EV Owners Report 'Far More' Problems Than Conventional Car Owners, Says Consumer Reports (consumerreports.org) 172
Consumer Reports awarded a "recommended" rating to Tesla's Modey Y this year, "with owners reporting fewer issues with its suspension, in-car electronics and general build quality than in previous years". Tesla's Model 3 also earned a "recommended" rating.
"Tesla's Model 3 and Model Y are now the sweet spot in the automotive industry when it comes to building electric cars," says Jake Fisher, the senior director of auto testing for Consumer Reports. "While Tesla is still a relatively new car company, it has more experience producing EVs than any other automaker."
But how about the larger universe of all automakers? Electric vehicle owners continue to report far more problems with their vehicles than owners of conventional cars or hybrids, according to Consumer Reports' newly released annual car reliability survey. The survey reveals that, on average, EVs from the past three model years had 79 percent more problems than conventional cars...
"Most electric cars today are being manufactured by either legacy automakers that are new to EV technology, or by companies like Rivian that are new to making cars," says Jake Fisher, senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports. "It's not surprising that they're having growing pains and need some time to work out the bugs." Fisher says some of the most common problems EV owners report are issues with electric drive motors, charging, and EV batteries...
This year's survey data show that hybrids continue to be among the most reliable vehicle type: Hybrids have 26 percent fewer problems than conventional models, even though they have both a conventional powertrain and an electric motor and therefore more potential problem spots than conventional cars. "It might not seem that long ago, but Toyota launched the Prius hybrid about 25 years ago," Elek says. "Automakers have been making hybrids long enough that they've gotten really good at it. Plus, many hybrids are also made by manufacturers that tend to produce reliable vehicles overall, such as Toyota, Hyundai, and Kia." Hybrids also are not typically loaded with high-tech features like multiple customizable displays that can be problem-prone, which is why Fisher says they are great options for drivers who are more interested in getting ideal fuel mileage than they are in bells and whistles. "These vehicles are not necessarily a tour de force of technology, so there's just less that can go wrong with them," he says.
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), which have both a battery for short-range electric driving and an internal combustion engine for long-range driving, are the least reliable category — 146 percent more problems than conventional cars. "PHEVs are sort of like an EV and a conventional car rolled into one, so by their nature they have more things that can go wrong with them," Fisher says.
There are exceptions, notes the auto testing director. Toyota's RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid "is one of the most reliable models in our survey this year. Similarly, the Ford F-150 hybrid has transmission and other issues that buck the trend of strong hybrid reliability."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.
"Tesla's Model 3 and Model Y are now the sweet spot in the automotive industry when it comes to building electric cars," says Jake Fisher, the senior director of auto testing for Consumer Reports. "While Tesla is still a relatively new car company, it has more experience producing EVs than any other automaker."
But how about the larger universe of all automakers? Electric vehicle owners continue to report far more problems with their vehicles than owners of conventional cars or hybrids, according to Consumer Reports' newly released annual car reliability survey. The survey reveals that, on average, EVs from the past three model years had 79 percent more problems than conventional cars...
"Most electric cars today are being manufactured by either legacy automakers that are new to EV technology, or by companies like Rivian that are new to making cars," says Jake Fisher, senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports. "It's not surprising that they're having growing pains and need some time to work out the bugs." Fisher says some of the most common problems EV owners report are issues with electric drive motors, charging, and EV batteries...
This year's survey data show that hybrids continue to be among the most reliable vehicle type: Hybrids have 26 percent fewer problems than conventional models, even though they have both a conventional powertrain and an electric motor and therefore more potential problem spots than conventional cars. "It might not seem that long ago, but Toyota launched the Prius hybrid about 25 years ago," Elek says. "Automakers have been making hybrids long enough that they've gotten really good at it. Plus, many hybrids are also made by manufacturers that tend to produce reliable vehicles overall, such as Toyota, Hyundai, and Kia." Hybrids also are not typically loaded with high-tech features like multiple customizable displays that can be problem-prone, which is why Fisher says they are great options for drivers who are more interested in getting ideal fuel mileage than they are in bells and whistles. "These vehicles are not necessarily a tour de force of technology, so there's just less that can go wrong with them," he says.
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), which have both a battery for short-range electric driving and an internal combustion engine for long-range driving, are the least reliable category — 146 percent more problems than conventional cars. "PHEVs are sort of like an EV and a conventional car rolled into one, so by their nature they have more things that can go wrong with them," Fisher says.
There are exceptions, notes the auto testing director. Toyota's RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid "is one of the most reliable models in our survey this year. Similarly, the Ford F-150 hybrid has transmission and other issues that buck the trend of strong hybrid reliability."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.
Murph yâ(TM)s Law (Score:2)
Re: Murph yâ(TM)s Law (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, a modern ICE is far more complex than a 3-phase motor and a VFD running on batteries, which is what electric cars use.
Re: Murph yâ(TM)s Law (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there a simple electric that fits that description?
