Electric Cars Repairs

John T Carroll

I have been reading with great interest the various pros and cons of EVs on Boards.ie and numerous other EV Forums.
I see very little mention of maintenance costs and repairs to these vehicles. ie main drive motors, electronics etc. There are plenty of references to expected battery pack life.
Does anyone have a link to these costs as they will become more and more important when deciding to go "EV" once battery technology improves and range anxiety becomes less of an issue.

samih

I guess the maintenance cost would be very small.

The motor has one moving part so not much to go wrong there. There have been a couple of cases of reduction drive bearing failures on Leaf, but again the construction of that is so simple compared to, say, a 5 speed gear box that if it becomes an usual occurrence repairing one should be cheaper than overhauling a gearbox. Likes of clutch/gearbox repair shops would get familiar in repairing those. Drive shafts are similar to any normal car too so nothing exotic.

Electrically the jury is still out but apart from charger failures not much has gone wrong in Leafs at least.

Battery will be the biggest problem when evs pile on kilometers/years. Hopefully there will be aftermarket solutions for that and/or manufacturer battery exchange service similar to USA.

reboot

John T Carroll wrote: »

I have been reading with great interest the various pros and cons of EVs on Boards.ie and numerous other EV Forums.
I see very little mention of maintenance costs and repairs to these vehicles. ie main drive motors, electronics etc. There are plenty of references to expected battery pack life.
Does anyone have a link to these costs as they will become more and more important when deciding to go "EV" once battery technology improves and range anxiety becomes less of an issue.

I suppose an Ev owner/leaser, is less likely to have as many maintenance costs over an Ice vehicle. When you consider the many engine,cat,exhaust,pumps,filters etc in a petrol car,covered in detail in the Martin Scheen Doc "Who killed the Electric Car?" My up and coming decision on my two year leased Zoe, is do I keep the car which is just fabulous, and replace battery modules if the dealer will permit this and at what a cost.

cros13

John T Carroll wrote: »

I have been reading with great interest the various pros and cons of EVs on Boards.ie and numerous other EV Forums.
I see very little mention of maintenance costs and repairs to these vehicles. ie main drive motors, electronics etc. There are plenty of references to expected battery pack life.
Does anyone have a link to these costs as they will become more and more important when deciding to go "EV" once battery technology improves and range anxiety becomes less of an issue.

When it comes to crash repairs on the Leaf the big one is the charge connector unit on the front of the car which can cost €2000 to replace.

There's not a whole lot to go wrong on the drive motor side apart from the issue samih mentioned they had on a small number of early Leafs with the drive bearings (largely due to the enormous torque from the motor).
This was fixed on the Mk1.5 by reducing in software the initial torque and some reengineering of the gearbox.

There's no cooling or exhaust system to go wrong and the A/C and heater on the Mark 1.5 is an electrically powered heat pump, not a belt run mechanical compressor.

Very few moving parts compared to a traditional petrol engine.

Here's a nice video of a mark 1 drive block being disassembled:

The problem is the availability of parts currently if something were to go wrong then you could be waiting many weeks. Nissan can hardly meet demand as it is so it;s even harder to make parts available.

Most of these parts will be very expensive to replace until the economics of scale drive down costs but in general the Leaf is a very reliable car and all the issues with the MK I have been fixed. There are no issues that I'm aware of in the current Mk 1.5.

A lot of people against the prius in the beginning said the car was too complicated and would likely fail or cost a fortune to fix but Toyota certainly proved them wrong and the Prius is one of the most reliable cars ever built !

The prius would be expensive to fix also if it failed but there are many issues with ICE cars that cost a lot to fix also but the prius is one car I would have no hesitations in recommending people buy with 100K miles unlike a modern Turbo Diesel.

The battery is indeed the big cost in the Leaf and while it won't just fail ( usually) it will gradually hold less and less charge and it could be many years before it becomes unusable but in general the EV with a new battery would be almost as good as new unlike the ICE car.