EVs Could Last Nearly Forever—If Car Companies Let Them

Time to make a billion dollars on something else, then start up a car company designed to fail. No investors, design a car for a 60-70k buying price, few bells and whistles, but built to last indefinitely with basic maintenance. Start the company planning to practically close it down just after the last preorder customer has their car delivered and become a maintenance company with a few employees to make replacement parts and install them. If demand rises, redesign for the new times, ramp up and do it all again.
- "Why do you hate freedom? And America? And puppies? And apple pie?" -Republicans, probably
- Who wants an infinite lifespan car anyway? Everything else would be getting safer and more fuel efficient. Might as well get around on horse and buggy.
I haven’t even read the article yet, and my cynical ass came to the same conclusion based on the headline. 😣
Competition, in theory, should combat this. It does, but it should.
Cars do have failure modes other than rust, like crashes. Having not yet read the article, I expect crashes still destroy cars.
Edit: having read the article, it was not a dense technical work and was disappointing on specifics.
- Having worked on and had every major brand (and some obscure ones) in my family, there's a reason Japanese cars are considered the most durable.
  We've driven numerous Toyotas and Hondas 300k+. Some we still have, 30 years old or more.
  Working on Toyota and Honda is generally much easier and far less frequent than other brands.
  You can see how American car companies enshittify things when there's a joint platform (Ford/Mazda, GM/Toyota, Chrysler/Mitsubishi). Invariably the American version is inferior, and even the Japanese company version often suffers with some of the same shitty design/engineering choices.
  I refuse to ever again own an American vehicle, or even one of the joint platforms. I've had both - they suck to work on, require more frequent repairs, sometimes to things that just never fail on Japanese cars (especially electronics and control systems... Looking at *you" Jeep/Chrysler).
Makes sense. That is why all those Japanese carmakers went bankrupt and diesal hasn't been a thing since the 1950s.

Planned obsolence should be illegal

Won't anybody think of the poor shareholders? Planned obsolescence is what keeps this whole system running.
- I'm a shareholder of $AMD because they worked with Framework to release a modular laptop GPU
  Support companies that support right to repair
- God that's a pet peeve of mine, people who think they're the sole component about why something works, when what's working works IN SPITE of them.
  Shareholders definitely qualify.

Like the new LED lightbulbs. Buy one now and they last a year or so. I bought one of them WAY back when they were brand new and horribly expensive and the damn thing still works just fine.

Companies can't stand new technologies that just work. They have to build in planned obsolescence. See also: smartphones, especially iTrash that make you buy a new one every year or two because updates slow them down.

