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COULD YOUR FIRST EV BE THE LAST CAR YOU EVER BUY?  
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Matteo Wong
June 8, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ An electric car capable of running for 1 million miles is within
reach--if car companies allow it. _

, Illustration by The Atlantic

 

In April, a group of people in a red Tesla driving through the
Moroccan desert were glued to the odometer on the car’s giant touch
screen. “Two million, Hans! Two million,” exclaimed
[[link removed]] the front-seat
passenger to the owner and driver, Hansjörg von Gemmingen-Hornberg.
His 2014 Model S had become likely the first electric vehicle to drive
2 million kilometers, or more than 1.2 million miles. The car could
have traveled from the Earth to the moon and back, twice, then circled
the equator 11 times.

The journey wasn’t entirely seamless. The car has had its share of
repairs, including several battery and motor replacements. A handful
of gas-powered cars have driven farther
[[link removed]], most of
all a 1966 Volvo that racked up some 3 million miles over five
decades. But such fantastic mileages are becoming far easier to
accomplish for ordinary commuters with electric cars. On a
technological level, it’s possible that we’re not far from a time
when nobody would flinch at an EV with as much mileage as von
Gemmingen-Hornberg’s—that is, unless car companies themselves get
in the way.

Unlike gas-powered engines—which are made up of thousands of parts
that shift against one other—a typical EV has only a few dozen
moving parts. That means less
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making it easier and cheaper to keep a car on the road well past the
approximately 200,000-mile average lifespan of a gas-powered vehicle.
And EVs are only getting better. “There are certain technologies
that are coming down the pipeline that will get us toward that
million-mile EV,” Scott Moura, a civil and environmental engineer at
UC Berkeley, told me. That many miles would cover the average
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for _74 years_. The first EV you buy could be the last car you ever
need to purchase.

Gas cars are already astonishingly durable. In theory, they can just
keep getting repaired (that’s how you get classic cars). But after
they get to be about 12 to 15 years old, major problems such as a shot
engine or a broken transmission are frequently not worth the cost of
repair. Even without problems, a newer car is likely to have much
better gas mileage than an older one, making a trade-in appealing. EVs
are still so new that few of them are a decade old, meaning we have
yet to figure out the exact limit of their life span. The ones that do
exist give us some sense. Several older Teslas
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Nissan Leafs have topped
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miles—as did the first three batteries in von Gemmingen-Hornberg’s
million-miler. His first Tesla, a Roadster purchased in 2009, has
itself traveled more than 400,000 miles.

The biggest factor in EV longevity is the batteries. Just like those
in a smartphone, they degrade over time. A battery might lose 1 or
2 percent [[link removed]] of
its maximum range each year, depending on how it is charged and
used—meaning that after 15 years, a car’s range might have slipped
from 300 miles to 210 miles per charge. Repairing a car’s battery is
difficult, if not impossible
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and replacements are expensive, Ed Kim, the chief analyst at the
consulting firm AutoPacific, told me. Many EV warranties today will
cover replacements to a battery for either eight years or 100,000
miles of driving, and they are considered due for replacement once
they’ve dipped below 70 percent of their initial
capacity, according
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Renewable Energy Laboratory. Batteries today are expected to take far
longer to lose that much of their maximum charge—potentially
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miles, or about 15 to 20 years.

The life span should only improve. Batteries are “one of the most
active areas in EV development,” Kim said. Prices are plummeting
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which will make battery replacement more feasible. And as the range of
new EV batteries keeps going up, longevity will also benefit. Some EV
batteries, including the one in the Tesla Model 3 Standard Range, can
already last for some 500,000 miles on the road, Moura said. One
Chinese manufacturer recently announced a battery warranted
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nearly 1 million miles. And even more durable battery designs, Moura
said, are in the works. A researcher at Tesla has tested a battery
that he claims could drive for 4 million miles
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or roughly 100 years, under the right conditions.