No cell modem, no laptop screen on the dash, hard controls, door handles not integrated with the stereo system?
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Nope. You'd be hard pressed to find _any_ modern car that isn't a computer on wheels. Nothing the average driver would buy, anyway.
I can think of a few specialty cars that are custom or restomods or have very low production, etc, but nothing serious for the masses.
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Nope. You'd be hard pressed to find _any_ modern car that isn't a computer on wheels. Nothing the average driver would buy, anyway.
I can think of a few specialty cars that are custom or restomods or have very low production, etc, but nothing serious for the masses.
I'd love to have a car that you could hotwire. Kids these days wouldn't have a clue how to steal it.
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They'd still steal your tires, rims, and catalytic converter. :-)
Re: Murph yâ(TM)s Law (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly, half the ICE vehicles have all that as well. That being said, I have the Hyundai Ioniq 6 which CR rated at 83 with good reliability -- well above all Tesla models. It has a nice selection of hard controls and a door handle that is mechanically connected so doesn't NEED power to open the door.
Hyundai's reputation for ICE cars leaves a lot to be deisred, but the Ioniq 6 they did an excellent job on.
Re:If you read the article and the studies (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who has owned numerous older ICE cars and has famliy that generally has to make do with older ICE cars, I'll call BS on the less expensive to keep running.
Degraded gaskets and hoses, cracked heads, busted turbos, ruined trasnmissions. That's ignoring the normal wear and tear of serpentine belts, timing belts, oil changes, more frequent brake pads (excepting hybrids on that one) and of course most obviously the cost of gasoline (which wildly fluctuates, but around here currently my EV is about 3 times cheaper to charge at home than a 30MPG car would cost at the pump, and I never have to go to a pump.
Contrast with EVs, where you currently have more tire expense (they are heavier) and *maybe* one large battery bill at 15-20 years. Of course, don't know how much the batteries will cost then, and it is one big one all at once, versus the pain coming over a half dozen mechanic visits with ICE. On the one hand, fewer visits, on the other hand being hit with the bill all at once can feel more painful than getting hit with an equivalent amount spread out over 5 years or so.
Re:If you read the article and the studies (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you read the article and the studies (Score:5, Insightful)
More issues is a more or less bogus statistic that Consumer Reports has.
If you have a car with 1,000 features and 10 of them have issues and another car has 12 features and 8 of them have issues consumer reports would consider the car with 2/3rds of the features failing as more reliable. Yes, the numbers I'm giving are exaggerated but they illustrate the point.
It made sense years ago when cars had a similar number of features, but now that the number of features varies by orders of magnitude it doesn't make much sense.
Consumer Reports has some strong biases and has skewed tests to arrive at predetermined outcomes. (The Suzuki Samari being one of them, they modified the test until they rolled the car even though it survived the first dozen or so attempts.
They could have just said that cars with more features have more things go wrong with them.
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I read it. It hurt my brain with the absolute stupidity of it.
Re: If you read the article and the studies (Score:5, Interesting)
I read, but the summary fails to capture the nuance of things.
For one, the population of EVs is smaller, so a one off problem with one model has an outsized impact on the results. Notably the Ford Mustang Mach-e (one of the more popular models) made an engineering mistake with a high voltage junction box and incurred failures and a recall. This probably heavily hits EV drivetrain reliability figures a lot despite being a one off that doesn't specifically apply to any new cars for sale, and any afflicted used cars have a recall to know if it is fixed or needs to be taken care of.
Beyond that, CR also has a methodology flaw generally speaking which was tainted car reliability reports in the past. Imagine a car with 360 camera setup has a bad camera. That will make the car be considered less "reliable" than a cat that doesn't even have those cameras in the first place, despite the "unreliable" car merely degrading to be as bad as the "reliable" model. They don't really do enough to normalize the data to account for whether a comparison is really like for like.
Finally, CR is talking about first year reliability, which is generally more annoyance at having to deal with free warranty work rather than actually incurring expense. This really doesn't speak to what happens a decade out, and really can't since data on EV is limited that far out. We are mostly coping with anecdotes and theories extrapolating what we do know.
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the hassle of me having to drag my ass to the dealership to fix an issue is what counts as unreliability in my mind.
I think the gut reaction of most folks when they hear "unreliable car" is that it will stop moving or fail to start moving. So there's some nuance.
Also, it's likely that you don't *need* to get to the dealer urgently. I had a car I bought in 2015 that had a number of glitches that were annoying, but not urgent, and I waited a while to accumulate them into an appoitnment at my convenience (back up camera glitchy, blind spot system not working on the passenger side, a very minor drip in heavy rain in one ca
Re: If you read the article and the studies (Score:4, Informative)
This FUD has been used since the early days of the Prius. Still have yet to meet anyone who had to replace their hybrid or EV battery because it wore out. My fiver year old Tesla has only ever needed new tires and windshield washer fluid. Nothing else. Nothing.