Good ones still last a long time. What fails is generally not the LED itself but the cheap-ass rectifier in a cheap-ass case that is optimised for production price instead of heat dissipation. The fixture can also be an issue as nobody designed for heat dissipation in the days of incandescent bulbs, you might be baking those poor capacitors.
And those kinds of bulbs will stay available because there's plenty of commercial users doing their due diligence on life-time costs. Washing machines, fridges? Yes, those too, though commercial ones aren't necessarily cheap. Want a solid pair of pants? Ask a construction crew what they're wearing.
- I bought about 20 Cree bulbs 5 years ago, 15 are on about 15 hours a day. I've had 2 fail in that time.
  Not a bad record in my book.
  Even the off brands, IKEA, Amazon, etc, seem to last as long. They're all in open fixtures, so no cooling issues.
The problem with LEDs isn't the bit that emits lights. It's the power supply, specifically the electrolytic capacitors. Good designs either use higher quality caps, or use designs that avoid electrolytic caps altogether. Either one takes a bit more money, but the market is always in a race to the bottom.
Long term, I think we should be avoiding traditional light fixtures entirely. It's better to have a lot of little lights spread over an area rather than a few point sources in the room. That gives us the opportunity to separate the power supply from the lights entirely, like LED strips do.
- The LEDs will also fail from overheating. LED bulbs don't last long in fully enclosed fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs.
  If the bulb starts flickering, that's usually a bond wire failure in an LED. When the LED heats up the bond wire loses connection and it will reconnect when it cools down again. The LEDs are in series, so if one fails, the entire bulb goes out. Flickering can also be caused by a capacitor failure in a switch mode supply, but most LED bulbs use linear regulators with a high voltage series string of LEDs now, which also increases the chance of a bond wire failure.
  The early LED bulbs that cost a fortune had huge aluminum heat sinks to keep them cool. The few that I had all lasted until the LEDs got dim.
Gonna downvote you here bröder and chip in with the people defending Apple’s products while recognizing that Apple did go through a lawsuit and that they did indeed participate in this shady-ass practice. Whether they still do - who knows, we live in a funny age.
From personal experience, not only is the build quality superior but they do last pretty long. I’ve got 3 devices personally and have had experience with many more.
My SE that’s old as hell now. I’m not gonna say it runs every app just fine, but the OS functions just fine. I use it as a music player now tho and iPhone 14 as my phone.
SE2 was shit, I’ll admit.
I bought M1 Air when they just came out - it has barely slowed down. Admittedly, it was after my 12 year old Acer plastic clunker decided to not wake up one day.
I also just recently used a friend’s pretty ancient iPad for Procreate and that worked just fine as well.
If someone’s looking for great UI/UX out of the box and great industrial design, what other alternatives are there besides Apple? At least for smartphones there are none. If someone did put a really nice feeling (physically) smartphone in front of me and said: “hey, you can switch everything off with hardware switches and all the apps you’re used to are supported plus the UI and the camera is competent”, I might jump, maybe. Depending on how I could manage my workflow with Linux bc I’m not going to Windows and in this hypothetical scenario if I’m jumping Apple, I’m jumping everything not just the phone.
All that said, I have been giving a thought to all of this for some time and as soon as the time is right for me, I will switch, out of principle. I would love to be able to run some other OS on Apple phone hardware tho.
- If someone’s looking for great UI/UX out of the box and great industrial design, what other alternatives are there besides Apple?
  And this right here is where you went from cringeworthy Apple pandering to laughably, horribly wrong. crApple iTrash has the worst goddamn interface of any system. I'd rather use pure DOS from the fucking early 90s than have to poke around on iOS's ass-backwards interface.
- iPhones and iPads famously get slower, laggier, and less useful as time goes on. This is not just because of its use because even resetting one will make it just as slow as before. Sure, as we move forward we get more demanding applications and such, but it seriously doesn't seem like that scales properly with the ability of the hardware, almost like Apple intentionally builds in incremental slowdowns in each patch that isn't installed on current hardware. It's apocryphal, I know, but there have been so many people complaining about their perfectly good iDevices suddenly not performing like they used to even after a refresh that makes me feel like there's at least something to it.
  And don't get me wrong, Android phones seem to do the same to a certain degree. iDevices are just more famous for doing it.

Seriously, no one is going to mention "Right To Repair"? If this was law, and companies had to divulge how there stuff worked and was assembled, as well as sell parts, things would last longer. If every trade zone had a repairablity index, competition would make things last longer still.

States have had no trouble passing and enforcing IP law that allows companies to get away with this. Reverse engineering would be the norm for closed source anything to the point it would be made irrelevant if companies didn't have the overwhelming weight of the legal system on their side to shut down anyone who dares try open up access to their designs.
Right to repair is great, but we are fighting against the entire weight of the entrenched ruling class to get it passed. It's going to take a lot of activism, and even then it's almost certainly going to be watered down and cater to large corporations when it does pass. We need to keep the pressure on them.
- I think the EU will be first to role it out at and scale. Like USB-C device power standardization.
If this was law, and companies had to divulge how there stuff worked and was assembled, as well as sell parts, things would last longer.
I'm all for it but I think you're being a bit too optimistic. If we had the right to repair then the prices of repair kits and materials is going to go up most likely. I can think of a few other ways they can make that system obnoxious too.
It's like everything else. Yeah, the general systems in place could be greatly improved but ultimately the majority of the issues lie with the people at the top who refuse to let us have good things. No matter what laws are passed they will find a way to profit at any cost. The shareholders behind massive corporations are the first priority because no solution we create will work as efficiently as it can unless they are out of the picture.
- Regulations can work. Latest is EU's USB-C phone/laptop/tablet standardization. It's great! No more crazy range of different laptop power supplies.
  Some stuff is pretty much as I want already. Henry vacuum cleaners for example. Tough as nails and easy to get parts and help for. Framework laptop and fair phone aim to be good for repair and upgradablity.
  France repairablity index can be rolled out further field.
  Things used to be more repairable and last longer. We can reverse the trend down. No need to despair.

