I think there are quite a few draw backs with electric cars indeed the more I've been thinking about them.
My mid size SUV is coming up to 6 years old. Only done 30K miles. Can probably go for another 6 years without too much bother but I'm not sure you'd want to do that with an electric car (can it even run for 12 years and if it can what will the value be?).
Only now looking at replacing the original tyres by the way which is pretty excellent.
Again with an electric car you would need to replace them far sooner due to battery weight plus your ride won't be as comfortable.
Battery life on Lithium is based more on miles driven, number of charge cycles, and charging speed. Teslas using 6.6kw chargers will probably last a lot longer than ones that use superchargers on a regular basis. Leaf owners figured this out when they realized that the high power CHAMEDO charges were reducing pack life while the stock Leafs with 2.2kw chargers lasted damn near forever.
I was also surprised to read Teslas still have 12V batteries in addition to the large battery packs as well and have in fact also been problematic for people often not lasting the 3-5 years at all.
Yep, the 12v battery is used as a "bootstrap" starter to wake the computer up and do the checks before closing the HV packs. One problem is that since it's a pretty small draw then a traditional starter battery tends to die early. The proper answer is to use a NiCD battery as the starter battery as they last damn near forever, but they have toxic waste problems these days. Drat.
I guess Teslas need very little maintenance but the extra cost of actually buying the damn thing doesn't really offset that so much.
One of the big positives about electrics is that they just don't have mechanical problems. Motors are remarkably gentle on the drivetrain, no transmissions to deal with, and on my Prius the brake pads literally lasted well over 100,000 miles due to most braking being regen. Aside from the battery, they last pretty much forever.
I expect battery rebuild services to take off. If they can do it for 2k that's about the cost of a transmission rebuild which you have to do on a normal car every 100-150k miles anyway.