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Re:If you read the article and the studies (Score:5, Interesting)
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https://globalnews.ca/news/10103753/electric-car-shock-50000-battery/
Re: Murph yâ(TM)s Law (Score:2)
Not yet, at least from mainstream manufacturers.
For Next year, check out CitroÃn and Dacia (Renault)
https://www.citroen.co.uk/mode... [citroen.co.uk]
https://www.dacia.co.uk/dacia-... [dacia.co.uk]
Chinese manufacturers have lots of "kei car" type of machines that are free from apps and are built from ev platforms.
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I mean, a modern ICE is far more complex than a 3-phase motor and a VFD running on batteries, which is what electric cars use.
Part of the issue is that cars take a ton of abuse and there's a fairly throw threshold for malfunctions. I recently did some work on my car and just looking through the different years one could see the manufacturer swapping out components as they found different reliability problems.
Re: Murph yâ(TM)s Law (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, that's a 137 years of technological refinement for you. The intuition that simpler is more reliable only works when everything else is equal, but in this case it's not. E-cars are new and we have to assume crude compared to what they will eventually become. ICE cars are probably as good as they'll ever be, even if they're around for another century.
If you compared the engine in a 2023 Toyota Corolla to the engine in a 1923 Ford Model T [wikipedia.org], they're both inline 4 cyclinder engines, but the Corolla's engine is *vastly* more complicated. So would you expect the Model T's engine to be more reliable? Of course not. Every extra geegaw on the M20A-FKS engine is the product of a century of refinement and proving.
If you brought an electric vehicle back from 2123, chances are it would blow away anything we have today in terms of reliability and performance. However it's doubtful that an e-vehicle from 2223 would be that much better.
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Even with ICE vehicles on the roads, EVs... or more specifically, the technology for EVs has been ramping up. Everything from better electric motors, especially the axial flux motors that some companies are starting to use, motor combinations, battery technology, and so on, have been in the wings for a while now. Most automotive knowledge has been about drivetrains, so in a lot of cases, moving from an ICE engine to an EV wouldn't set things back as far. We saw this with diesels in the 2000s and 2010s go
Re: Murph yâ(TM)s Law (Score:4, Interesting)
We saw this with diesels in the 2000s and 2010s going from fuel guzzlers to having excellent fuel economy with things like common rail injection, high pressure fuel pumps, and other improvements.
The tech didn't increase the mileage much. My 1992 F250 with the IDI 7.3 V8 got 20 MPG on the freeway. My 1982 300SD with the IDI OM617 2.7 liter L5 got 30 MPG on the freeway. Modern diesels get maybe 10% more mileage than that. What they do have is much lesser emissions, although the soot they emit is more carcinogenic than those old diesels which is apparently believed to be a good tradeoff, weird.
Diesels always got good mileage because they can run lean. But that also meant they produced high NOx. So they fixed that with unreliable DEF systems that can strand you if they fail, the vehicle refuses to operate even though it can do so without damage.
turbine engines which are quite efficient. Yes, they can be noisy, but Dodge/Chrysler solved that issue with their turbine engine prototypes many decades ago
Except they didn't solve it, they did still have a constant whine and modern ICEVs are much quieter. They figured out how to tune engines for lower noise, which required more complicated fuel injection systems. Those turbine engines also had a lot of hot exhaust, even in the recirculating models designed by Chrysler.
Re: Murphy's Law (Score:2)
>If you brought an electric vehicle back from 2123, chances are it
>would blow away anything we have today in terms of reliability and
>performance.
And in a thread about Murphy's Law, just exactly *what*do you think is going to happen to your grandfather when you galavant through time like this?
[and for folks trying to comport Model T reliability to Corolla, the ratio probably flips when you exclude the repairs you can do yourself on the side of the road with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers!]
hawk
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I'd have to counter with: "Have you consider the amount of software that goes into a modern ICE?"
Entertainment wise, the code is probably similar.
But why would you think that an EV drivetrain would need more code than an ICE?
Sure, you have all the stuff to run the motor as a motor and a generator, properly handling regenerative braking and such.
But these days you have antilock brake technology in ICE vehicles, so the two probably end up very similar in regards to braking.
The EV will have coolant - so proba
Re: Murph yâ(TM)s Law (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically an EV has less of parts to go wrong.
Now this report has the exception of Tesla Models, which are actually on the top of reliability. The issues are mostly due to these companies mainly legacy auto, trying to change the processes around for EV production. More software, focus on weight... A lot of these issues are the type of problems Tesla had a few years ago.
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No, the most fail prone components are mechanical. And, to prove it, I'll now provide exactly double the amount of evidence that you did to the contrary.
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Another misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)
Another misleading headline. When you get to the text, it says that EV owners except for Tesla owners are reporting more problems.
But... the majority of EVs on the road are Teslas.
Re:Another misleading headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Another misleading headline. When you get to the text, it says that EV owners except for Tesla owners are reporting more problems.