Of course, how long a car can keep running is not necessarily the same
as how long somebody wants to drive it. EVs are more high-tech than
gas cars, and standard improvements—longer range, faster charging, a
better touch screen and infotainment system, improved autopilot
features—would compel people to buy new models, just as they do for
any tech gadget today. But at some point, each successive model
won’t be all that much better than the last. “Do I need a slightly
better sensor so that the windshield wipers work better when it
rains?” as Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, put it to me. “Maybe
I don’t.” With continued battery improvements, more drivers may
opt to stick with an older car rather than buy a new one. A decade-old
EV that can go 400 miles on a single charge, instead of its initial
500 miles, will be more than sufficient for most drivers.

The longevity of EVs, and any appetite for new cars, might help
address one of the primary complaints with these cars: that their
sticker prices are too high for the typical American household. Used
cars, which will continue to work well while requiring fewer repairs,
will open up the EV revolution to much of the country. A used Tesla
can already
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purchased for roughly $20,000. “We have to think about how we design
these vehicles, not for the first owner, but for the third, the
fourth, the fifth owner,” Moura said.

Even if many people are content with driving the same EV for decades,
car companies may try to stop them. Tesla, Ford, and other auto
manufacturers will need people to buy new EVs, and may well create
incentives for us to do so. In the EV age, car companies are acting
more like tech companies and bringing more software to their cars than
ever before. The entire auto industry could follow an
adoption-and-replacement cycle a lot like that of the iPhone: It used
to be common to buy a new iPhone every couple of years for a faster
processor, better camera, and larger screen. Now the iPhone 15
isn’t _that _different from the iPhone 11. But people do, of
course, constantly buy new phones from Apple. The old ones are
expensive or difficult to repair and, with every software update, seem
to slow down [[link removed]] just a
bit more until the devices are no longer eligible
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updates at all.

Whereas Apple commands a ton of brand loyalty and a dominant hold on
smartphone sales, causing a car’s battery or motor to degrade faster
is a great strategy for losing customers. Carmakers’ approach may
not resemble planned obsolescence
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much as “planned improvements,” McDonald said—making older
hardware incompatible with software updates or other new functions.
Tesla’s Autopilot, for instance, is only compatible with vehicles
built after September 2014 [[link removed]],
and newer updates to the feature don’t work with older cars that
lack more advanced sensors and cameras. Car companies may be able to
ensnare people in software-and-gadget ecosystems, just as Apple does.
As Ford, GM, Tesla, and other automakers sell home-charging systems
and other energy products, car owners might have to upgrade their
vehicles to keep up. It’s a sort of capture akin to how, even if you
don’t want to buy the new iPhone, you might pay for upgraded iCloud
storage so you don’t run out of memory, or buy an Apple Watch to
easily check your iMessages.

The bigger concern is that the same battles over the “right to
repair
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an iPhone are also coming to cars.  Even though EVs require fewer
repairs, they aren’t maintenance free. And right now, most EV
repairs can be done only by manufacturers and their retailers. Any
mechanic can fix pretty much any traditional car, but EVs require
specialized parts and training that are hard to come by. Whether
automakers will make the spare parts and technical knowledge needed to
fix EVs available to independent repair shops is uncertain. Tesla has
already faced multiple class-action antitrust lawsuits
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that the company maintains an unlawful monopoly over maintenance and
replacement parts. (A judge dismissed
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suits in November, although the ruling did not weigh in on the
monopoly question.) “What I foresee is that [with] newer vehicles,
the ability for an individual to repair it themselves is becoming
less,” Moura said.

Longevity is not just a bonus to EVs; it’s central to their promise.
Cars that spend more years on the road means less carbon from the
manufacturing process, less mining for battery minerals, and less
scrap metal. More used vehicles that cycle through more owners will
mean the same. If car companies continue to act more like tech
companies as their products become more like tech gadgets, an entire
avenue of their green potential could be closed off.

Matteo Wong [[link removed]] is a
staff writer at _The Atlantic_.

* Electric vehicles
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* high mileage
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* long life
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