What Determines When a Car Dies?

Tesla recently got involved in a telling controversy about how long its vehicles should last. While Elon Musk said its battery packs would hold up 300,000 miles to 500,000 miles, the BEV maker's lawyers in Germany argued the cars would not last more than 130,488 miles (210,000 km). Their objective was to receive a higher amount of money from customers that managed to return their BEVs after facing multiple issues with them. Although German courts ordered Tesla to buy these cars back, they also ruled these buyers should compensate the company for having used the vehicles for a while. The longer they are expected to last, the lower the compensation.

Ignore whether earning a few more bucks is worth ruining Tesla's reputation. What matters here is the mileage that some people use to determine the lifespan of a car. The calculation follows a similar formula to that applied to human beings: the ages of those who die in a given year are summed up and divided by the number of individuals involved. With vehicles, the mileage is more important, so it is what researchers sum up to establish how long customers should expect their cars to last.

Just like we have people dying really young and those who live beyond 100 years, vehicles face the same situation. Some owners crash their cars minutes after leaving dealership lots, an unnatural cause that cuts their lifespans short. Others manage to keep their vehicles running for decades, preventing natural causes (wear) that lead a car to stop working. If you think about it, that's another similarity with how people and their bodies work: cars also die from natural or unnatural causes. It has been like that with automobiles powered by internal combustion engines (ICEs), but battery electric cars (BEVs) are changing that, and even Tesla's German lawyers inadvertently admitted that. The Achilles' heel of vehicles powered by a battery pack is this component, their most important and expensive one.

For insurance companies, a vehicle must wave bye-bye when it does not pay off to repair it. That usually happens when the repair costs exceed 50% of the car's retail value. In vehicles with costly components, that is almost a given in crashes that affect them. In ICE vehicles, that usually had to do with massive collisions that compromised the body structure or involved so many body panels that it would be cheaper to buy a similar car than to replace everything in a safe manner. Used luxury cars also experienced that if their sophisticated engines or transmissions were damaged beyond repair. One of these components could cost as much as the entire car. All BEVs are subject to this causa mortis.

Most of their makers do not design their battery packs to be repairable. Any damage may demand replacing them with new ones, which is quite a problem when they cost $15,000 to $20,000 a pop – some are even more expensive. This is the main reason for so many written-off electric cars and the high insurance prices they face. Anyone with a crashed BEV should prepare to receive bad news.

Vehicles may also die of old age, especially those whose owners do not give a damn about them. The so-called "iron termites" have no idea what maintenance is: they just refuel their cars and drive them until they can no longer move. It may also happen that they do not have money for more than fuel, which is particularly common in developing countries. When these cars die, they usually are only suitable for recycling – if the body panels are not already eaten by rust.

Some others face a better fate and are so well kept that they reach millions of kilometers or miles with the same owners. It is not uncommon to see cars for sale in Europe with more than 300,000 km (186,410 mi). Good roads, quality fuel, and a better average income make these vehicles naturally sustainable, meaning they keep working for years. Sadly for them, their combustion engines are so polluting that they may face another death cause: one imposed by law.

In several countries, mandatory inspections determine if a vehicle can still circulate or not. Those that fail them have to be fixed in order to try to pass again. In some countries, taxes on used cars are so heavy that their owners prefer to handle them to recycling companies. Theoretically, they could still drive for more years, but local governments do not want them to do that anymore because they are deemed too polluting.

That is not something anyone can claim about BEVs. As long as they do not face severe wear, they could run for decades. Sadly, the way they are currently conceived will not allow that to happen: their most expensive component is a wear part with a relatively short life compared to the rest of the vehicle. My next story about this subject will be more than an analysis: it will be a warning against the dangerous trap into which the automotive industry is falling. Car fans will also fall into it as a consequence if we do nothing to change that.