Exactly. I'm looking for a repairable EV, and so many kinda suck. A lot have big computer modules that control nearly everything, the battery pack uses bespoke parts that aren't available from the manufacturer, etc. They probably need less maintenance, but they will need that maintenance eventually.
It's disappointing the direction everything is going.
the one pain point would be the batteries, and those have no reason to not be easily maintainable and highly universal. They're all modular and often times even using the same cell types.
While it's true that EVs can be built with fewer moving parts in the drive system itself, and that companies could absolutely produce longer lasting vehicles if they focused on longevity, there are still a lot of parts of a vehicle that simply will not last beyond a certain point. The moving parts of an EV still cover everything in the suspension, wheels/brakes/steering, and a number of other components that are very costly to replace, not to mention the underlying frame/unibody of the vehicle itself being vulnerable to wear over time depending on the conditions it's driven in. "The few moving parts that wear out" still covers a huge swath of a vehicle, even if you take the engine and transmission out of the equation.
Well-built EVs with a focus on longevity and repairability could extend the lifespan of the average people mover by a great deal, but at the end of the day cars will by nature eventually reach a point where the cost to repair some major core component becomes too great to justify, outside of rare or collectable cases.
Probably not a bad thing if your primary concern is the environment.
- Carsharing? Yes. Personal cars with a subscription? Not really.

Friend of mine bought an EV. Didn't even last a month. He landed in a tree.

Goddamn planned obsolescence.
- *planted obsolescence
What was the issue? Do you know?
- Handing out driving licences like they were sweets instead of actually testing people's ability to drive, maybe?
- I think the tree didn't give way when it should have and damaged it a bit, hard to tell though
- Probably turned off traction control and floored it. EVs have some pretty solid acceleration and weight a bit more than their ICE counterparts.
- Lost consciousness for a bit. Unknown why.
- Then the wheels just fell off. Stupid woke EVs are built to fail.
- Yeah, got launched when drifting off the road
I'm sure if we spend enough time working on it, we can figure out how this is all OPEC's fault. /s (jeeze tho I hope your friend was okay!)
- He luckily only has 4 broken ribs.
Lemmy: Capitalism caused this.
In a socialist system cars would be tree proof.
Sad to see an i5 in that condition :(
damn wild trees crossing street

All cars could last a lot longer if people kept maintaining them and - importantly - didn't damage them. Electric cars are not going to be immune to this, I can't see them lasting much longer on average than ICE cars.

Keep in mind that even when you change out the engine for something with less parts the rest of the car still remains and contains things which will eventually cause issues. For example I bought a cheap van a few months ago and here's some of the reasons it was cheap that are not ICE specific:

Steering wheel lock mechanism sticking
Air distribution flap cables kinked/binding so A/C only blew at feet
Central locking on side door sticking
Rear shocks leaking
Front strut mount bushings worn
Head unit not functioning

Presumably the previous owner just didn't want to spend the money on fixing these issues as they arose, and eventually it added up into a lot of potential expense (if you have to pay someone to fix it for you) and more reasons to sell the car. Such behaviour seems pretty common in my experience and I fully expect it to continue with EVs. It'll be hard enough to get people to even maintain their brakes and change the motor coolant considering the natural reluctance of people to spend money on maintenance and this unfortunately prevalent idea that EVs don't need it.

Funnily enough the main ICE specific problem with that van was just as much an electrical issue as part of the petrol engine - an intermittent secondary air injection error code which ended up being down to a combination of a sticking valve and a fuse with a hairline crack causing an intermittent connection.

A lot of this also comes back to asshole design, and EV's can be particularly bad for this. Switching to large touch "entertainment" displays is a major issue. With my last ICE (Honda) vehicle, it was integrated into the backup+side cameras and a few comfort/convenience features. I could still replace that with a new head unit, though only certain ones would still support the cameras.
My wife's EV (Hyundai) on the other hand, the console isn't really made in a way where it seems swappable, and even if it was there are major system functions - such as configuring charge/power settings - which can only be configured from that (or the dogshyte app that screws up often and requires a paid subscription after 3yr)
- Yes, the move towards integrating the infotainment further into the car with propitiatory parts instead of generic sizes and not separating out vehicle related controls is definitely going to make long term upkeep harder.
Exactly this...in new cars its not the transmission or engine failure that causes it to be junked but rather all the rubber/ plastic bits going to shit and costing an arm and a leg to replace...
- That's my thought as well. Things like failing interior plastics, or glass that is no longer being manufactured, or basic body seals rotting away. Even body rotlike folks in cold or salty environments deal with.Those bits add up fast.
Yeah. Markass Brownie got his Tesla in an accident. Repairs? More than 50% of sticker price. Sure you can throw the chassis out and put on a new one, but what about a hundred little sensors that also need troubleshooting, repair and calibration? Gotta go through them one by one.
- Are you making fun of Marques Brownlee, or just really not paying attention to what your autocorrect is doing...?
There needs to be a market for aftermarket batteries

After ~20-30 years, rubber gaskets and seals and cable insulation start failing. Plastic becomes brittle, especially if exposed to the sun. How do they solve this problem?

