Reduced maintenance hurts dealers and independent mechanics, but if electric cars also come with much increased long-term durability, that also torpedoes manufacturers' revenue. (e.g. if the long-term per-km capital cost of driving is halved, that halves the entire car manufacturing sector's revenue.)
This is the interesting thing. Automobiles are turning into software, obviously. And one of the things about software is that the “all you can eat for one price” model is rapidly dissapearing.
Nobody can survive without turning customers into revenue streams, so we have SaaS, in-app purchases, and so on. I predict that automobiles will go that way, they will essentially become a service, whether you get one exlusively to yourself or share it on demand.
OEM's are looking at their 2-5% margins and then eyeing lyft and uber's 40% margins (well, +/- the burning-all-of-it-plus-investors-money-to-capture-global-market-share bit).
What’s the resell market like for EV? I wouldn’t ever buy new and with the change in maintenance I’m wondering how viable just going to a mechanic to checkout a craigslist car purchase will be as EVs make up a greater share of vehicles on the road.
I suspect part of that is just how much better the current model Leaf is than the old ones. In a rapidly changing market, you can’t expect much resale value. Of course, this implies the next problem; it’s never the right time to buy an electric car, because next year’s range is going to be a lot better..l
Right. The logical thing to do is to price it up as a lease without option to purchase / long-term hire contract and compare that to other competitors.
Resale is extremely weak, even for something like a Model S. Think 50% or less going to auction after three years, and some cars in particular (looking at you 500E) going for 1/6 what they were sold for brand new.
Once the technology stabilizes a bit and becomes more common, resale probably won't be any worse than everything else.
That's true only if you compare sticker prices. In reality, a $32k bolt has a $7.5k federal rebate, a $2.5k california rebate, and various city and utility rebates. So a $32k MSRP is actually around $20-22k.
With that in mind, a $16k 3 year old Bolt is actually not that bad.
Meanwhile in Canada, there are no EV rebates (in most provinces), and due to the depreciation of the dollar and Tesla's USD-based pricing, buying a new Model 3 is now only $400 less than the Model S was at launch four years ago.
If long-term reliability really is good for EVs, it should be cheap for manufacturers to offer long-term warranties, transferable between owners, as a point of differentiation over their competitors. As-is, EVs don't (yet?) have better warranties than ICE cars.
When Tesla was raising the funds for the Gigafactory, they did try to frame the discussion about company's core competence being sourcing, production and recycling lithium-ion batteries.
Whether those batteries were attached to a set of wheels or packed inside a box for a residential/utility install was secondary.
No. I'm not making any claims about the long-term durability of EVs, just pointing out the result that selling more durable cars will have on the auto manufacturing industry.
I don't know that long-term durability of EVs is even knowable yet, the oldest Model S is only four years old. Average age of cars on the road in the USA is 12 years, so we'll need to wait a while for good comparison data.