But... the majority of EVs on the road are Teslas.
One reason for the lack of clarity in the headline is to get clicks/eyeballs. If they made it clear up front that most EVs on the road, in absolute numbers, not by model, then they might not attract as many readers.
Another reason is they needed to keep it short, but I doubt that's the case.
Had they put in the headlines that Tesla is doing great in making EVs then that isn't exactly news, right? You've likely heard an example before on how it's not news that 3 million airline passengers arrived safely at their destination yesterday, but it is news that 50 passengers did not.
What is interesting to me is that hybrids (the kind that don't plug-in) had better reliability than conventional ICEVs while PHEVs had the worst record of them all. The one part that separates the two is the battery charger, so I would assume that is where most of the trouble lies in every EV. If Tesla is doing well then perhaps it is because they have the most experience with battery charging. I wonder if the adoption of Tesla's NACS will improve things.
While EVs are hardly new, we've seen them made over 100 years ago, it is only now that we are seeing enough of them that some of the little details like a standard charging port is coming about. With more complexity to the PHEV it might be understandable that this is the one style of vehicle that will always have the most issues. What I'm seeing as a misunderstanding is that to be more complex is to be more expensive. A very simple device is a bar of gold, but that's also quite expensive. My SUV is far more complex than that bar of gold, but it's far less valuable. A BEV will be less complex than a PHEV but because it contains a lot of highly refined materials in the batteries, big copper wires, and any of a number of simple but expensive parts, the BEV could cost much more than the PHEV with an engine block made of common steel, and a much smaller battery. That added complexity comes with more points of failure, but possibly more redundancy. If I have a PHEV and there's some problem with the charger port then that would be an inconvenience since I'm now burning more gasoline until that is repaired. If I have a BEV and there's a problem with the charger port then that will make that vehicle no longer safe to drive, it could leave me stranded somewhere.
I like the idea of a PHEV, I believe that is what will dominate the light vehicle market fairly soon. It kind of hurts to see the PHEV rank so poorly on consumer complaints. My guess is that as the EV technology develops that gap will become quite a bit smaller, though because of the extra complexity it may never come out on top in this department. That doesn't make them a bad idea, because not all complaints should be weighted equally. It will be difficult to come up with some objective scoring since different drivers will weight problems differently.
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The biggest problem: the awful third-party CCS 1 charging network here in the USA. Meanwhile, for the most part the Tesla Supercharger network has worked well. No wonder why Tesla opened sourced the Tesla connector with the NACS (SAE J3400) specification.
Charging problems ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... are not EV problems, they are charging problems. Non-Tesla charging sucks mightily
I love my Model Y and have had zero problems
My only criticism of Tesla is that THEY DON'T SELL PARTS!
Re:Charging problems ... (Score:4, Informative)
They know that. Quoting the article:
Note: Charging problems reported by members are with the vehicle, not with home or public chargers.
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I mean, yes and no. If you live in an area with lots of chargers but no gas stations, getting an ICE vehicle will give you issues with refueling. You will list this as a problem with having an ICE vehicle.
Yes, I'm aware there likely aren't any such areas at this point in time. It's for the sake of comparison.
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Re:Charging problems ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Tesla is the only real EV on the market. The others are more like technology experiments and prototypes looking for market fit.
I think the next round from the other car makers will be a more serious effort and competitive.
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But other automakers have and are building EV's on totally new bases, obviously they do reuse their knowledge from their ICE's, something Tesla had and still has problems with.
Like the Nissan Leaf is available since more than 12 years.
As an example, since a little over a year I drive a Nissan Ariya, after an over the air software update last April it works perfectly, before the update I saw a few weird gremlins.
In the first year I've
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The only leaf owner I know hated it and dumped it after about 18 months. I haven't seen a zillion leaf's on the road. My guess is they didn't sell a whole lot of those compared to Tesla or most ice.
Your gremlins is exactly what I'm talking about. You got an incomplete car that needed an OTA to make it work right. That's a release candidate, at best, not a finished product.
My ice (1 year older than my Tesla) didn't have gremlins or need an update to work. It just worked. Built in America by American co
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What universe are you living in? Every Leaf owner raves about how great their car is. I agree that ICE cars are a lot more reliable than they were in the past, though. Ford and GM cars from the '80s needed constant tune-ups, stuff was always breaking or leaking, interiors fell apart, and they performed like shit. These days you barely need to do anything besides scheduled maintenance every six months.
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Leaf has sold 650k -worldwide- since 2010. And 175k units in USA since 2010.
That's 174k / about 13 years is about 13-14k units in the US per year. That's pretty low. It is very fair to say it is not a popular car.
By comparison, Toyota Corolla sells about 1.5x more per MONTH than the leaf sells per YEAR.
https://carfigures.com/us-mark... [carfigures.com]
The few people who buy them may love them but that's a pretty small segment of the market who want a car like that.
Shrug.
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>>> You got an incomplete car that needed an OTA to make it work right.
