Electric cars break down more often than petrol and diesel vehicles, the Automobile Association (AA) has warned.
Jakob Pfaudler, boss of the breakdown service, said electric vehicles (EVs) were prone not only to punctures and flat batteries, but also to a host of specific problems such as jammed charging cables and technical glitches.
He said: “There’s a common misconception that electric vehicles break down less frequently than petrol and diesel vehicles.
“Currently, at least, that is not the case. The breakdown rate is, in fact, slightly higher for electric vehicles than for internal combustion-engine vehicles.”
Is this inherently more complex? Or just newer and so not had the same amount of attention paid to reliability?
but also to a host of specific problems such as jammed charging cables and technical glitches
This sort of thing is sounds like teething problems and user familiarity. Expect them to reduce significantly over time.
The difference between chinky software and brummie metal bashing?
Another vote for “because they’re new”. Internal combustion enginese have had about 150 years of continuous improvements, including improvements in reliability.
Does it count as a “breakdown” when they spontaneously combust?
So the head of a company where income comes from people paying subscriptions due to fear of car break downs, tells us that these new types of cars break down more often.
From the AA’s own website Electric vehicles require less maintenance than petrol or diesel cars and are more reliable, so they won’t need as many repairs”
I suspect electric cars really are more reliable and the primary reason for electric car drivers AA membership is fear of running out of battery. As more public chargers become online and the fear of running out of power wanes due to increasing anecdotal evidence a new fear is needed to keep the breakdown companies solvent. Reminding people that electric vehicles can break down is to be expected.
Electric vehicles still have pneumatic tyres which get punctured. You need a breakdown service simply to change a wheel nowadays. When I leased a VW Tiguan a decade ago I was astounded to discover that I was neither able nor allowed to change a wheel: I had to get the breakdown company to do it.
I highly recommend “MGuy Australia” on Youtube. Very informative and entertaining on all things EV
“From the AA’s own website ‘Electric vehicles require less maintenance than petrol or diesel cars and are more reliable, so they won’t need as many repairs’”.
Note the “won’t”. It’s not a claim to a fact it’s a claim to a prediction. As my father’s generation might have said “so they bloody well shouldn’t need as many repairs”.
Most breakdowns are not likely to be to do with the motive power but with the other bits. The electronics, mostly. There are a couple of ICE engines which have a reputation for breaking but usually they’re good for a long time nowadays. Likewise the electric motor probably won’t fail. The battery is a compromise between enrgy density and risk. As an ex-mechanic I don’t fancy working on a car with a live battery though, I believe there are extra precautions to be taken. I’ve heard some mechanics don’t want to work on them, don’t know if it’s true.
I suspect a lot of user error
The issue isn’t the number of defects it’s how serious they are
I travel on the M5/M4 quite a bit and I would say a greater proportion of recovered vehicles are EVs than you would expect
The rest seems to be LandRovers!
Teething issues and user error and some cheap solenoids on the cable locks. EVs are inherently simpler 6000 moving parts compared to around 30000 on a decent ice .
oh and some things like regenerative brakes mean brake failure and brake wear become almost a thing of the past. Some EVs don’t even have the mechanical brakes as service items.
Andy’s…
Safe and reliable. Now where have I heard that before?
The stuff that breaks down on ICE vehicles tends to be the external interfaces – the rubber literally hitting the road – not the deep internals of the engines these days. Who last had a con-rod break in their engine?
And it’s those same external interfaces that break on EVs. Suspension, brakes, locks, electrics.
Except there’s also the electronics, both power and general. There’s less difference between the general electronics of ICE and EVs these days – similar infotainment, guidance, driver assist etc. But power electronics are always somewhat more prone to failure. It’s actually quite hard to engineer stuff to handle the cycles of heating and cooling that happen when you put kilowatts of power through cables and components, and an EV has literally thousands of points of contact that must all work together.
So – meh. It’s an interesting statistic, but the more important one will be long term repairability. We’ve got quite good at arranging ICE components so they can be removed, fixed and replaced. EVs are a bit of a mixed bag, and when the companies concerned are constantly changing components finding a replacement part for an older model may become more difficult. The mainstream manufacturers are likely to be better at this, having an existing supply chain for repair centres, but newer entries are having to learn from scratch.
