What Does Maintenance Actually Mean for an EV Owner?

One aspect of EV own­er­ship that is often high­light­ed is the con­cept that EV’s have less mov­ing parts, less com­po­nents nec­es­sary for mobil­i­ty, there­fore less main­te­nance. This should, in the­o­ry, lead to a far greater off­set in costs in the TCO (Total Cost of Own­er­ship) from the high­er price tag to make it more com­pa­ra­ble to a gas car.

Is that true?
What hap­pens when an EV hits high mileage?

Thank­ful­ly, there’s plen­ty of data, both anec­do­tal­ly and record­ed by auto man­u­fac­tur­ers to help alle­vi­ate con­cerns on EV longevity.

Our fam­i­ly dri­ves around 25,000 miles a year, on the West Slope, which was one of our fac­tors for choos­ing an EV. We pur­chased a Tes­la Mod­el 3 Stan­dard Range in 2019 and by March of this year we hit 80,000 miles on the odometer.

There are quite a few main­te­nance items, both fre­quent and infre­quent on a gas car that are absent of an EV: spark plugs, oil changes, air fil­ters for the engine, coolant flush­es, trans­mis­sion, exhaust checks, and and in some cas­es, brake changes.

Our Mod­el 3 wasn’t total­ly absolved from main­te­nance: we had to change the cab­in air fil­ter a cou­ple of times, most­ly due to the fires that occurred in Glen­wood Canyon and around Grand Junc­tion that real­ly clogged up the fil­ters. We need­ed win­dow wash­er flu­id every now and then.  We had a cracked wind­shield (hel­lo Col­orado “rocky” roads).

But hon­est­ly, that was about it.

Due to regen­er­a­tive brak­ing, using the kinet­ic ener­gy of the car to trans­late into elec­tric­i­ty to recharge the bat­tery pack, the mechan­i­cal brakes were hard­ly ever used. At 80,000 miles our brakes were still near­ly brand new. About once a week I would make sure to tap the brakes fair­ly aggres­sive­ly just to make sure brake flu­id was flow­ing smoothly.

Lat­er this spring, we trad­ed in our mod­el 3 for the exact same year and mod­el but with AWD and big­ger bat­tery pack, but this mod­el has 130,000 miles on the pack. Brakes are still in great shape, and the pack has about 8% degra­da­tion. After 3 years and rack­ing up tons of miles on our first EV, we had full con­fi­dence going into a used EV with lots of miles.

And con­sid­er­ing bat­tery tech, Tes­la announced their ener­gy impact for the last year and they had shown data that proves their bat­ter­ies expe­ri­ence on aver­age 12% degra­da­tion past 200,000 miles. Oth­er auto man­u­fac­tur­ers are mak­ing sim­i­lar claims, and plac­ing strong bat­tery war­ranties to help alle­vi­ate con­cerns about the still new advent of bat­tery technology.

How­ev­er, all that to say,with the aver­age cost of a new car, gas or EV, approach­ing $50,000, many EV mod­els can be found under that price tag, along with the cost sav­ings that comes from far less main­te­nance, charg­ing cheap­ly at home, and more time in your pock­et away from gas sta­tions and auto shops.

Had we kept our 2016 VW Jet­ta, we would have spent $13,400 on gas and main­te­nance in the years we owned our Tes­la. We spent $1500 on elec­tric­i­ty, wash­er flu­id, and tires in those 80,000 miles of dri­ving. So yes, if you make the switch to EV, you’ll find you save a lot of time and mon­ey stay­ing away from an auto shop and gas station.

Writ­ten by Ben West­by, Vol­un­teer EV Coach