- Pretty much this, diagnosing and fixing an electric motor is about as difficult as an alternator. Check signal, if good remove unit and swap (core gets remanufactured). With drive by wire and steer by wire and all that most things are equally modular. Gas pedal/throttle unit is pretty much a rheostat with a spring-loaded pedal, steering rack actuators, etc
  Then you got ICE which becomes a ship of theseus. If you put enough hours on a combustion engine you go from the simple stuff like hoses and timing belts to having to replace piston rings, bearings, or even the cylinder heads if they get so worn out that they leak and fail compression tests
- True, but even electrical vehicles need lubrication, cooling, breaking fluids etc.
  I'm expecting that, as EVs become more common, the car maintenance industry will catch up.
Modularity of construction, so that rubber components can be replaced without scrapping the whole vehicle. Reducing reliance on plastic parts, or improving the ease and quality of plastic recycling, so that we can fix the exterior components without sacrificing the chassis and core parts.
Especially if it's made by Delco. Ask me how I know.
My guess is the thermodynamics of a hot engine makes the rubber and plastic parts fail more quickly than they would otherwise.

What about it's batteries?

They are still chemical so they wouldn't last forever.

Batteries can be replaced. An EV that could run 1 million miles would still need maintenance - I think the point is that they could be designed to last.
Planned obsolescence is so wide spread we don't even notice it, but lots of products are designed to fail either through cheaper components or deliberately flawed design. That means we have to go and buy a replacement. It is also generally cheaper.
So we either have cheap products that will break or seemingly expensive products but they last for a very long time. But in the long run the cheap products generally cost you more to buy than one expensive product.
- I don't think the wider population would accept the compromises necessary for a million miles vehicle. There is always a balance between component longevity, cost, performance, features, and safety.
  They can exist but I don't forsee wide adoption due to it being wildly expensive and/or bare bones in terms of contemporary features.
- Batteries will be very expensive, however. The battery company is still quite greedy, eyeing for 5~10x growth in the near future - and that requires raising battery prices by at least twice.
Yes, the batteries would need to be replaced but that means designing them to be replaced.
Unlike the Tesla model Y which built the battery into the frame and filled it with foam so that it absolutely cannot get replaced. Musk said the way to replace the battery is to send the entire car to the scrap yard and recover the lithium from the shredder.
- Another reason on my list why to never buy a Tesla.
- That…can’t be true.
- That's patently false, according to https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/tesla-battery-replacement-cost-explained/#:~:text=Absolutely.,will%20likely%20also%20be%20similar.
  My 2013 Model S has 235,000 miles on it and still l drives like it's brand new. I haven't yet had to replace the battery pack but when that day comes, it will almost certainly be worth the cost.

Car manufacturers:

I would love to see a car company create a vehicle platform with battery replacements central to the design of the car. Make larger packs out of smaller units so their larger models (or simply longer range models) simply use more of the smaller pack units. Recycle old packs back into making newer ones to reduce the need to mine more materials.

Sure, charge me enough on the replacement to keep this cycle going. Buying a car you know will get battery (and therefore range) upgrades as time goes on is a no-brainer.

Imagine the goodwill and free word-of-mouth advertising you would receive if you went the extra mile and open sourced all the software for the vehicle and allowed users to modify it if they wanted. Make the car not look like dogshit and I imagine you'd do well.

