Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

how about trade in value in ten years when the battery needs to be replaced?

Less than zero. You have to dispose it.

You know, you can find such things pretty easily by looking at Autotrader. I did a search for Tesla, 2016 or older, and sorted by highest mileage. 







Seems to me that cars with mileage in excess (some well in excess) are still going for pretty decent numbers. 

Here are some similar (IMHO) gassers...

If it needs a new battery in a year, it's worth ZERO.

Yeah, and clearly the market has spoken that it is NOT believed that a 10 year old Tesla with >100K miles is going to need a new battery in a year, or they wouldn't be fetching these numbers. 

Wouldn't shock me of those Beemers rack up >$5K in unplanned maintenance costs WELL before those Teslas on average. 

Costs me very little to do maintenance on my 10 y/o Benz. Just did the yearly last month.

$185.00.

Some other industry folks think differently re: Mercs... https://caredge.com/mercedes-benz/maintenance

Oddly guess who does pretty well on these metrics? https://caredge.com/tesla/maintenance

I can only speak to my experience.

Last year I spent $1,200.00 or so. $100/month. No car payment.

Yeah, I'm assuming that other owners had it worse... Like the year (~2004?) where my ex's VW Passat was just past its warranty (~65K miles) and in one year racked up $5K in repair bills. 

I'm a little surprised to see how strongly Tesla ranks, but that site otherwise followed what I expected... Japanese brands leading the pack, American and non-Japanese Asian brands behind them, and Euros picking up the rear. 

But it goes to show you how much anecdotal info (and media amplification of it) can skew the narrative. You've had good luck with Mercedes despite them being very poorly ranked for maintenance costs, so you're an MB fan. And a few scare stories about people having to pay enormous battery replacement costs--amplified by the anti-EV forces within media--skew you to believe that will be the norm. 

The data doesn't seem to back it up, though. 

We are a one-car family and we put about 6-7K miles per year on the car.

An EV makes zero sense to us (except our golf cart, with which the battery is already starting to fail after 3+ years).

I think we need to be careful about painting with a broad brush here.  Because I believe there's a fairly large segment of the total potential EV market, that consists of urban apartment/condo dwellers who would otherwise be inclined to buy an EV, but can't because their apartment/condo parking situations don't allow it. 

Your comments work for suburban home owners, but they aren't appropriate for those in urban situations that don't provide adequate infrastructure.  Cincy has already commented that this is HIS situation, and he's far from alone.

For various reasons I think that the urbanist condo/apartment dweller and the potential EV driver have quite a bit of philosophical overlap, and yet this potential target segment must be removed from the calculations of total available market for EV purchasers.

Agree 100%.

CD's quotation from some source upthread pointed out as much. EV sales in the US are dominated by those in higher income brackets, who own their homes, majority white, and quite often the BEV is not the only vehicle in the household. As you can probably imagine, I'd say that demographic skews more conservative and would be less likely than "average" to desire an EV. 

And the younger, single, apartment-dwelling, less affluent demographic probably skews more liberal and has much higher than "average" to desire an EV, but their living situation doesn't easily allow for charging at home. This screws up both the cost and convenience advantages of an EV, if they're even available to afford them at all, as EVs are generally more expensive than an equivalent ICEV. 

I do expect that over the next decade, we'll see more and more apartment/condo facilities building in some sort of EV charging capability just due to demand and to offer competitive "amenities". I think maybe by 2035, having on-site charging might be table stakes for apartment/condo communities to attract people to live there. But it's certainly not in place today IMHO. And even if it's communal charging stations, that's STILL not as convenient as plugging in to the garage in your single family home at the end of the day and not having to unplug, to move your car, or to do anything like that to make the charger avalilble to someone else. 

Living in apartments through college and early professional life, there were quite a few arguments and open fights over the most desirable parking spots.

I can't even imagine how much worse it could be, when people are vying for the spots that allow overnight charging.  And how often those vehicles might be "accidentally" unplugged, and plugged into another car.  And then more chaos and hilarity ensue.

I assume they'd make it a paid amenity, like having a garage or a guaranteed parking spot in front of your own front door is currently.  But if it's a paid amenity, then it's not really analogous to the "free" overnight charging at your own suburban home.

Yeah, lots to work out there. For example at my office, we have a limited number of EV chargers in the parking garage. I think there is a maximum 4 hour use per parking spot, but I don't know how it is or would be enforced. My guess is that since we all work together, it's a sort of "honor system" sort of thing where you don't want to get the reputation as the guy/gal who just leaves their car plugged in for 8 hours. But I highly doubt that'll survive given apartment complex resident politics 

The other question is how you meter it. My recollection of typical apartments is that electric was one of the utilities you typically still had to pay, and it was individually metered per unit. I.e. you don't want someone coming in and setting up a bitcoin mine for cheap electricity rates lol. But when I lived in a complex with individually-assigned single garage units, there were no electric outlets in the garage because they couldn't be feasibly metered. So you have to either bring in a third-party charging company to install (which will mean they set the rates and it won't be cheap like charging "at home"), or if it's a paid amenity, you need to set the rate high enough on average to spread it over the entire user base and not lose money on the deal, if you can't meter it individually. 

It's certainly not an easy problem, but I'm sure the world will slowly meander its way towards figuring it out lol...