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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

Well crap. Both of my cars have well north of 200,000 on them. I was really hoping to keep driving them for a long time to come.

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Depends on the kind of car you get, but certain cars regularly get to twice that with proper maintenance. Of course, the interior and exterior start falling to bits around the drivetrain anyway.

In large swaths of the United States (and, presumably, most of Canada) road salt will destroy most cars long before the drivetrains are worn out. Collisions also destroy a significant number (in some cases partially destroying the drivetrain too, but not always). In both cases the drivetrain almost always gets disassembled for parts unless there's something really unimpressive about it. Pretty rare to see a car body go into the crusher with the engine still in it unless it was a bad frontend wreck, at least in my experience.

Electric vehicles will be subject to the same body rust and general degradation issues as combustion cars, and it's not obvious that the residual value of a battery pack is going to be that much higher than the residual parts value of an engine in a rusted-out but otherwise operable gas car.

We'll see, I guess, but it doesn't seem on the surface like the economics are likely to be all that much different on the scrap / recovery side of the equation. I suspect that supply chain and labor costs will dominate the price of used batteries rather than the lithium metal itself.

The barlytery will certainly hold its value quite well, for stationary storage if nothing else.

Also electric cars will have flatter and thicker bottom plates which will rust less. Not to mention that many are aluminum frame.

IMHO in that age range, "proper maintenance" means that you'll replace most of the key parts over the next years.

The difference between maintaining and buying new is thus whether you buy the new parts all at once, or replace them one-by-one as you go..

I replaced the engine and transmission in my vehicle at around 220k. I intend to get another 300k out of it, hopefully long enough for the first wave of cars to be remote controlled into the nearest lake and legislation to be passed requiring some security rating that does not yet exist.

I had 250k on an +20 year old Toyota pickup, though things slowly start to crap. Leaky carb diaphragms due to ethanol, harmonic balancer wearing out, corroded brakes lines, bad clutch cylinder, dead ignition module. Donated that after buying a new Toyota pickup. Had that for 12 years now with zero problems.

Purchased a used 2015 Nissan Leaf recently and very happy with that. We'll see how the battery holds up.

I think many will ditch their cars not due to engine wear, but for stupid reasons like their smartphone not linking to the stereo.

I think a much better reason that people ditch their cars is the increased safety in the newer models. Very few cars had side air bags and a decent amount didn't have ABS 15 years ago. There are a lot of other improvements surely made that I don't know about.

In Japan everyone junks their cars in 10 years because of the mandatory car check-ups (we pay $400-$2000 every 2 years for the check-up then have to pay every year once the car hits 10 years old). There are some exceptions and I don't know all the rules as I just own one car.

> for stupid reasons like their smartphone not linking to the stereo.

I'm hoping to install an after-market (Pioneer) wireless CarPlay stereo in our 2009 Mazda, assuming it can wire in to the existing reversing camera. The car's just fine, but it's stupid having this double-DIN stereo with a screen that's always turned off because it's useless.

I think you may have to do a Dukes of Hazard with them.

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