Hacker News Reader

Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

As electric vehicles mature and increase their share of the consumer market, it will be interesting to see how these sorts of reliability measurements change to maintain relevance. Already today, a luxury EV is probably more mechanically reliable than a mass market ICE car.

Electric batteries and drivetrains have their differences in reliability for sure (IIUC, the 1st generation Nissan Leaf lacked a battery temp management system). However the difference between the reliability of EVs isn't likely to be that big since EVs are much simpler machines.

A lot of the complexity that provides the luxury ICE driving experience (smooth, quiet drivetrain, strong acceleration) comes for "free" in an EV, even in mass market models. With that complexity gone, there's much less to differentiate cars from a reliability perspective.

View on HN

> Already today, a luxury EV is probably more mechanically reliable than a mass market ICE car.

Tesla is among the least reliable car brands at the moment:

https://www.consumerreports.org/media-room/press-releases/20...

But I think that says more about the relative immaturity of Tesla's manufacturing than it does about EVs generally.

It will be interesting to see how Volkswagen's modular MEB electric car platform goes in the long term. The MEB platform designed to be used across multiple VW brands (VW, Audi, SEAT, and Skoda) and Volkswagen is interested in licensing it to other manufacturers so it will be widely used.

Had a Tesla Model S. Got rid of it, went back to Toyota. Dumped the reservation on a Model 3, too.

Would you care to expand on what pushed you to do that? Was it purely reliability, or were there other factors involved?

From that CR article:

> Tesla fell six spots from last year and now ranks third-worst (27 out of 29). The Model S dropped to “Below Average” this year, and its Overall Score is no longer high enough to be “Recommended” by CR. Owners reported suspension problems and other issues that included the extending door handle. (Please see chart below.) The Model X SUV remained “Much-Worse-Than-Average” for reliability, with ongoing problems including the falcon-wing doors and center display screen. On the flip side, the Model 3 sedan has “Average” predicted reliability based on owner feedback

Note that none of those issues appear to be related to the electric battery and drivetrain. They are design and manufacturing issues with systems that are present on ICE cars also. It's a demonstration that the goalposts of "reliability" are themselves shifting away from focus on the propulsion system.

Admittedly, ICEs have become incredibly reliable themselves over the last few decades. But there is an order of magnitude more complexity required to achieve that reliability in an ICE vs an EV.

> Note that none of those issues appear to be related to the electric battery and drivetrain.

I don't think it makes much difference what the failure is if the end result is that you can't sensibly drive the car.

If the display fails in a Tesla Model 3, for example, then that's a critical failure because you lose all dashboard information. In contrast, if the display failed in my car then I'd lose access to some features (like sat nav and the reversing camera) but I can otherwise safely drive the car.

If you can't drive the car safely then it doesn't matter how good the drivetrain is. You still need to fix the problem to make the car drivable.

> If the display fails in a Tesla Model 3, for example, then that's a critical failure because you lose all dashboard information.

That's a design issue with Teslas, not with EVs in general.

What denotes a luxury car for the most part is the cabin interior quality, and that will stick around in the EV era too.

Toyota has a bunch of somewhat related experience with the Prius, so they might still come out on top in the end of these EV wars?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com