- In general, battery-electric cars need less lifetime maintenance than gasoline ones.
- The battery, electric motor(s), and power electronics rarely need service at all.
- Items shared with gasoline cars need the same amount of maintenance.
Conventional wisdom has it that the only items you need to service on an electric car are the tires, wiper blades, and cabin air filters. It’s not far from the truth: In general, an EV does need less regular maintenance over the course of its life than an equivalent gasoline car.There’s no engine oil or transmission fluid to monitor. Most EVs don’t even have transmissions. Like any car, EVs do need windshield washer fluid. They also need brake fluid. But overall, their brake components last far longer because regenerative braking takes over a lot of that task.Do electric cars cost more or less to service than regular cars?Over their lifetime, EVs usually cost less to service. For instance, Ford says maintenance costs for its F-150 Lightning electric pickup over 100,000 miles or eight years are 40 percent lower than the cost of regular service and parts for a gasoline F-150.That’s due to several factors. EVs have far fewer moving parts than gasoline cars, which now use staggeringly complex engines in which many hundreds of parts move dozens or hundreds of times a second. In EVs, the only moving parts in the powertrain are the rotors of one or two drive motors, and the pumps that circulate coolant through the powertrain and provide cabin heat. All that other stuff? Gone.ChargingDo I need to replace the battery? Batteries in EVs are designed to last at least the lifetime of the vehicle, considered to be 10 to 15 years—with perhaps 10 to 20 percent degradation in total energy capacity, far from enough to render the car unusable. So far, all indications suggest they do exactly that. More data needs to be gathered, since the oldest EVs on U.S. roads only went on sale in December 2010. Carmakers are now gathering that data.Better yet, EV batteries seem to be lasting longer than predicted. (Businesses that recycle old EV batteries for their metals can’t get enough supply, because most of the packs they expected to buy are still powering EVs on the road.) A Stanford University study last year suggests that real-world driving—with frequent acceleration, stop-and-go traffic, and widely varying power demands on the battery pack—may actually result in longer battery life and better energy retention than the constant discharge and regular recharge routines used in lab tests.Do the electric motors need regular servicing?Electric motors in EVs are designed to last the lifetime of the car and rarely have regular service required. The same applies to the coolant pumps that circulate liquid to cool or heat the battery, the electric motors, and often the cabin of the vehicle.Do the brakes on an electric car need regular servicing?Electric vehicles have conventional brakes, but they do a substantial portion of their slowing down via what’s called regenerative braking, where the electric motor is switched over from powering the car to become a generator that feeds electricity back into the battery to recharge it. That means the brake pads last far, far longer—just as they do on hybrid cars, which use the same system to recapture otherwise wasted energy. Like any car, EVs require brake fluid. If that gets low, the car will alert the owner, just like a gasoline car.Marc Urbano|Car and Driver2024 BMW i4.What parts of an electric car need regular servicing?They include rubber items like tires and wiper blades; filters for cabin air and other functions; brakes (mostly to check fluid, see item above); windshield washer fluid; suspension components; and bulbs.How often do you have to replace the tires on an EV?One area where EVs may cost more than gasoline cars is their tire use. With 500 to 2000 pounds more weight than a comparable gasoline-powered vehicle, they have larger, beefier tires that carry higher loads. GM’s new EV trucks have eight-lug wheels, and even its compact and mid-size electric SUVs have six-lug wheels—something usually found only on heavy-duty trucks. Car and Driver2025 GMC Hummer EV.Drivers who find themselves frequently showing off the brisk-to-startling acceleration of many EVs may need to replace their tires more frequently than for a gasoline vehicle of the same size. On the other hand, gasoline performance cars often chew through tires for the same reason, so the best comparison may be not to the vehicle type, e.g. compact SUV, but to one of similar performance, e.g. 0-to-60-mph acceleration in however many seconds.What about recalls?These days, almost any new car will be recalled for a handful of things over its life. Most are minor, and you’ll never hear about them in the news. Most owners find out only when they get the letter from their dealer or the carmaker. EVs are pretty much the same way.
However, many EVs (and an increasing number of gasoline cars) can have some of their issues addressed via over-the-air (OTA) software updates. This doesn’t apply to, say, replacing a seat latch. But it does apply to software for vehicle control, battery energy use, and many other functions. It also lets the makers add features after purchase to make the car better. (They may want to sell you some of those new features, but that’s a different story.) So EVs still have to go through recalls, like any car. But in general, they have less hardware and fewer moving parts that could fail to start with.More to Know about EVsJohn Voelcker edited Green Car Reports for nine years, publishing more than 12,000 articles on hybrids, electric cars, and other low- and zero-emission vehicles and the energy ecosystem around them. He now covers advanced auto technologies and energy policy as a reporter and analyst. His work has appeared in print, online, and radio outlets that include Wired, Popular Science, Tech Review, IEEE Spectrum, and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He splits his time between the Catskill Mountains and New York City and still has hopes of one day becoming an international man of mystery.
Source: caranddriver.com
