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by yobbo 1536 days ago
> fanbelts

Belts are maintenance parts, and are extremely unlikely to break if changed on schedule.

> flywheels

You would need a shaped charge warhead to break a flywheel.

> alternators and starters

Electric motors and servos exist in electric cars as well, to drive fans, pumps, brake servos, and so on.

> spark plugs

It is extremely rare for spark plugs on fuel injected engines to break, but they degrade and are cheap and easy to replace. Much easier than brake pads or tires.

> transmissions

Very rarely break, but the transmissions in electric cars share the same basic components.

> In practice, Teslas break most when other drivers hit them.

If this was true, it would mean teslas are babied and only used sparingly in forgiving environments. But there are still too few old teslas around to produce meaningful statistics about drive train/chassi failure modes, which usually happen much later in the cars lives. The oldest ones are essentially babied "boutique" individuals.

Maintenance changes on cars are: tires, brake pads, fluids (oil, cooling, hydraulics), and some belts, shock absorbers and suspension parts.

It is true that electric cars don't need oil changes.

1 comments

Most of those internal combustion engine maintenance parts simply do not exist one electric vehicles. You still need maintenance to fix / replace them, and that does not exist for most of those. The transmission on say a Tesla is a single speed and significantly simpler as a result.

As an example, the tesla model 3 warranty is 4 yr/50,000 mi basic, 8 yr/100,000 mi powertrain.

By comparison, the BMW M4 warranty is 4 yr/50,000 mi basic, 4 yr/50,000 mi powertrain.

Now the powertrain warranty being twice that of BMWs tells me they expect it to last at least that long. Perhaps I'm misreading something here?

The oldest teslas with the most miles are primarily taxis. I'm not sure I'd call a taxicab a "babied" vehicle.