This already exists.
Look up Nio. They already have fully automatic battery swapping stations for cars leasing the pack. You literally swap the whole pack instead of charging when it's empty.
Takes less than 10 minutes
- That is very interesting and their cars look appealing.
  I think in the US, a company may have a better time selling the whole car including battery and still offering quick replacement when it comes time to upgrade.
  I'm about to search more but do you happen to know if Nio is selling in the US?
  Edit: Dang.. Not selling in the US yet. And with these new tariffs it's not looking good.
- Nio
  Ugh, looks like they designed their door handles just like Tesla did. Are EVs in general adopting that design standard? Cuz thanks I hate it.
nice concept and i think framework might actually do a protoype of this kind of car when they get the investors and the funds currently they still are a small company so i really hope that they become larger in this decade
- Company called vinfast opened up next to tesla in my town. Never heard of them so i checked it out and they have a battery subscription option which was interesting to me, if its like propane tank exchange systems it could be interesting, since its the battery that seems to be the. Biggest concern for people having to replace down the line. Would make a lot of sense for heavy use situations(delivery, sales that travel a lot etc and burn through leases regularily)

I mean most things can, it just isn't profitable...

Planned Obsolescence, baby!
That said, we might be able to make industrial scale recycling an economically efficient activity if we build more durable goods with a longer lifecycle and limit the availability of new territory to strip mine and abandon.
So much of our "cheap" access to minerals and fossil fuels boils down to valuing unimproved real estate as at zero dollars and ignoring the enormous waste produced during the extraction process. Properly accounting for the destruction of undeveloped real estate and the emissions/waste created during industrial processing could dramatically improve how much waste we produce and - consequently - how long our durable goods last.
And few people want to work for free or want put aside too much of there personal wealth to help people for things that don't seem critical (like healthcare for example which has a lot of nonprofit activities).
I hope OpenSource keeps takening off in the field. Communalize the engineering results so we advance together, and lower the cost of manufacturing with diy/small scale manufacturing and maybe we can get better things at costs more can afford without enslaving people.

Its really worth reading the whole Article. Im looking forward to long lasting EVs, but I really fear that, what the author also described in his article, may come true. I think we will see that car manufacturers will start to act like hardware company's and start to force you to regularly buy a new car by making your car incompatible to new features or by designing it to fail after a few years.

I think we will see that car manufacturers will start to
They started to do this decades ago. Generally any given part in a car might be left unchanged for 5 or 6 model years before it gets changed, often for completely arbitrary reasons. For many cars, if it's over ten years old your only hope for a replacement part is the junkyard.
- Or your local friendly 3D Printer mad scientist. Provided they have a metal and a plastic printer.

I bet smartphones could last 3 or 4 years even if companies let them 😏

I'm still using my OnePlus 8t. Phones lifespans are fine. If you can't keep your phone working for 4 years, that's on you.
I see no reason to upgrade until support is dropped.
- I used my 6t for 4 years but it started bootlooping and I needed it for 2fa codes every login on some applications for work. I bought a 10t after a couple of days. Funny enough now the 6t appears stable again, oh well it's the household backup if any others spontaneously die
- My Samsung a70 doesn't get major software updates anymore. I'm OK with it. I'll use this as long as possible.
Imagine being able to opt into an long term support branch when you feel your phone starting to lag, unlocked bootloader's, and have user replaceable batteries.
Still mad about accidentally installing the newer version of iOS on my iPad pro. Such a meaningful feature to have security patches without slowdown from newer versions.
- Imagine being able to opt into an long term support branch when you feel your phone starting to lag
  That's kind of what LineageOS does.
Wait, are you saying my phone should last less time than it does?
My current phone is from 2017.
They don’t?
I just got a new phone despite my previous one being totally fine because it's no longer getting security updates. I've had it for ~4 years with no issues, so I got a Pixel for longer security updates.
So yeah, they totally could last longer if they kept supporting them.

My family bought an electric forklift for their factory in the early 90s. I think it is a Yale.

My sister has since taken over the forklift for her company and she has only replaced the batteries and the controller once.

These things are cheap to replace and not as much of a mystery as ICE engines.

I am seeing people replace old Prius hybrid batteries themselves with basic tools now.

I think the only thing I would be concern about is the crash safety for cars. Newer cars are safer. I think that would be the only draw to buy a newer vehicle.

I replaced the main battery in a Gen1 Prius. Fiddly. Had to get a strong buddy to help lift it in and out of the car, but we did it in a long weekend. A full set of 'used but tested' cells cost something like $750 but that was probably 8 years ago.
- Exactly. Plus the newer cells are more efficient and longer-lasting. You pretty much upgraded your vehicle.

