That probably wouldn't make the difference for a fully paid for vehicle but it can make a substantial difference depending on electricity (and access to solar) and fuel prices.
And higher propensity to beep and whine at you and higher propensity to pull a "I'm sorry dave" at any given time.
I'll be driving my old cars to the bitter end.
Nissan Leaf gave BEV a bad name because it had much worse battery tech. Battery longevity is not a problem for modern, or even decade old cars.
> Battery longevity is not a problem for modern, or even decade old cars
Thanks to this N=1 study I can conclude that battery longevity is not a problem like you said. Thank you!
Even more alarmingly, the speed of revisions now is such that vehicles can have parts that were only used for a very short run before being updated and replaced. Your particular vehicle batch may not necessarily have identical parts to other batches even within the same generation. We're a long, long way from the way things used to be, when parts commonality stretched for decades.
EV Batteries Last Way Longer Than Expected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43001996 - February 2025 (2 comments)
New study shows: EV batteries last much longer than expected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228901 - November 2024 (70 comments)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
There is no way you are driving a 25 year old car without serious maintenance like exchanging the timing belt. Add the frequent oil changes and all other yearly maintenance and it does add up.
Compared to a BEV, where you literally only need to change the break pads, and you may or may not need to change the battery, and the batteries keep outperforming the expected lifespan. BEV are simply mechanically much simpler devices.
A new lifecycle study in the journal Science concludes there are substantial climate benefits to swapping an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle for an electric vehicle (EV) even if the ICE or hybrid vehicle is brand new, if driven more than ~7,054 km/year (4,384 miles/year).
That’s exactly what the article you’re commenting on tries to answer. I recommend you read it
25% of total annual global vehicle sales are already EVs. We’re just arguing timeline to get to 100%. Peak combustion vehicle sales was 2017.
https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/09/chinese-ele...
https://www.evinfrastructurenews.com/ev-technology/evs-take-...
My daily driver turns 54 this year.
Never cared much about the climate scam, never will.
But Trump and the Postmaster General cancelled that and went to use gas guzzlers instead. I wonder how that is working out now.
https://news.usps.com/2025/12/01/usps-is-delivering-its-new-...
> The Postal Service’s $9.6 billion upgrade of its delivery fleet is proceeding apace.
The organization plans to roll out 106,000 new vehicles by 2028, including 45,000 battery-electric next-generation delivery vehicles and 21,000 commercial-off-the-shelf battery-electric vehicles.
> Additionally, USPS is upgrading infrastructure at its facilities with the addition of charging stations for the zero-emission electric vehicles, of which over 14,000 have already been purchased.
> So far, more than 35,000 new vehicles are on the road.
> “The new fleet rollout is proceeding well, aligned with our plan,” said Justin Glass, the Postal Service’s fleet management senior director.
(USPS spends ~$500M/year for fossil fuels, so it’s a no brainer to electrify)
What makes you say that? The biggest impediment to the rollout was that the company that was supposed to build them repeatedly failed to do so, and finally had their contract pulled in 2021 and it was given to a defence contractor who seems to be on track to actually deliver the things.
I would say it's obviously in service of the fossil fuel industry but it's gotten to the point of being so absurdly senseless and against our interests that it seems primarily ideological/emotional.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/senate...
(Yes, they would have been better as EVs)
While this seems intuitively true, I have some pushback, and I think that the reliability record of e.g older generations of Prius backs me up.
While you do have effectively two cars (an EV and an ICE) crammed into one, you’re not actually using both at full capacity all the time, which cuts down a lot on wear and tear. Your ICE is almost never run under load before it warms up, and is kept running at its most efficient rpm most of the time, your transmission is running under less load since it has help from the electric motors, and is often simpler (the aforementioned Prius does not have a reverse gear for example).
No it’s not nearly as simple as a BEV, but a well implemented hybrid system is absolutely an upgrade from a full ICE vehicle.
Only significant problem was pothole related damage.
In theory this should be true. In reality hybrids eat motors compared to the same engine in an ICE. That's just what happens you have two ways of making the vehicle go to potentially mask "something's funny" type issues and your customer base is people who are buying an appliance based on an MPG number and some math.
With competent ownership (fleet vehicles provide a lot of examples, lots of hyrbrid Fords from the 00s and early examples still around) they come out about the same as an ICE car so you essentially get the hybrid system "for free" from a maintenance perspective. But that's not the median consumer.
A modern Toyota hybrid is far more complex than an electric car, but the fact they are more reliable than a gasoline car is by design, not just good manufacturing.
Not really. The transmission is an e-CVT in hybrids which has no torque converter, the main part that breaks first in an automatic transmission. Unlike a regular CVT, the e-CVT has no belt, either. The e-CVT basically never breaks, so you basically never have a transmission go bad in a hybrid. On top of that, because the traction battery is so small, it's replaceable for $1-2k instead of $10k+ for a BEV. If anything, hybrids are the best of both worlds. Had you specified plugin hybrids you would have been correct.
If you are not replacing your tires after decades, you and those around you should be fearing for their lives.
>Peak combustion vehicle sales was 2017.
Peak oil was every year starting decades before I was born.
Facts: Climate change is real. Combustion vehicles contribute to climate change through their emissions. EV sales keep going up globally, combustion vehicle sales keep going down. This will continue. Comments here change nothing about these systems or trajectories, nor their rate of change.
Thankfully AI renders it fairly obsolete. I'd be happy to come up with some competing facts if you'd like. Then I can look down my nose and say vaguely insulting things too.