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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Futurology
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I personally don't see gas going away anytime soon. Gas cars are repairable and will run for decades. Batteries on the other hand break down and can't be repaired.
Additionally I can fill up my car with gas way faster than I can charge it. Having a liquid fuel allows for simplified billing and gas takes a long time to break down.
Moral to the story is that I'll not buy a electric car even if they are reasonably priced. I won't even buy a car with surveillance built in. (I drive old cars)
There's plenty of dudes fixing batteries. Sometimes it's a faulty sensor, sometimes they swap a module out.
Gas takes 2 weeks to be unstable and unusable, you can charge at home and have it top up every night. Also you can go without charging for some days and charge it while shopping or going to the cinema.
Gas cars are also full of surveillance, down to owning the genetic material left in the car. I also drive a 15 year old car, but I'll soon switch to electric.
Gas is unusable after two weeks? I've let it sit for over a year with no issue.
I'm all for electric cars when they make sense, but come on.
Battery degradation is also nice because unlike any comparable issue in an ICE it is never fast or a surprise. Your not going to go out to your car one morning and find it won’t start because one of the hundreds of consumable parts in the engine cracked apart overnight.
Coming as someone who has watched rebuilds of both ICE engines and EV batteries, i’d say that both require about the same amount of work, though modern engines are a bit tougher and more finicky.
If it works for you have at it. It just won't work for me.
Ev car batteries seem to hold up well, but they do need to be easily replaceable.
Can you work on the battery though? Cost wise it seems like the equivalent of replacing your engine. It seems like electric cars are just a worse version of the crappy plastic things we have today.
In theory yes, you could try and take apart the battery pack and replace individual cells.
In practice, they are not built to be opened, cells are welded together
And it gets even worse. Many manufacturers have the batter pack as a structural component, meaning replacing the battery requires a lot of disassembly, and poor efficiency means you need large heavy battery packs that are too heavy to be handled without specialized equipment.
I am rooting for a startup called Aptera who gets around this a little with extreme efficiency, thus smaller batteries, and a claimed right to repair philosophy.
Current evs are far too expensive to just replace because of battery damage.
Given all this I still think electric cars are superior for most people, they don't pollute as much, cost to operate them is much lower, and range is good enough now, and will get even better.
Most people don't drive hundreds of miles a day regularly, but for those that do gas or hybrid is still better.
Cost-wise it's more like the equivalent of buying a new car.
I'm not buying another proprietary car. If it isn't open-source then I don't want it.
I don't care about that. The problem is when they tell you you're not allowed to work on it. Cars shouldn't be "smart".
I don't mind a "smart" car, so long as I can delete, alter, or otherwise work on it without having to jump through the manufacturers' hoops.