Item — HN Reader

A big selling point for EVs, for me, was much lower maintenance.

No brake disc/pad replacements, no oil changes -- or any fluids! -- and no trips to the gas station. Mostly just tire rotations/replacements.

Hybrids still require roughly the same maintenance as ICE vehicles, and also have to deal with battery life on top.

1 comments

I've not owned an EV, why would you not have to replace the brakes?

I understand that regenerative braking reduces their wear, but that's also offset to some degree by the vehicle being heavier.

On the EV6, there's a paddle behind the steering wheel that you can use instead of the brake pedal that will use 100% regenerative braking. I use that almost exclusively, only using the brake pedal when I don't brake soon enough and it's necessary for a quicker stop (which is maybe 5-10% of the time).

Also, the brake pedal uses regenerative braking most (maybe 80-90%) of the time, unless (again) needed for quicker stops, or if it detects friction braking hasn't been used for a while (just to clean off the pads).

So by my rough estimate, I'm guessing we use regenerative braking about 90% of the time, which means it should be about 10x the timeframe (vs. ICE vehicles) to replace brake pads/discs.

Oh that's really interesting.. I didn't realize there was a separate paddle for braking. The PHEVs I've driven only had it in the pedal. I should rent one to try out, seems neat.

To be fair you can do that with an ice manual transmission too via engine braking.

Regenerative braking works way better than engine braking.

I can use engine braking to come to basically a complete stop.

You don't never change them but it is pretty minimal. I put around 100k miles on my tesla and never had to change my brakes. If you treat an EV like a stick shift car and just time your stopping via coasting, you rarely need the brakes to the point where you have to slam on your brakes from time to time to burn off road junk

Gotcha. I live in a hilly area - regular +/- 2000 ft elevation changes on a given trip. Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Brake maintenance sucks, even more than needing new tires.

So I live in the SFV in socal where the area I live in is very flat but it's mountainous all around. One of the neat things is using a bunch of battery going up a mountain and then gaining 70% of the loss back going back down riding purely on regenerative charging rather than brakes. It's a game and I'm sure there's a lot of people that just jam on the brakes but it's a great way to save money and it's not so aggressive that you're causing a traffic jam on the way down.

Because they don't wear enough over the lifetime of the vehicle to require replacing.