This is basically like saying combustion vehicles could last nearly forever if you replaced the engine every now and then

I mean...they can, you just refresh the motor. Tons of ICE vehicles out there with 400-500k miles on them. Hell most semi trucks have millions of miles on them.
A rebuild every x00,000 miles on a Toyota sounds nicer than paying the price of a new pilot every 100,000 miles tbh. Computers don't last though and emissions have made it a huge pain to fix on older cars. Nothing against emissions it's a necessary evil.
- New pilot? I dunno what any of this means
If they're easy enough to work on, and the parts market is maintained, yes.
Nothing lasts forever without something going wrong, but we can make it easier to fix. It's a little more true of EVs, because they're mechanically simpler than ICE cars. You added an electric motor (which lasts forever if designed well), batteries (life dependent on the chemistry involved), and some electronics to drive that (caps in there go bad, much of the rest will last forever if not abused). You took away an ICE, an intake system, an exhaust system, perhaps some forced induction, a coolant system (which you might have on EVs, but not to the same level), an ignition system, a shitload of sensors (O2 sensors having particularly short life, relatively speaking), and a fuel pump.
If designed to be worked on, the EV is far, far easier.
I am thinking of doing that when my civic should be legally declared dead. With the insanity that is new car prices and insurance for new cars plus the vanished used car market it just isn't worth it. I want an EV but things have to go back to normal before that happens
- It's easy to do, and engines don't cost much on ebay.
  Fortunately Honda makes vehicles that are very durable, so it's not like everything dies at the same age of the engine.

Surely the free market and competition will deliver what customers want, right? ... Right?!?

Here a link to bypass the paywall:

http://12ft.io/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/06/electric-car-battery-longevity-right-to-repair/678641/

If the government regulates them*

Electric motors can last a really long time, assuming no defects, they should outlast the battery by a Longshot.

That leaves the battery, and an LFP battery should also last a hell of a long time, probably a decent way into a million km before you have degraded to about 80%.

If you got those key items lasting, then it just depends on how well the rest of the car holds up, but replacing small parts while the motors and battery works is probably always going to be more cost effective.

The problem is the battery is a wildcard still.

We know how long those LFP batteries should last in a car, but they're also pretty are in cars and we don't have that real world data yet.

I also fear that OEMs will still gouge us on replacement batteries 15 - 20 years from now when costs are even lower and replacing the battery shouldn't be so expensive.

There's an old expression: Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.
If a car has a warranty of 10 years, it will last 11 years.
- But battery cells don't just fail after a specific time. Maybe a component in the battery will like a switch or gasket though.
  Motors are highly resilient as well.
  I'm not as sure about the motors, but I really am optimistic on the LFP batteries.
- Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.
  Oof.
  In the defense of engineers, they are usually trying to optimize around a few more variables than ability to stand. Cost is a big one.
  If a car has a warranty of 10 years, it will last 11 years.
  ...If it's well engineered.

I think people need to start being educated about how their climate influences how they can use the electric car. Many people know if they live by the sea or where roads are salted that corrosion is an issue. But people might not be aware that with some EVs, they should leave it plugged in if they're in an extreme climate, so the car can air condition or heat the battery. I caused some battery degradation to my Volt because I wasn't able to leave it plugged in living in Tucson.

- You have a point; some EVs like the Leaf don't even have conditioning. The Volt does have active conditioning, and being a PHEV instead of a BEV has battery charge and discharge limits which were limited by the factory to preserve longevity at the expense of being able to charge to a true 100%. If extra range is needed the ICE is activated instead of stressing the traction battery.
Have you ever been driven the Desert Bus from Tucson to Las Vegas on that Genesis game?

Which was also true of ICE cars. The Model T Ford had a major design flaw: everyone could work on it easily, parts were plentiful, and there was no reason to buy a replacement once you had it. In fact, there's enough of them still running, with an associated parts market, that you could still daily one if you wanted to.

So much so that TFLClassics on YouTube in Colorado bought a well maintained model T and drove it to the nearest dealership and had mechanics there change the oil and take it for a spin just the other week.

It would be wonder if they last forever and easly could be repaired. Making it better to keep the car then buy a new one. It just need to be upgradedable to the latest standards that might be more safe, efficient and agree with current law.

But I am pretty that would never exist - too hard.

There's not much room for improvement in terms of efficiency for EVs, except maybe lower rolling resistance tyres and better aero. You generally have to replace the whole car for better aero though unless you don't mind having some bolt on mods 😂
- Ok, but it might be in other areas. Example lets see someone invent very high efficiently on solar panels with no weight at all. Or lets get rid of rubber wheels and do sifi so the car can hover over the road.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  bolt on mods
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Batteries capacity per m^3 and/or per KG is improving over time though, so that's where the main reason to upgrade an EV would come from.

