[cs702]

According to the OP, Hertz has found that EVs are "between 50-60% cheaper to maintain than gasoline-powered cars."

That's a huge difference. It means that the cost of using an ICE vehicle over time is 2x greater.

If the figure is anywhere near accurate, ICE vehicles are toast.

[Majestic121]

While those numbers are extremely encouraging, the fact that this is on a new fleet is to be kept in mind.

What we know now is that they 50-60% cheaper to maintain during the first couple of years.

Let's hope that they are also 50-60% cheaper to maintain over their whole lifetime, but this might not be as assured as one might think due to batteries which are a huge cost.

[metadat]

EV maintenance items should only involve tires, air filters, and wiper blades and fluid. My friends with Teslas have reported that these are the only things they've done in 50,000+ miles.

[treeman79]

So same as a gas car minus oil changes.

[metadat]

I'm not going to put the entire ICE maintenance list here, but there are a lot more wear items. Brakes, belts, coolant, oil, transmission service, annual emissions inspections.

Radiator or other leaks.. pretty annoying.

The maintenance schedule is definitely more involved.

Edit: lostlogin, sure.. that's a, uhm, certain strategy. No doubt, Japanese cars can usually take an impressive amount of abuse. And yeah, a harsh way to treat a machine you rely on to keep you and your loved ones safe.

[lostlogin]

It can be, but our 2 corollas have had an oil change each in 10 years, one got a set of tyres and one needed brake pads and rotor skimming.

It’s a terrible way to treat cars, but they go fine.

[DangitBobby]

I've unfortunately taken a car to its limits by neglecting to change the oil (depression). They go fine and then they fail quite fast and permanently. Amazing how long it lasted without any noticeable effects, though!

Most people change their oil way, way too often. Places like Jiffy Lube will tell you every 3 months or 3000 miles because they make more money that way, but if you look at your manual it's more likely to say 6k miles with crude and have no time based recommendation. Synthetic oil you can go something like 10k IIRC.

[yazaddaruvala]

The best part about exponential curves:

By the time the battery needs to be replaced batteries will be 90% cheaper.

[almost_usual]

This seems very optimistic.

[yazaddaruvala]

That is my preferred outlook yes :)

But it is backed by the data. Check out my other responses.

If you’re either “realistic” or pessimistic, what about the data and trends we already have doesn’t convince you of a giant cost reduction over the decade to produce batteries?

[nebula8804]

we'll see about that. It does not seem to be true for the Leaf batteries. These early 24kwh models have replacement batteries costing like 11-12k. Based on the rapid depreciation of the car's value(how many people want a car that can only go 80ish miles?) that battery pack price makes it a non starter for many people.

I am looking forward to third parties hopefully releasing their own packs. How would you warranty and insure them though? Also forget about third party packs for Tesla. They have so much integration that I doubt you'll see anything other than replacement packs from Tesla.

[lm28469]

You can be sure the invisible hand of the free market will take care of that, and also of the "it's 4x cheaper to charge an EV than fill an ICE vehicle tank"

[yazaddaruvala]

The technology is just too distributed already for any of that to happen.

Cost of charging an EV is bounded by the ability to add solar panels to your house (currently solar installations “pay for themselves” in 7 years in Seattle - not so sunny - high cost of labor location). The grid and “free market” have to be able to compete with that for cost.

Batteries like solar panels are very cheap to transport. They are flat, they can easily stack, there is no expiration period, and no temperature regulation needed to transport them. Batteries will be produced globally if the local markets start gouging.

Solar panels are already a great example of this cost reduction curve. So I’d say your outlook is very pessimistic and not backed by the data.

[lm28469]

You'll need a shit load of solar panels to charge a 60kw+ EV regularly, and a shit ton of sun.

A lot of people don't own/live in a house in Europe, let alone a house with enough land for a proper solar installation

If it was that easy every single house would already be self sufficient in electricity, if you can half charge a 60kw EV battery every day you could easily run everything in your house

I'm 100% pro solar but I think people just don't understand the numbers here, with my _yearly_ electricity consumption I can only charge a 75kwh tesla battery 25 times, that's once every 2 weeks.

> So I’d say your outlook is very pessimistic and not backed by the data.

Filling am EV at a public charger in Paris already costs more than filling your gas tank. https://www.frandroid.com/produits-android/automobile/voitur...

I'm telling, people who want to make money won't change overnight. Of course that's different than trickle charging your EV in your garage but a lot of people 1 don't own a garage, 2 won't have the proper installation for a quick charge and won't have that any time soon.

I know lots of people here are 100$k+ tech worker living in fancy and sunny places but the reality is that the vast majority of people can't even afford an EV right now, let alone a 20$K+ solar instal for the house they don't even have yet.

[yazaddaruvala]

> A lot of people don't own/live in a house in Europe,

Ok fair enough, I shouldn't have said "on your house".

The point of my comment was the decentralization of energy production and storage. i.e. "Cost of charging an EV is bounded by the ability to add solar panels to [someone's] house [, relatively nearby]". e.g. please look into https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/community-solar-basics

For as many people in the city that cannot add solar panels, there is land owned by someone who is very happy to install solar (with your money - as an "investor"), generate an excess, and sell it to the grid. It seems very unlikely that "the invisible hand of the free market" will result in higher cost of electricity for individuals.

