 1996, all bought used, and I traveled for work with one. One car I sold to a family member, and it’s still being driven.
It’s people that choose to not drive cars this long.
Yeah but that can for sure be survival bias.
Basically you got lucky, or a brand made a better car for a while, you heard about it and bought one.
To make it sustainable cars should be easy to repair, probably with interchangeable parts etc.
Same. We’re at 17 and 18 years, and we’re looking for replacements because we want something more efficient. We’ll probably sell them instead of junking them. We bought one at ~8yo, and the other at ~15yo, each has had minimal issues and I’ve done most of the work on them myself. Neither have any rust, though we live in a desert, so that’s not all that surprised.
Cars absolutely can last quite a while if they’re well maintained and designed well.
Same goes for light bulbs
“EVs won’t last nearly forever.”
I mean most things can, it just isn’t profitable…
Planned Obsolescence, baby!
That said, we might be able to make industrial scale recycling an economically efficient activity if we build more durable goods with a longer lifecycle and limit the availability of new territory to strip mine and abandon.
So much of our “cheap” access to minerals and fossil fuels boils down to valuing unimproved real estate as at zero dollars and ignoring the enormous waste produced during the extraction process. Properly accounting for the destruction of undeveloped real estate and the emissions/waste created during industrial processing could dramatically improve how much waste we produce and - consequently - how long our durable goods last.
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But ending capitalism to make good products that satisfy user need kills 100 zillion people.
But it’s also very gay, so it’s probably worth it.
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And few people want to work for free or want put aside too much of there personal wealth to help people for things that don’t seem critical (like healthcare for example which has a lot of nonprofit activities).
I hope OpenSource keeps takening off in the field. Communalize the engineering results so we advance together, and lower the cost of manufacturing with diy/small scale manufacturing and maybe we can get better things at costs more can afford without enslaving people.