You do realize that when I picked up my 2018 Model 3, it didn't even have a functional radio? IIRC, it was almost a year before a software update enabled the FM radio. That's not to mention all the other advertised features that were missing or badly handicapped.
Now, my wife's 2023 Model 3 is a beautiful, complete vehicle. Far better than my 2018. Of course, 2023 EV's have to compare themselves with a 2023 Model 3, and not a
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Mine is a 2019. I waited a year for a reason. :-)
And we're now in 2023 and as you note that is what they must compete against. And they're not doing well so far.
There are a fewer vehicles here n there on the higher end that may pull it off like the Lucid Air and the EV Ford truck line but those aren't priced for bulk sales to the masses. I'm guessing more like 2025 or 2026 for the first real EVs in bulk worth buying from the other makers. At least one from each and by 2030 they should all have a long li
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I can't see the details of the report, and I wonder what kind of problems EV owners have reported. What counts as a "problem",
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I saw a summary of the report on a different site. From that I believe the report is crap so I'm not basing my comments on that.
Let's look at the roads. How many Tesla are out there? When each new model came out they sold hot n fast.
How many of the other EV are out there? How many have sold? I'll bet any Tesla after the S in its first year has outsold all the others combined and the current S certainly does. The frickin ugly cybertruck has how many preorders and is supposed to ship tens of thousands a
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I don't know about that.
I see plenty of nissan leaf around and quite a few electric kia's.
My boss has been driving a leaf for 3 year now. He convinced a few people around him to get one and they like it. Seems like the leaf is a reasonable car.
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Please see my reply to his reply about leaf. Splitting this thread with a copy paste of the same response would be poor netiquette on my part.
Thanks
Report or Experience? (Score:5, Funny)
Are EV owners actually experiencing more problems than ICE owners?
Or are EV owners reporting more of the ones that they experience?
The demographics of those who are buying current EVs is significantly slanted towards people who overshare their lives and complain about stupid shit.
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Hertz reported higher cost of ownership for Tesla's. They're heading for another bankruptcy.
Higher cost of repairs is one of the reasons. The other was price cuts hurting future resale values.
Hertz hinted that the repair cost and higher incident of damage is a Tesla thing, and expects GM EV's to be cheaper to maintain.
Re:Report or Experience? (Score:5, Informative)
Just want to point out that Hertz wasn't just renting out Teslas in the traditional rental car sense of somebody flying in and needing a car for a week or so for some local job.
No, they tried to get into renting cars to Uber drivers. Uber drivers naturally favored vehicles with the "pizazz" of Tesla, IE they're something that could attract riders. Also, lower per-mile costs when they're putting a lot of miles on the vehicles.
Then you get that since the vehicles were rented, not even really leased, the uber drivers didn't care about fast charging or such. Enter extra expense.
It wasn't just Teslas that got Hertz into trouble, it was trying to rent to Uber drivers and not adequately accounting for the extra wear and damage.
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It doesn't help that there's all these influencer-types renting teslas and filming themselves going airborne over hills and the like, doing stuff normal drivers would never do if they had to pay for it. The old adage of "Drive it like you stole it"-on-steroids applies.
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Are EV owners actually experiencing more problems than ICE owners?
Except for Tesla owners.
Pure second-hand antidote here (Score:2)
The article itself was a massive survey from consumer reports so it's actual EV reporters reporting on the problems they've had with their EVs. It's also consumer reports doing the survey and they are probably the most reliable journalistic organization in the country. So it's highly unlikely that the data is biased or incorrect. It was a very large survey sample si
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I'm not sure whether this was a result of enthusiast drivers putting more stress on their vehicles or simply having higher confirmation bias through more acute awareness
Re:Report or Experience? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are EV owners actually experiencing more problems than ICE owners?
Or are EV owners reporting more of the ones that they experience?
The demographics of those who are buying current EVs is significantly slanted towards people who overshare their lives and complain about stupid shit.
Another possibility: the headline is click bait horse shit. Take a look at consumer reports car make reliability data: https://www.consumerreports.or... [consumerreports.org] About 1/2 way down, you will see a graph saying hybrids have 26% less problems than gas power cars. How can hybrids be more reliable than both gas and electric given they have the complexity of both?
According to that same page, Toyota makes the most reliable cars out there, and hybrids are made by mostly Toyota. That explains why hybrids are more reliable - but it has nothing to do with being a hybrid. Gas and EV's are made by range of companies, some of them downright abysmal (who would by a Chrysler after seeing that?). Off the top of my head Toyota doesn't make EV's, but if they did my guess is their would be more reliable than other companies gas cars.
Tesla is the middle of the pack reliability wise. Telsa only makes EV's. Given they are in the middle of the pack Tesla's EV owners can't possibly be doing what the headline claims: "Owners Report 'Far More' Problems Than Conventional Car Owners".