Additionally, from 2019: "Under the 25-year contract with developer 8minute Solar Energy, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power would pay less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour — a number city officials and independent experts say would be the lowest price ever paid for solar power in the United States, and cheaper than the cost of electricity from a typical natural gas-fired power plant."

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-08-27/los-ang...

[endisneigh]

there's no way that will be true, lol

[yazaddaruvala]

This is the trend, backed by all the data and the expectation of the industry. Why do you think otherwise?

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/management/e...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

If you’re familiar with Moores Law, that is an example of an experience curve.

[endisneigh]

I’m familiar with the trend, but it’s unlikely the price of electric batteries would decrease an additional 90% in 20 years

[yazaddaruvala]

“unlikely” based on what?

Your narrative is counter to the industry’s expectations of itself. Your narrative is counter to the research and science already showcased in labs.

So I just want to understand your perspective better. What sources are you using to justify “unlikely”, or are you using intuition?

Keep in mind exponential curves are very hard for humans to grasp and even harder for humans to believe, but the super majority of the time those curves hold for many decades.

[metadat]

Strange claim, because Hertz's fleets are comprised of new and almost brand new vehicles, which usually only require oil changes.

Then they sell them off after accumulating 10,000-25,000 miles, before any real maintenance is required.

20,000 miles is what, 4-6 oil changes?

[belval]

An explanation could be that people driving Hertz cars are not optimizing for car longevity which breaks more stuff earlier? Also 10,000-20,000 miles in pure city environment can still take a toll on the brakes which the EV would be more resistant too because of regenerative breaking.

[pjc50]

The article mentions failures. Presumably it's quite an expensive hassle if a customer's car fails and you have to provide them with another one on top of the cost of the actual repair.

Interestingly JD Power claim that EVs have more problems https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/28/jd-power-evs-and-and-plug-... .. but mostly in the infotainment system? Maybe that matters less to rental drivers. Maybe that depends on brand.

[toast0]

> 20,000 miles is what, 4-6 oil changes?

Most new cars have a 10,000 mile factory oil change interval. PHEVs usually go for 20,000.

Rental cars sometimes have a hard service life, but I'd put that range at maybe 1-2 changes. Which isn't much at all.

More likely there's a usage difference; if you're puttering around from the airport to the hotel and back, you might pick an EV, but if you're renting a car to drive a longer distance one-way trip, it's mostly going to be an ICE, and you're gonna put some miles on it at high speed, etc.

[metadat]

Thanks for the info, toast0.

Minor clarification: Highway miles are actually gentler than city / town miles. Less wear and tear due to stop and go traffic, 90 degree turns, and fewer potholes.

[toast0]

They're generally gentler, but it kind of depends on the highway. The speeds also mean more consequences of any pothole or other obstruction, too.

But mostly the observation is that you'll likely get a lot more miles on the car in such a rental than a local rental. So a rental company that keeps a car in their fleet for 2-years or 20,000 miles is going to likely send most EVs out for age and more ICEs for milage (in my estimation, anyway), and so sure, ICEs will have oil changes in that interval, but they'll also have more of the every car needs maintenance sort of proportional to use (runtime and/or mileage), because they'll see more use.

[CydeWeys]

I would be curious to see absolute values on this rather than percentages. Not having to do oil changes could easily be a 50% decrease, but oil changes also really aren't that expensive overall on a few tens of thousands of miles, right?

[dsfyu404ed]

Some employee has to take those cars to jiffy lube (or whatever oil change place is contracted with that Hertz location to provide fluid changes) to the tune of $20/hr. I can see that dominating costs.

And on top of that the average EV probably has low(er) rolling resistance tires (to get a few more miles of range) which get replaced every 40k instead of whatever sticky tires the OEM slapped that only last 30k so you're doing that routine less too.

[fiftyfifty]

Oil changes probably explains the difference. We have 70,000 miles on my wife's Tesla and it's never gone in for any maintenance. We've replaced the tires on it twice now (Tesla's do eat tires) and I've replaced the cabin air filter a couple of times and fill up the windshield washer fluid about once a year.

[diamondo25]

I think the main issue is how people drive these cars. If you have a lot of short trips, or overrevving, or just in general abusing it (because rental), is much more common on ICE cars compared to electric ones?

[bluedino]

Probably closer to 3 if they are following the cars oil life monitoring system

[oxfordmale]

I wonder if the second hand price of EVs makes a difference. Until recently you could pretty much drive a Tesla for free for the first two years, as the second hand value hardly deprecated.

[ip26]

Here’s an interesting question- do they need to sell off EV’s after only 25,000 miles? Does simple maintenance reduce the turnover rate & associated costs?

[asciimov]

Rental Companies are notorious for not doing scheduled maintenance on cars.

[lm28469]

> ICE vehicles are toast

Let's wait, my dad traded his 20 years old car for a new model a few years ago, he paid 8k euros for a brand new ICE car, he does under 10k km per year now. The cheapest EV I can find is 22k euros here, and it's a piece of shit that barely does highway speed, which he could not afford anyways.

Companies will make public charger more and more expensive until it reaches the price of filling a gas car, it's just matter of time, mechanics will do the same. In the meantime it's all tricks and snares, enjoy it while it lasts

[astura]

What car is only €8k new? I don't think there's anything in that price range in the US market..

[asciimov]

Those are short term ownership costs. Major Rental Companies often pull cars between 35k-50k miles, which they can pile on the car in 12 months. For most modern cars that is a couple of oil changes, but before the long term maintenance items crop up like tires, which on EVs are more expensive.