[velhartice]

No I don’t because I inspect and research the cars I buy to avoid dumpster fires. After 20 years of car ownership I’ve never once had a breakdown or an expensive repair. Furthermore I haven’t had any issue that a $150 toolset, a jack, and a youtube video couldn’t fix in an afternoon.

[ajford]

And you don't believe you can do the same with an EV? When I test drove the first EV (a Nissan Leaf) I bought, I took an OBD2 dongle with me and evaluated the data after the fact. I was able to confirm the battery health and capacity, the charging rates seen, etc.

With that in hand, I was confident in the health of the EV and made my purchase.

In the future it may very well be possible to do the same home repairs on your EV. We're barely past the first decade of publicly available EVs. A number of early EVs have plenty of guides out there on how to replace and rebuild battery packs on your own, and aftermarket mfgs are starting to produce speed controllers and ECUs for custom EVs.

It's just a new wave of tech, and that too will become normal over time just like ICE cars themselves.

[2muchcoffeeman]

Things happen with ICE vehicles too. But you can easily find a model that has a really good track record for reliability and is easy and cheap to repair.

Batteries on the other hand will eventually break down. Sure, eventually it will become cheaper to repair and replace. But the oldest EVs on the road are probably Teslas. The Model S is something like 10 years old now? And a full battery replacement is still hugely expensive. A decade on and EVs are still luxury items.

The cost of the vehicle and maintenance over 10 years would have to be dramatically less in the average case for regular people to start buying them. In that sense I think Toyota has plenty of run way.

[random314]

Good for you