My concern is that in a few years time, when these electric cars are 2nd/3rd hand down the line, the sort of people that can afford to buy a secondhand electric car can’t afford a horrendous bill of £5000+ if there is a major issue as some of the secondhand electric car buyers are finding out right now
The greatest thing about electric cars is powertrain-wise there's about 3 things that can ever break, so you'll basically never need maintenance.
The terrifying thing about electric cars is powertrain-wise there's about 3 things that can ever break, so when one does out goes a third of the powertrain.
The main worry is batteries.They're inescapable failure points, and they make up so much of the cost of electric cars - cost that people don't currently pay thanks to heavy subsidies, which only increase the battery cost to car price ratio, that thus starts high and only goes up: battery cost stays dead still and car value lowers year on year. So by the time an electric car is a decade old and prime for a change, its value will have gone below battery cost, and if it won't be the insurance to declare it totaled, it'll be the owner who'll consider it unwise to spend, say, $5k on a $3k car (and then go spend $15k for a new one
) and scrap it.
What this will mean in practice is busted electric cars will be split between crashed ones, good examples with busted batteries, and exceptions. So the salvage market will supply plenty of good "shells", lowering their value, and the crushers will barely get any good used batteries, so their value will stay about still, making the situation even worse.
In short, old cars will all have bad batteries (time is a wear factor too, so it's inevitable), but new ones won't have any reason to cost less and used ones will be so rare they basically won't be a sensible option.
However, there are ways to look at the bright side:
- At some point, if no one buys used electric cars, the new battery price will have to lower to move some units, so at some point the wasted shells will be curbed somewhat
- This situation means that new, better/cheaper battery types (which are already in the air right now) will have a great incentive to be adapted for older cars, because of all the shells that are only waiting for a new pack of them
- Every other spare will become cheap and plentiful because every car totaled over battery cost alone means an entire set of everything else becoming available, and with how frequent this will be the price will be bound to lower immensely
There is to note, I'm junk with predictions - please don't go around thinking a newbie on an A2 forum has brought you the gospel.