Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects. With hard work and expertise, basically any old vehicle could be restored and operated: On YouTube, you can watch a man drive a 1931 Alvis to McDonald’s. But the car itself was stuck in time. If the automaker added a feature to the following year’s model, you just didn’t get it. Things have changed. My Model 3 has few dials or buttons; nearly every feature is routed through the giant central touch screen. It’s not just Tesla: Many new cars—and especially electric cars—are now stuffed with software, receiving over-the-air updates to fix bugs, tweak performance, or add new functionality.
In other words, your car is a lot like an iPhone (so much so that in the auto industry, describing EVs as “smartphones on wheels” has become a go-to cliché.) This has plenty of advantages—the improved navigation, the fart noises—but it also means that your car may become worse because the software is outdated, not because the parts break. Even top-of-the-line phones are destined to become obsolete—still able to perform the basic functions like phone calls and texts, but stuck with an old operating system and failing apps. The same struggle is now coming for cars.
Software-dependent cars are still new enough that it’s unclear how they will age. “It’s becoming the ethos of the industry that everyone’s promising a continually evolving car, and we don’t yet know how they’re going to pull that off,” Sean Tucker, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. “Cars last longer than technology does.” The problem with cars as smartphones on wheels is that these two machines live and die on very different timescales. Many Americans trade in their phone every year and less than 30 percent keep an iPhone for longer than three years, but the average car on the road is nearly 13 years old. (Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment about how its cars age.)
17 million last year, 60 million in total globally. Where do you get your information.
sure they can. They support everyone having a toaster or a dryer.
300,000 -400,000 miles.
How many ICE cars make it to 400,000 miles?
This has been true in ICE for decades.
Lmaooo your logic is so broken. The new new electric vehicle batteries are only rated for 15-20 years at the most. Not including the reduced lifespan that they have already been proven to have in the cold northern states and the issues that salty roads introduce to that. But just for arguments sake the average American drives 13,500 miles a year. Which comes to just over 200,000 miles in 15 years and 270,000 miles in 20 years. And that’s IF you get the maximum life. I know PLENTY of people who have well over 300,000 miles on their gas vehicles and diesels last even longer. And the batteries cost around $10,000 on average but the range is $5,000 to $20,000. Engines range from $3,000 to $7,000 new and you have options for used or remanufactured for cheaper (which you can’t do for batteries). And you can’t literally just Google it, our electrical grids CANNOT currently support everyone having an electric car. Hell California can’t even make it through the summer without grid outages due to overuse just from air conditioning lmao. If you just Google it you will find out that they have already done studies that show we need to put around 2 trillion to 4 trillion dollars into our electrical infrastructure (neighborhood transformers and house electrical panels) and main transmission grid systems in order to support everyone switching to electric vehicles. And it would take a few decades to get it all completely done. But realistically given we had the funding already setup we could likely have most people ready to go in about 15 -20 years and everyone done by 30 years. But we don’t so it’ll be at least 30. And once more and more people get electric vehicles and they improve designs and improve batteries, then it’ll likely take less power and batteries will likely be cheaper and easier to make. And once all of that happens, then gas powered vehicles will start to completely fade away. But they’ll still be the better option (for the general population) until all of those things happen