“Unlike gas-powered engines—which are made up of thousands of parts that shift against one other—a typical EV has only a few dozen moving parts. That means less damage and maintenance, making it easier and cheaper to keep a car on the road well past the approximately 200,000-mile average lifespan of a gas-powered vehicle. And EVs are only getting better. “There are certain technologies that are coming down the pipeline that will get us toward that million-mile EV,” Scott Moura, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley, told me. That many miles would cover the average American driver for 74 years. The first EV you buy could be the last car you ever need to purchase.“

No way a car would last me and my family 74 years. First year I owned my car I put on almost 35k. Was driving 100 miles back and forth to work at that time. We typically take a road trip from colorado to near Vermont every year for a vacation.

A lot of midwesterns will drive 14 hours to get some where

Sure, there's always going to be outliers. Most people live and work in the same metropolitan area though - they're not driving 50,000km+ a year. Besides, having a vehicle with 5 times the effective lifetime is going to be a big win regardless of how much you drive it.
At best case 60 miles an hour... Your commute was more than 90 mins? Ugh. That's awful.
You weren't clear if that was round trip or not, so possibly more than 180 mins? How did you find time to sleep!?
- Round trip was 100 miles every day. This was rural Ohio driving to Columbus so it was not to bad 2 and 4 lane roads till you hit the city most of them time. If we got a lot of snowfall it could super suck but I was from NE Ohio so most of the time it was not that much white knuckle driving. You just listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts or call some friends on your hour or so drive home
- In the San Francisco Bay Area, it's not uncommon for people that work here but can't afford to live here to have commutes of over an hour with good traffic (2+ hours with heavy traffic) each way. That's the case in a few major metro areas in countries like the USA and Australia.

Obviously they wont "let" them. Why would they ever do that? They have to be made to do it. But I hope i'm wrong, we will see.

Wear and tear doesn't kill a car; rust does.

Back in the day you could buy whole (but small) parts, cut away the rusy one and solder in the new one (paint with anti rust paint). Did it on my cheap ass volvo 142 :-)
Maybe you can't do that any more because of complex crumple zones, but I bet we can do better. A car shouldn't just have a life span of 6-10 years.
- A car shouldn't just have a life span of 6-10 years.
  They don't.
  My current daily driver is 18 years old. I expect at least another 10 barring an accident, maybe 30 more years as a spare vehicle. It got a new transmission at 200,000 miles. Engine seems like it'll make it to at least 400k. A replacement is $1500, far less than a new car.
  Most cars in my family (approximately 30 cars) are between ten and thirty years old.
  I've had 3 cars since 1996, all bought used, and I traveled for work with one. One car I sold to a family member, and it's still being driven.
  It's people that choose to not drive cars this long.
- You can still do that. They're called body repair panels. They are usually plain metal. You have to cut out the old, weld in the new, grind them flat, prime and paint them. This isn't cost efficient if your car is worth less than the paint you'd need. The parts usually are around $100-$300 bucks (if you don't need OEM parts) but the labor is expensive. And if you do it for cheap it will look like crap.
Climate change is getting rid of snow. No more salted roads. Cars will last forever
- FYI https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cybertruck%20rust

power density just needs to grow until someone can easily kit-swap a range of battery and motor options into any platform - then we can ev-ify whatever we want to drive around.

I had already read of the first teslas model S getting to 1M km with ordinary maintenance alone, so it should be pretty easy to achieve. Of course it won't be done as it wouldn't be profitable.

Bad drivers like me can fix that by applying wear to bodywork. Normal driving wears the tires and all the gears, gaskets, and bearings in the system. But it can probably last 20 years.

1 of the 👍 points that were brought up was artificial gatekeeping. Many techies know it but I guess many non-techies don't know it. Phone makers intentionally not putting the newest features on the old phones to boost the newest phones' sales should be widely known. I wonder what the public opinion will be.

Sometimes I think people don't understand how capitalism works...

"EVs won't last nearly forever."

In April, a group of people in a red Tesla driving through the Moroccan desert were glued to the odometer on the car’s giant touch screen. “Two million, Hans! Two million,” exclaimed the front-seat passenger to the owner and driver, Hansjörg von Gemmingen-Hornberg.

Ah, it's gonna be one of those fluffy wanker articles.

Also paywalled.

So lame.

Well that's just not going to happen.