EVs are mechanically simpler but rely on a fatter software stack, so issues tend to come when trying to connect to chargers or occasionally satnav issues. Home charging should be reliable but every time you rely on public charging there’s a risk it’s out of order or won’t recognise your fuel card.
They consume a lot of the same sort of parts ICE cars do and big batteries need watching so it’s important to get an EV serviced every 10,000 miles, but they’re as easy to drive as fairground bumper cars so overall an EV should give the average driver a comfortable and reliable experience if you’re mindful of the charging pitfalls / range.
Tbf the days when you could buy a lemon have closed, even the cheaper ICE cars are very reliable now.
I think you’ll find that EVs have been around longer than ICEs, although in trains, trams and milk carts (and fork lift trucks) rather than passenger cars. Also, the range of an EV isn’t that much less than a car, sometimes it’s more. And while there may be a problem finding a charger available, the problem usually is how long it takes to charge, especially if you add in the queueing time.
I can see why people who like EVs like them. Especially if it’s a company car, and/or they get all the tax benefits. Plus they can charge at home with cheap(er) leccy, and possibly even free at work. They are full of gimmicks that people like, and the big touch screen is better at GPS than the biggest TomTom. If all you do between charges is go to work and back, or do ‘domestic’ travel near to home, you probably never have range anxiety.
Personally, I can’t stand EVs, not least because I hate the sanctimonous prattery from owners who are ‘saving the planet’. Worst of all, it’s the touch screen. I like to feel for the controls while looking out of the windscreen, or in the mirror, to drive safely. Obviously, some people view this differently.
There may also be a factor of unfamiliarity. What does that funy noise, strange handling, or warning light mean? Experience may have taught many drivers what they can get away with only for eclectric vehicles to behave differently. Maybe this difference will disappear as people get more accustomed to the vehicles.
@Excavator Man – “Worst of all, it’s the touch screen. I like to feel for the controls …”
You are quite right that touch screens are bad, but I have some bad news for you – they’re getting more common in every type of vehicle.
I have a few dead Hornby locos.
They do not inspire my confidence in EVs
Worst of all, it’s the touch screen.
My deisel work van has a touch screen. Who the absolute FUCK thought that controls with no haptic guidance and tactile feedback in two tons of moving metal was a good idea?
Even worse than the “no tactile feedback” is that if you don’t touch it *just* *right* it thinks you’re swiping and does something completely different, forcing your eyes off the road to try and work out WTF has just happened.
jgh, it’s such an obviously dumb idea I wonder how it got past the regulators. Oh…
My ideal car now is probably a late-model automatic VW Up! Nippy, frugal, no touch screen. Darza.
Touch screens can be a pain, fortunately cars with extensive touch screens do normally have voice input so there is zero need to take your hands off the wheel or eyes off the road to accomplish the simple things that physical buttons and knobs on the dashboard supported.
Some car brands are better than others at working out what you are asking though they are rarely much good when there is no phone service. Offline speech recognition is however something that will be reliable in a few years.
Offline speech recognition is however something that will be reliable in a few years.
I was operating a computer using offline speech recognition 20 years ago. One did have to train it, for voice to text to make it reliable. But the basic commands it picked up pretty quickly. And that was on a 32 bit running Millennium(?) & 250 mB of RAM. Stone age ware. You don’t need the Net for everything.
Who the absolute FUCK thought that controls with no haptic guidance and tactile feedback in two tons of moving metal was a good idea?
It was a deliberate choice by Musk who wanted to reduce the cost to manufacture his cars’ interiors. Get rid of all that complicated mechanical stuff and move to pure touchscreen and save millions in development costs and another packet for each car.
Unfortunately, his cost-saving choice was hailed as “the new style for car interiors” by idiot journalists who didn’t have to live with the things, and all the other manufacturers were soon following the trend for fear of appearing to be behind the curve.
Offline speech recognition is however something that will be reliable in a few years.
