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Electric vehicles are so gloriously light on routine maintenance, people keep forgetting they still need some attention.
Tires wear down. Nothing could be more ordinary. And yet, when I suffered a blowout in my Tesla Model 3 this winter and decided to get a new set of four, I found myself pulled back into an unwelcome place: Pep Boys, or more specifically, the world of basic car maintenance.
EVs feel novel, like breaking with the clunkiness of the past to join the future. And in several ways, this sensation is true: The experience of driving, refueling, and, yes, maintaining your electric car is miles apart from the combustion life. EVs have the potential to require far less routine maintenance than what has come before. The difference is so stark that some EV owners may be lulled by their vehicle’s futurism into thinking it cares for itself.
But don’t be. This is still a car, after all, and it still requires your attention.
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The most noticeable part of maintaining an EV is what doesn’t require upkeep. An electric car doesn’t have engine oil or an oil filter that needs to be replaced during an inconvenient trip to the mechanic every 3,000 miles, one that carries the risk of being upsold some other service. It doesn’t have a radiator asking to be refilled with antifreeze. There are no belts and hoses beneath the hood that must be swapped out (there’s just the frunk, which is where I keep my shopping bags).
The absence adds up, especially when considering the calculus of car ownership over time. As has been widely noted, EVs typically carry a higher sticker price than their gas-powered counterparts. Federal and state tax incentives begin to cover the difference, and can make EVs very affordable if you live in a generous state like Colorado. Electricity (depending upon where you live) could be cheaper than gasoline, which lowers the lifetime cost of an electric compared to gas. The lack of oil changes and other basic maintenance can be a money-saver, too. I’ve now driven my Tesla more than 52,000 miles, which would have required 17 oil changes in a traditional vehicle.
Automakers will recommend some service on an EV, such as the occasional tire rotation, but nobody is going to make the happy-go-lucky EV owner actually do this (you should, though). Among the only chores that remind you an electric car is still a car are the need to put air in the tires and top off the wiper fluid.
The dearth of required basic maintenance creates an illusion, making it startlingly easy for owners to treat an EV like a mobile smartphone that needs no upkeep beyond the occasional software update. Look no further than the YouTube celebrity who ranted that his Tesla was unsafe to drive, only to have the entire internet point out the real problem: He had worn his tires down to the bone.
I carry an orange notebook in my glovebox to jot down major moments in my car’s life, a habit I surely picked up from my father. Over the first four years of EV ownership, it has remained mostly empty. This year, after replacing the tires at just past 50,000 miles, I also had to swap in a new 12-volt battery. (This is the small one like gas cars have — the place where you have to jump-start them. Tesla uses it for low-power applications like the windows and doors, so you don’t get locked inside if the big battery taps out.) In terms of routine maintenance, that’s about it.
What’s yet to come is something of an open question, since we still don’t know everything about how EVs age. Take brake pads, the parts that exert the physical pressure to slow down the car. Their lifespan can vary wildly based on how and where a person drives. If you glide to a gentle stop, they last. If you drive on lots of hills or constantly slam on the gas and the brake, they don’t.
On a normal maintenance schedule, I’d be due for new brake pads soon. With EVs, though, comes a complicating factor: regenerative braking. The vehicle slows itself down when the driver lifts her foot off the accelerator, feeding the recovered energy back into the battery. Once a person learns to drive this way, they need only hit the actual brake pedal when they suddenly need to stop very quickly. At one point, Elon Musk said this feature would negate the need to ever replace the brake pads in a Tesla. Although that, like many of his statements, was hyperbolic, I’ve learned to extend the life of my Model 3’s brake pads by barely using them.
Tires may be more problematic. EVs are heavy, and heavier vehicles tend to wear down their tires faster than lighter ones. This puts more microparticles into the environment and causes drivers more pain in the wallet. Given the glut of very heavy mega-EVs coming to the market, owners may find that the need to replace their tires negates the savings from gasoline not bought and oil changes not taken.
Unless they get a lemon — something with a manufacturing defect that requires frequent trips to the service center — EV owners should find that they invest less time and money maintaining their vehicles, at least in the short and medium term. The big question is, what happens in the long term?
As Heatmap has covered before, we simply don’t know yet. Of mass-market EVs, only the oldest Nissan Leafs and Tesla Model S’s have passed a decade on the road at this point. Once EVs have been on the road for a full lifetime, we’ll have a much better idea how much longer-term maintenance they need — for example, whether motors or crucial electrical components will wear out. And, crucially, how long those expensive batteries will really last.Read more about electric vehicles:
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
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Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.