The first Tesla's were horribly unreliable. Not surprising, given Tesla's was a complete newbie it designing and making cars at the time and they were for the most part hand built. Given Tesla was one of the few electric car manufacturers, the headline was probably accurate back then. But it's today's headline, and today it's the worst sort: misleading click bait.
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Are EV owners actually experiencing more problems than ICE owners?
Yes, however the issues being experienced are overwhelmingly basic stuff covered by warranty.
The demographics of those who are buying current EVs is significantly slanted towards people who overshare their lives and complain about stupid shit.
Citation required. And if you don't want to sound like an angry bigot then please cite a psychology journal with your claim.
Clickbait Repost (Score:3)
My family has had 3 EVs for 5 years (Score:4, Insightful)
This report had me scratching my head. Our EV ownership has been trouble-free. None of us will ever buy a gas car again. And then I noticed that the report says that Tesla owners don't face the problems they are talking about. Only legacy auto manufacturers trying to build EVs. If you buy one of their EVs, then yes, expect problems. They are very new at it.
The story title is click-baity. It really should say that companies that haven't built EVs before are building unreliable EVs. But, yes, it is not as catchy. And somewhat obvious.
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Congratulations, you lucked out and got a good government car, not all drivers/owners are so lucky. I've had enough friends try them and run screaming back to ICE vehicle's that my anecdotes outweigh yours.
That's how this works, right?
I'd wager also you're not in a northern state, up here, trading range for heat is not a compelling sell. I had to do an emergency clean-up of a seat in my truck earlier today, and now going to leave it running all night to make sure the wet spots don't freeze and dry, a natura
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I have seen the entire range of EV users:
Some people love the Tesla buying experience because they don't have to deal with dealerships, and are able to just log on, qualify, finance (or pay cash), and have their vehicle delivered to their doorstep. So, they only will buy Teslas, and take them to a shop when need be.
Some people buy low-end EVs, find them great for in-town runabouts because they can charge them overnight, and for longer trips, take their old ICE vehicle out, where they don't have to plot the
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Being stuck in the ditch should under normal circumstances not stop you from using the car's heater, yes it consumes power but nothing compared to driving and heating it.
Sounds more like the car’s make matters (Score:5, Insightful)
A few months back one of the big car rental agencies was in the news because their EVs were allegedly costing way more to maintain.
Turns out that wasn’t true. Their EV maintenance costs were actually far lower across the board, but the Teslas they had in particular were proving to be more expensive because (a) they were renting them to a bunch of kids doing Uber, who naturally had a higher rate of accidents than the average rental driver, and (b) Tesla’s unibody frame results in the car being totaled more often compared to literally any other car on the market (ICE or EV). Because Tesla’s represented something like 80% of their EV fleet, any Tesla-specific stats dominated the EV stats as a whole, even though they teased out the nuances in their report. Did any of the articles written about it get into those nuances? Nope. The articles all said that EVs cost more to maintain, even though the financial statement said the exact opposite.
I get the same feeling here. Toyota is the biggest brand that basically isn’t even in the EV space. “Toyota is reliable” isn’t newsworthy, but frame it as “EVs are less reliable than ICEs” and you get clicks, which is especially easy to do when you’re an organization with a history of clickbait, you don’t publicly disclose whether you’re normalizing for sample bias, and when you’re working with an obviously biased survey group of your own paying members who are most likely to repeat opinions that reinforce the ones you as an organization have previously stated.
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>> makers are cancelling ev because poor, first generation versions of EVs that don't measure up to a Tesla don't sell....
Fixed that for you....
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
Note that Q4 2023 isn't on the graph....
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No one wants an overpriced mediocre EV from a company that didn't invest into them when they have an alternative that's better and cheaper.
This shouldn't be a surprise
Re:Sounds more like the car’s make matters (Score:5, Insightful)
makers are canceling ev because they simply dont sell.
Some are, sure. Why do you think that is, given that the Tesla Model Y is currently the top-selling car in the entire world? Even in the US the only vehicles ahead of the Model Y are pickup trucks in 2023. It's beating out everything else, including perennial favorites like the Corolla, Camry, and CR-V.
The reason legacy auto manufacturers are having trouble rolling out EVs is two-fold:
(1) They don't yet have the institutional competency to operate in the EV field, but that pales in comparison to the elephant in the room, which is...
(2) They're required (either by law or by existing relationships that they can't easily circumvent) to sell their vehicles through third-party dealerships they don't control, and dealers have very few reasons to sell EVs. Something like 60% of dealership revenue comes from after-sales service on the vehicles they sell, most of which is for service that EVs simply don't require (e.g. oil changes, fuel filters, or engine air filters, and even the brake pads last far longer because of regenerative braking), so dealers don't want to sell them.
After a recent survey found that 2/3 of US dealerships didn't even have a single EV to sell [autoblog.com], the survey team asked whether the dealership even wanted to sell them. Of that 2/3 that didn't have an EV to sell, less than half (44%) of the dealerships said they wish they had one to sell. Put differently, 2/3 of dealerships aren't stocking EVs, and most of them prefer it that way.
