sj_zero on Nostr: Why do most people get rid of their smart phones? It's the batteries. People end up ...

Why do most people get rid of their smart phones?

It's the batteries. People end up getting new smart phones because the batteries die out and they can't last anymore.

Batteries for an EV have been quoted as tens of thousands of dollars, and on many EVs they simply aren't manufactured after a point and so your car is scrap. As well, insurance costs for EVs are starting to rise because relatively small accidents can have repair costs so high it'll write off the vehicle.

The saddest thing as batteries die on your phone is maybe you start off with your phone able to last for a few days, and then maybe a couple days, then maybe you last a day, and then eventually you're sitting there running around trying to find a charger to get a few hours in between.

And if you're not charging at home, the cost to get a charge at a charging station is surprisingly high. About 10 years ago I did a study of the difference in price between the cheapest EV and a cheap new gas vehicle (I think it was a Toyota Corolla), and found you'd really struggle to make up the difference in price in gasoline usage and oil changes.

According to my research at the time, and inexpensive Corolla was just under half the price of a battery electric vehicle. I just took a quick look, and the same Toyota Corolla is aboot 29,000 canuckistani kopecs, and the cheapest BEV I could find was the Volkswagen golf at 39,000. There's completely other dimension to this being the new versus used but I'm not going to get into that right now. The key thing is that if your gas budget is about 40 canuckistani kopecs per week, then that's 2000 kopecs per year, so if you assume you basically get travel for free then it's 5 years to break even (give or take a 3 oil changes per year). That's now, with der fuhrer's carbon taxes in full effect. I have to assume that he will be spending that money on something extremely good for the environment, such as paying off charities that employ his family members. On the other hand, if charging costs a bunch of money because it turns out those chargers aren't so cheap (it might be just fine, but I've seen multiple videos where people charge up and the cost is in like the several tens of dollars which was not what I expected)

And for all of the times you can't use your EV, for example trying to drive to the next city in the winter, suddenly you need to count the costs of using something else.

So I think it's more accurate to say that the known costs of driving a car with an internal combustion engine may be higher than the as of yet not really known costs of driving an EV. On the other hand, maybe not. We don't really know yet except for a small number of people who self selected because their lifestyle worked for EVs, but it'll still be a while before things are known.

There's also a whole other part that no one talks about because most of the people who drive EVs don't live in really cold places: if it's 40 below, your starter battery on your car is in bad shape. You can keep it on a charger and keep the block heater turned on though, and the car will start and once it does that, it'll get comparable performance to in warmer weather for a variety of reasons where some things are more efficient and other things are less efficient. You basically get cabin heat for free. Especially when you're driving, it can be really really cold out and you can have a nice warm toasty vehicle cabin, and that doesn't affect the range of your vehicle at all, since instead of redistributing waste heat to the outside using the radiator, you redistribute waste heat to the inside of the car using the heater core. By contrast, if you turn on the heat in an electric car, an electric car is going to see a commensurate and rather large drop in range because to heat an EV you use the battery to create heat. Meanwhile, the engine bay of an ICE car warms up from waste heat, and the EV needs to keep its battery warm using energy that can't be used to move the vehicle.

You will often find videos of electric vehicles being tested in Arctic conditions, but one thing that you need to note for those videos is that they drive out of a heated garage into the cold. Therefore, in order to have your energy efficient ev, presumably you need to keep at spare room in your house heated to keep the car in overnight. That might seem like a wild conjecture, but I've worked somewhere with electric vehicles and 40 below, and those electric vehicles had to stay in the heated garages when it got really cool or else they would not move.

Anyway, I know that this all seems like I'm completely cutting down EVs and saying that you can't possibly want to buy one ever, but the reality is more like "these are not a magic wand that one can wave" -- there are going to be situations where they make a lot more sense, and other situations where they make a lot less sense, and unfortunately I think for a lot of people at least for the time being they might be in the latter camp. On the other hand, as with literally everything, you need to do your own research and come to your own decisions because what might not be a good idea for one person could be a great idea for that person's neighbor. Decisions are mostly personal, after all.