this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] -2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

4 qt oil in a prius. I change my own oil every 8,000 miles, so it's around $25 for me, but most people don't, I suppose.

Electricity costs money. You skipped that, and for the millions and millions of people living in places like apartments, you can't charge from home. Charge stations cost almost as much as gasoline, so that gets danged pricey and inconvenient. Poor option all the way around for those people.

Most vehicles have a 100,000 power train warranty, so that's pretty irrelevant.

I already stated the failure of the batteries is closer to 15 years. That is the good batteries used today. I'm well aware of the lifespan of the lithium ion batteries used in today's EV's. They're generally Lithium Cobalt Oxide or Lithium Nickle Cobalt Oxide and they can go 300,000 in theory. The "in theory" is that they won't last that long if it's spread over the course of 15 years and you keep them always close to fully charged or close to discharged. To go 300,000 miles you'll have to not use any of the extra fast chargers and keep the capacity between 30 and 80 percent all the time. The batteries used have a lifespan of about 1400 charge cycles, if age is not a factor. You can go beyond that by keeping them at 30 to 80 percent, and it will be less than that if you use a level 3 charge station.

Also, look at tesla. There's an entire industry that's developed to keep their batteries up and going. They use barrel style batteries. There's around 3,000 battery cells in each of their teslas. Some of those individual cells start going out quite quickly. The manufacturing of them isn't flawless to the extent that 3,000 can all last over even 5 years. Tesla designed their system to be able to operate as the cells go bad, but it's a nice slow deminishment of capacity and power. It's turned into an entire business of tearing into those tesla batteries, finding and replacing out the bad battery cells, and then re-selling the packs as refurbished to people, which is a terrible idea, really. Replacing a hundred of the worse cells and calling good, when the other 2800 cells have a decade on them and will also fail soon is a short lived stop gap that takes advantage of people ignorance about what a remanufactured battery actually is.

Lastly; to your comment about toyota being "totally fine putting that junk in there": LOL. You obviously don't know much about batteries. NMH batteries have a longer duty cycle rate than any lithium batteries that have been developed. It's why a little 75 pound battery in a non plug in lasts 14 years as it did before wearing out. Also, the "junk" batteries are Panasonics. Go check into it. They're regarded as making the best mass produced batteries in the world.

Also, fyi: teslas 8 year battery warranty only kicks in if the battery has degraded below 70% capacity. So they think it's OK that the car you bought to go 300 miles on a charge may only go like 225 miles after 8 years.

Then, finally, look what happens to a plug in when it's winter and below freezing. An electrics range is tested and claimed when it's around 70 degrees outside. That's when your 300 mile electric can go 300 miles. If it's 15 degrees out real world expectations put your range down to 60%. So your 300 miles goes to less than 200. That's not just from capacity and discharge rates being effected. A large reason is running the all electric heater.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

True I did not count cost of electricity, because it's extremely hard to guess. Some places are .04$/kwh, some are .45/kwh, some are free. What if you had free charging at work? Or apartment, or had solar, it could be completely free. But let's say you did pay for electricity, average of .12$/kwh, 4mi/kwh, around 12,000$ so half. You spend twice as much for a far slower, much smaller car that needs maintenance 2-4 times a year, and need to waste 15 minutes every week at a gas station (13 hours per year!).

And before I get a "it only takes 3 minutes to fill" bullshit, your not considering the detour time, pull in time, parking time, credit card time, Skip their ads/loyalty shit time, wait for receipt, time to make your turn out of the lot. Go ahead and time it, I'm sure you'll be surprised how much of your life is being wasted while breathing those fumes from gas/exhaust.

Of course there's going to be a market for ev battery repair, and they'll work on Teslas the most/exclusively not because they're bad, but because they're the only significant ev so far. They've sold millions, when the next highest has 200k. Shit can break on anything at any time from any manufacturer.

All Toyotas for years have had 3yr/36,000mi, 5yr/60,000mi powertrain warranty.

Nimh is junk, it is guaranteed to die due to age. It cycles really well but the chemistry inside literally dries out and stops working, 8-10 years. That's probably where a lot of the FUD about lithium batteries come from, lithium batteries degrade slowly. You can check this old blog that gives stats for 10 year higher mileage Teslas, looking at 18% to the high end but usually 8-12%. And those are the early batteries where Tesla was probably cutting as much cost as possible, today's batteries are a bit better.

And Toyota absolutely does put junk into their cars, they put weak engines, weak hybrid motors, bottom tier infotainment, minimum legal warranty. They've been riding their 1980-2000 reliability reputation hard. Not saying they're unreliable, but that reputation is the only thing that sells their cars.

Range does decrease in winter for evs, but it does for gasoline cars too, they don't show the mpg difference on the window sticker either. Tesla has really good thermal management so it generally Loses about 15%, not your 40% claim

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago

Dude. You're living in your very own special zip code.