It's widely known that maintenance costs way less on EVs than on gas-powered cars. There are plenty of data points everywhere to confirm this. EVs are much simpler with way fewer moving parts and fluids to worry about.
It is NOT clear this is true for the first 10,20 or 50K miles though, and that's about as long as a rental company owns the car, so attributing financial gains from EV vs. ICE seems spurious at best.
If you own a large fleet of vehicles, and especially with the way people treat cars that aren't theirs, some non-trivial percentage of those cars are going to need service that goes beyond mere fluid replacement, even within the first few ten thousand miles. This may not apply to the modal rental car, but it will apply to some of them, enough to bring the average up non-trivially.
I'd be interested in seeing how this applies to consumers/owners. From what I've seen, the items that tend to cost more in maintenance for EVs are things like the battery; ones that last a long-ish time but are extremely expensive to fix/replace when they go. Given that rental companies (and people that lease) likely won't have the cars long enough to reach that point, the overall maintenance cost is lower for them. Does this hold true when you start to consider people that own/use the cars for 10+ years?
Most EVs won't ever have their batteries replaced; it simply won't be necessary. This is a perennial concern about EVs that simply isn't a big deal in practice, and EVs have been around long enough to have data points here.
Most people don't own and use cars for nearly long enough to fully wear out a battery pack on an EV that they've bought new.
>Most people don't own and use cars for nearly long enough to fully wear out a battery pack
The average car age in the US is over 12 years. I can see why it’s much less with the current EV owners as early adopters tend to…well, adopt the next technology earlier. But wouldn’t this also imply the environmental impacts are lessened by continual churn in manufacturing?
Most of the problems in any moving vehicle come from stuff close to the ground, tires, suspension, steering. This is true for everything from battery powered forklifts to semi trucks.
Leaks start showing up in old age and the involved parts don't typically wear out unless you ignore leaks and habitually run some subsystem low on its requisite fluid or run it dry. There are some exceptions for piss poor engineering but generally the prior sentence holds.
>Most of the problems in any moving vehicle come from stuff close to the ground
Is this based on your intuition or is there more to it? The DoT tracks automobile issues and it looks like the top ones are engine, engine cooling, other power train, air bags, and brakes. [1]
That said, a lot of EV have transmission and more fluids due to the need to improve temperature control. Until someone solves the battery chemistry problem again.
That may be true, but from the perspective of a company like Hertz they are covered by the standard 8 year warranties offered by most EV manufacturers because they do not keep cars that long anyway.
Idk how true this is, but I keep hearing that car batteries have gotten so good they are likely to outlive the car.
Anyways, these are rentals, which are usually sold after around 1 year/30,000-40,000 miles. So it's irrelevant for a rental car company if batteries last longer than that.
do batteries wear out in the lifetime of a rental car? I would think the batteries have a lifetime of at least 10 years whereas a rental agency only keeps the car for <4 years.
There likely is greenwashing. The percentage of their fleet consisting of EVs is likely small. Most modern ICE vehicles only need service every 10K miles on their ICE components. This may amount to $1000 for the time rental companies are operating a particular vehicle, a fraction of the overall revenue.
Alternatively, how are rental companies charging returned EVs? The time spent sitting at a charger should be considered as lost revenue when an EV comes back empty.