Tesla's success in the EV market isn't because their models are so much better than everyone else's: it's because they're selling through a direct-to-consumer channel that they control from end-to-end. If not for the middleman who have their own agendas, I'd wager that we'd see more of the traditional names at the top of the bestselling list, rather than Tesla.
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makers are canceling ev because they simply dont sell.
No they are objectively not. One of two American companies are pulling one or two models. There are more EV models than ever both on the market as well as in production.
Not all problems are the same (Score:4, Insightful)
This has long been an issue where people just count "problems" without talking about the severity of the problems.
Problems that stop you from getting from point A to point B are the problems I care about, and those don't seem to be higher on EVs.
Or, the better way to look at this is the surveys about how happy people are with their cars. Little problems don't affect that opinion, so it's a great proxy.
EVs from good EV companies tend to have very high satisfaction numbers.
New Technology Less Reliable Than Old (Score:2)
Doesn't seem that surprising that new tech has issues, where tried and true technology doesn't have so many. Not much of an EV fan but it's not a shock that new tech, even from long-time manufacturers, has more bugs and issues than something they've been doing for decades.
In summary (Score:4, Funny)
All are unreliable, except for those that are reliable.
EVs are not as good, except the ones that are.
PHEVs are the least reliable, except the one that is super reliable.
All brands are bad, except for the ones that are good.
All legacy brands are no good, except for the legacy brands that are good.
In summary: useless to talk about EVs, or PHEVs in general. Talk about individual brands.
There's tesla then everyone else (Score:2)
It doesn't add up (Score:2)
A plug-in hybrid is basically a hybrid with an extra charging circuit and possibly a larger battery. So how is it that hybrids have the best reliability but plug-in hybrids have the worst?
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A plug-in hybrid is basically a hybrid with an extra charging circuit and possibly a larger battery. So how is it that hybrids have the best reliability but plug-in hybrids have the worst?
I was pondering the same thing and I offer a point to consider. A PHEV will be a "full hybrid", a vehicle able to run on battery power alone for extended periods and in all speed ranges, while the hybrids that don't have the ability to plug-in for a recharge would be a "mild hybrid" or "micro hybrid".
A few links to help with definitions and distinctions:
Full: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Mild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Micro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
My brother has what might be called a
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There may be something to that if a minority of PHEVs are dragging the stats down for the whole category. I say that since the same manufacturers have offered non-plugin full hybrids for some time. It might be interesting to see a finer grained analysis or the PHEVs.
Brazenly loaded headline. (Score:3)
Many of the faults are trivia (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading the complaints about some EVs shows people moaning about their ability to play music from the iPhones and other such dross. There are some big issues, usually fixed by software upgrades, in the battery management, which appear to be because the manufacturers are trying to squeeze more miles out on one hand, and recharge in ever shorter times, and then they're into heat management issues.
I recently considered the choice between an EV and a hybrid. EV power chain - battery, control electronics, motors and sensors, and axles. Hybrid power chain: diesel engine (with turbos, catalyst, particulate filter and addBlue system, each of which need a couple of sensors and an ECU), battery, electric motor, belt drive, auto gearbox and axles. It's a miracle of modern engineering quality that the hybrid can make it out of the garage without one of the drive train systems fouling up!
Does it measure "Whiny"? (Score:2)
How did they account for "Whiny"?
Honestly though! My last brand new car was purchased 12 years ago. Fairly early I bought it in for 2 or 3 little things that should not be a problem on a new car but was. I also did NOT bring it in for probably a half dozen little irritations.
I'd bet that new car's worth that most of the quantity of complaints on EVs are that people want them to be 100% trouble (character) free. We all have cars with a little character in them....we just don't bring them to the dealershi
Tesla: The german ADAC says otherwise (Score:2)
Re: Biggest problem is CCS vs NACS/Tesla (Score:5, Insightful)
NACS doesn't solve the problems while it is smaller and easier to use, the problems is the 3rd party charging companies, not doing what they need to keep the infrastructure up and running. Tesla has the advantage that their car profits goes into the supercharger network.
Re: Biggest problem is CCS vs NACS/Tesla (Score:5, Interesting)
, the problems is the 3rd party charging companies, not doing what they need to keep the infrastructure up and running.
I've read that at least some people "in the know" are blaming this on incentives.
To wit, you get money/subsidies to install chargers, not to keep them running. The subsidies drastically outweigh any profit from keeping them running, ergo, there's little incentive to install dependable chargers as opposed to the cheapest that will meet the subsidy rules.
I suppose you could put some sort of warranty requirement - but the companies buying them often don't care past the rebate money themselves. You could probably do some sort of uptime requirement, but that would be very complicated to test and verify, plus that might threaten all the chargers BUT Tesla, and Biden has shown himself to be somewhat hostile to Tesla.
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To wit, you get money/subsidies to install chargers, not to keep them running.