The problem with speech recognition isn’t so much the reliability as the lack of “discovery” – how do you navigate a menu when you don’t know what the magic word is for the thing you want to do? Playing guess the right phrase with a computer whilst also trying to drive is terrible for concentration.
Of course it works great in demos and test-drives when someone talks you through the process and tells you what to say – but you soon forget the stuff you don’t do frequently and it’s back to the guessing game.
You can pick.
Either:
1. A ice car with a lot of moving parts to make you go.
2. An EV with lots of non-moving parts to make you go.
Each has advantages and disadvantages.
1. Moving parts need to be lubricated and maintained but can be swapped out relatively easily
2. Non-moving parts need to be manufactured correctly
Batteries are like engines. Expensive to manufacture, representing a good chunk of the car value.
Unlike engines, batteries are almost impossible to maintain. They don’t like being sat idle. They don’t like being over used. Ice engines will run continuously for a very long time. They’ll sit for a long time and start with some basic maintenance.
Batteries have thousands of cells, each with at least two weld/solder points, each a point of potential failure.
The chemistry of batteries degrades over time, look up dendrites, increasing the likelihood of spontaneous ignition.
Ice cars don’t just spontaneously go boom while parked, at least not in any significant numbers.
EV fires are hilariously dangerous giving off toxic gases, burn hot and can reignite days later spontaneously. Ice cars fires can be easily contained.
On the plus side EVs are easier to drive (personally I prefer a manual ice car). Quieter and reduced city air pollution.
But they’re terrible for long journeys and non-urban living.
There’s a use case for EVs. But let’s not pretend they suit everyone all the time.
Cars and vehicles are tools. Like all tools they have something they’re good at and something they’re bad at.
Ice cars just have a wider range of uses.
Analogy time
Ice cars are like an 10″ adjustable spanner. Can fit a wide range of sizes you’ll commonly come across, decent hefty so can be used as a hammer if needed, long enough and bulky enough to be used as a lever occasionally. But bulky so occasionally you wouldn’t be able to fit it in (that’s what she said).
EVs are like a 13mm ring spanner. Excellent for their use case. Better than a 10 ” adjustable in fact, you’re less likely to round a nut. However, if you come across a 15 mm nut or 10 mm or any other size, you’re knackered. It’s less useful as a hammer or a lever too.
Leave it up to people what they want to drive. One size doesn’t fit all.
The problem with EVs isn’t EVs, it’s the fuckwits trying to ban the alternative instead of letting the market sort it out.
Although I suspect the problem with EVs in Britain is going to be that its deranged energy policy means there won’t be enough leccy to charge 10 million of them at once.
– “Offline speech recognition”
Where everything said in the vehicle has to be transmitted to a computer not under the owner’s control? Why would anyone want a permanent spy in their vehicle? Do people think that we have such strong protection for freedom of speech that private discussions will not be held against them?
“Oh and some things like regenerative brakes mean brake failure and brake wear become almost a thing of the past”
Except that rarely used brakes have a habit of seizing up and the disks corroding. Many years ago a friend owned a Citroen BX estate, which had fully powered brakes, steering and suspension. The rear brake pressure was proportional to the load, and he regularly had problems until he started carrying a heavy toolbox in the boot…
I still say I can’t see the electricity distribution network coping with the demand. The cabling in the streets was laid up to several decades in anticipation of the demands of the time with a modicum of overhead. Cable’s expensive & you don’t lay cable you don’t need. Consumers are already using more than. Sure, modern appliances use less power. But we use a lot more of them.
A few houses charging cars, the load gets spread across all houses on the cable. But you won’t need many to exceed capacity. And relaying all the street cables & their feeds from the network ain’t going to happen in just a couple years. Or ten. They took decades to put in.
I must say, the idea of a car charger capable of delivering 100kw/h scares the shit out of me. 400V? I certainly wouldn’t want to be connecting to a rain covered car at near 100% humidity like many days & nights are. That leaks you’d get a helluva belt. They expecting seals to be 100% efficient with Joe Public using them? Any moisture & that juice will track.