Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects. With hard work and expertise, basically any old vehicle could be restored and operated: On YouTube, you can watch a man drive a 1931 Alvis to McDonald’s. But the car itself was stuck in time. If the automaker added a feature to the following year’s model, you just didn’t get it. Things have changed. My Model 3 has few dials or buttons; nearly every feature is routed through the giant central touch screen. It’s not just Tesla: Many new cars—and especially electric cars—are now stuffed with software, receiving over-the-air updates to fix bugs, tweak performance, or add new functionality.
In other words, your car is a lot like an iPhone (so much so that in the auto industry, describing EVs as “smartphones on wheels” has become a go-to cliché.) This has plenty of advantages—the improved navigation, the fart noises—but it also means that your car may become worse because the software is outdated, not because the parts break. Even top-of-the-line phones are destined to become obsolete—still able to perform the basic functions like phone calls and texts, but stuck with an old operating system and failing apps. The same struggle is now coming for cars.
Software-dependent cars are still new enough that it’s unclear how they will age. “It’s becoming the ethos of the industry that everyone’s promising a continually evolving car, and we don’t yet know how they’re going to pull that off,” Sean Tucker, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. “Cars last longer than technology does.” The problem with cars as smartphones on wheels is that these two machines live and die on very different timescales. Many Americans trade in their phone every year and less than 30 percent keep an iPhone for longer than three years, but the average car on the road is nearly 13 years old. (Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment about how its cars age.)
Over bloan. Software does not age but security does. Other things that do not age well is specialty tech hardware components. Batteries are a question too.
I know my volt at 10 years does not have a viable oem battery replacement (back ordered and nutty price). I can get a reasonable after market battery though.
A) Your car is not an EV. It’s a Hybrid.
B) All hybrid cars were/are bad investments.
You take a car, make it more complicated by adding an entire second power and drive system, and then expect it to not cost a fortune to maintain later?
Fucking stupidity.
All cars period are bad investments. That’s being said, I had a volt for about 3 years and I saved more in gas than I lost to depreciation and expensive maintenance. I bought it before there was an EV that could do my daily commute that wasn’t horrendously expensive; they were a good transition vehicle 10 years ago before batteries and charging speeds improved, though they’re definitely a huge PITA to maintain.
If you’ve only had it three years, the expensive maintenance part hasn’t started yet, it’s probably still under warranty.
I have a hybrid that will be free in one year from fuel savings to date. Math is fun. Brakes last forever.
And then it will become more expensive to maintain than the gas version the year after, and worth less at resale because of a degraded battery or some shit.
Also, brakes are not a primary cost in ownership of a vehicle.
Math is fun, but you need to do a total cost of ownership calculation, not a cost to date calculation.
Full electric is simply better math.
Dude, you should tell all the taxi companies in San Francisco they are stupid.
There have been hybrids since 1997, many are on roads after 20 years. You will not see a 15 year old Tesla. There is an entire worldwide industry of EV conversions fueled by the plentiful amount of Tesla motors from wreckers.
16 years on hybrids and your demons have not affected me.
Taxi companies don’t keep specific vehicles for 20 years, they wear out long before then. Keeping them maintained to pass inspection at that point would be a costly nightmare.
The first Tesla only came out 17 years ago, and it was a 2-door sports car… so yea it’s not really surprising you wouldn’t see 15 year old Teslas regularly. They do exist though. The Model S has only been out for 13 years, and there are definitely still first run Model S vehicles driving around. There are 8 from that original year for sale on Autotrader.com right now, all in running condition.
There are only 2 Prius C from 2012, and 2 more Prius V from the same year. Those were the first years of each of those models as well, just like the Tesla.
I think Teslas are shit though. They’re designer brand electric cars, poor quality, and they make zero financial sense at all compared to full EV models from the likes of Hyundai, Kia, or VW.
Also, like I said in an other comment, Taxis are not driven the same way that a regular person drives their car. Hybrids are absolutely perfect for the Taxi driving use case. They make almost no sense when used once a day to go to work, and then hit the grocery store and gym on the way home.
Had a volt, I don’t even think they were selling them 3 years ago. I had a 2011 or 2012, one of the original models before the update, from from 2019-2022 or thereabouts. Had to replace the radiator, 12 volt battery, reset the traction battery, and replace the coolant system hoses. Again, huge PITA but got more than double the MPG of the 2001 sedan it replaced and held its value decently.
They stopped production in 2019. They still make the Bolt. I look forward to the Jolt.
Almost as fucking stupid as not looking up the long term reliability on a Prius, or a Volt. There’s good reasons why city cab companies buy them.
Cabs don’t drive like you do. Neither based on distance driven, nor the constant stop and go driving that optimizes hybrid use case.
Full electric is better for a lot of taxi locations, which is why a lot of Cab companies are now starting to switch their fleets over.
Even Uber ditched it’s Uber Green branding for Uber Electric.
Every single Waymo on the road is fully electric at this point after they phased out their hybrid units a couple years ago.
Not at all. The Volt is great. No major issues. Not sure why your loosing your shit over something you seem to know nothing about.
Prius is one of the most reliable cars on the road. Of course, Boomers loves to tell me the BATTERY WON’T LAST and IT WILL COST $50000 TO REPLACE. Fucking stupidity.