When my grandfather was 85, he forgot to do all of the maitenance on his car. He drove like 40,000 miles without ever changing the oil and blew up the engine in his BMW 7 series. It wasn't exactly a cheap car.
Replacing the engine in the car was something like $7,000.
I see your point about safety - gas clearly isn't the safest substance in the world. But neither is electricity. My cousin is currently a police officer, and before that he was a first responder for car accidents. He has had specific official training to deal with hybrids becuase you have to avoid the battery cables after an accident when using the jaws of life and what not. And those batteries are more stable than lithium ion, in those cases they are simply concerned about compromising the battery cables. So it kind of cuts both ways.
This is a problem lithium ion powered electric cars. We shouldn't sweep it under the rug. It should be solved now while there are 10,000 electric cars and not 10,000,000 electric cars. It seems like the solution is a combination of educating/warning owners & notifying them by phone or email if the car starts to get too low. That isn't exactly the end of the world. But ignoring it is not the solution.
> Replacing the engine in the car was something like $7,000.
Which, for many drivers, may as well be $40k.
> the solution is a combination of educating/warning owners & notifying them by phone or email if the car starts to get too low
I never advocated ignoring anything. My point is not that "Tesla is great" or "boo ICE yay electric," it's that all the hysteria around "OMG car bricking" doesn't actually promote whatever communication/engineering solutions would actually make the product better or more consumable for people.
Did you really go ahead and conflate $7,000 and and $40,000? $7000 buys me a decent used car. $40,000 buys me a brand new Toyota Prius (MSRP $24,700) with almost enough change left over to buy a brand new Hyundai Elantra (MSRP $15,345).
$7,000 is not a small chunk of change, by any means. It's a lot less, however, than $40,000. Conflating the two does no one any good.
Unexpected maintenance costs can be factored into the consumer cost using expected value, similar to how one accounts for recurring costs such as fuel efficiency in the decision to purchase a vehicle.
Your reasoning is similar to a company computing the cost of web hosting using only the initial cost of one server, without accounting for the cost of downtime or multiple backup servers. Maximum effort does not imply a process with 99% reliability is 100% reliable, and that the cost of failure can be written off.
This is not making a claim in regards to Tesla or the accuracy of the $40k figure, merely that cost matters.
Fair enough. I admit that $40k is mad spicy for a repair resulting from some basic user error, and even if the incidence for this problem is 10% (much higher than Tesla would claim, I'm sure), we're talking about raising the price of a Roadster from $100k to ~$104k to cover the amortization.
Replacing the engine in the car was something like $7,000.
I see your point about safety - gas clearly isn't the safest substance in the world. But neither is electricity. My cousin is currently a police officer, and before that he was a first responder for car accidents. He has had specific official training to deal with hybrids becuase you have to avoid the battery cables after an accident when using the jaws of life and what not. And those batteries are more stable than lithium ion, in those cases they are simply concerned about compromising the battery cables. So it kind of cuts both ways.
This is a problem lithium ion powered electric cars. We shouldn't sweep it under the rug. It should be solved now while there are 10,000 electric cars and not 10,000,000 electric cars. It seems like the solution is a combination of educating/warning owners & notifying them by phone or email if the car starts to get too low. That isn't exactly the end of the world. But ignoring it is not the solution.