There's a lack of charger repairmen
There Aren't Enough Electricians To Fix America's Broken EV Chargers
https://jalopnik.com/not-enough-electricians-to-fix-broken-ev-chargers-1850915631
tl;dr: estimates are that the demand for electricians will grow over the next decade while the supply of electricians will shrink
Re: Biggest problem is CCS vs NACS/Tesla (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you looked into what it takes to become an electrician? 4800-16000 hours of work (California-Iowa) as a journeyman. Yes, there may be added demand, also a rather high bar to pass to be able to do such work.
Know what happens when electricians are hard to come by? People do the work themselves, at least residentially. Perhaps the answer isn't maintaining the current incumbent protectionist licensing regime.
Re: Biggest problem is CCS vs NACS/Tesla (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a large difference between working with 120/240 or even three phase and with the voltages and connections that the superchargers deal with. Playing with that shit on an amateur basis is a really good way to get yourself fried.
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Lock out tag out, make sure the equipment is de-energized and know how to check and safely discharge any capacitors using an appropriate device, maybe involving a resistor in the kilo-ohm range.
Then you should be free to fix stuff.
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What guarantees that some amateur will "fix stuff" properly so that it supports Level 3 (or even Level 2) charging? Compared to residential work, there's a lot less margin for sloppy work with voltage and current that high, and the best-case outcome is that the charger fails again pretty quickly. Worst case is someone else gets fried....
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Re: Biggest problem is CCS vs NACS/Tesla (Score:5, Informative)
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Amazing, you managed to get from a single sentence that "lock out tag out", a professional practice is 'sloganeering' rather than just not duplicating the safety handbook or something? My post would have had to be a lot longer to cover all of the process. Even then, I doubled up on making sure the equipment was dead before starting work.
Basically, for a EV charger, there should be a breaker panel somewhere reasonably close by, and it should be a commercial unit especially if you're looking at ~480V 3 phas
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I think that I may have failed to adequately address what I was actually talking about. DaHat talked about how many hours it takes to be considered a "qualified" electrician. Ravenshrike was the one that mentioned "amateur" basis.
I was actually thinking about still professional work - most broken EV chargers that are a problem aren't in people's homes, after all, but using cheaper labor than at least a journeyman electrician.
I'm "at best" a field electrician - IE I was a comm guy in the military, the powe
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I think you are underestimating the challenges with really high-current connections. The Geforce RTX 4090 has a very modular connector, but that doesn't keep it from having problems due to small manufacturing errors or slightly incorrect insertion. That connector is rated for a nominal maximum of 55A across all pins, or 9.2A on single pins due to uneven connections. Level 3 charging typically provides between 20 kW at 400 V (a similar 50 A) and 350 kW at 800 V (440 A). That much current is amenable to h
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That much current is amenable to having lots of easily replaced modules because each connector adds resistance, which means inefficiency and heat.
did you mean to say "not amenable"? Because as is, you're saying that the current level is good for easily replaced modules.
As for connectors, well, in my mind that's just engineering.
From what I understand, though Tesla changes stuff up on a regular basis, their chargers are often a bunch of chargers operating in parallel. So a lot less amperage per module, and they're probably operating off of some sort of rail system.
But anyways. The control board should probably be mostly connector based. It doesn't
Re: Biggest problem is CCS vs NACS/Tesla (Score:5, Informative)
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Apprentices are still working & doing the work of fully qualified workers, they're just getting paid less & are dependent on whoever's "training" them.
When that's the case they are getting fucked, they are supposed to be assisting fully qualified workers and not doing their work for them before they're certified.
Re: Biggest problem is CCS vs NACS/Tesla (Score:4)
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Plus you are just plain wrong. Its a 1K to get into their particular path. Then after they prove they are worth the
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Electricians presumably also have to study a lot of theory before &/or during their apprenticeships. Does that mean that they also have to take time out of their low-paid j
Doing it yourself (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought a house 3 years ago that turned out to have a lot of hidden electrical problems. It was urgent to replace the wiring but I couldn't get an electrician to do the job at any price. Ultimately I got the job done by doing the grunt work under the supervision of an electrician. Once the wiring was roughed in the electrician did all the actual connections.
I had to rip out the existing wiring and replace all the junction boxes, receptacle boxes and switch boxes. The work in the attic was miserable. I ran the new wires and left each line with about four feet of wire hanging.
An experienced electrician could have done the job much more quickly than I could, but I learned a lot about code and about my house. In many cases I probably did things much more conservatively than an electrician would. For example, there are no circuits in the house with less than a 20-amp breaker, and the kitchen alone has 14 circuits.
If I were to do the job over again there's one thing I would do differently. I tried to save money by not ripping out drywall. That meant a lot of fishing wires in hard-to-reach places, and I still had to do a lot of drywall repair. It would have been much faster to rip out all the drywall and replace it.
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>To wit, you get money/subsidies to install chargers, not to keep them running.
Ah, lawyering. It's human nature :)