Electric Vehicles

I don’t think we have the data yet to answer the question, and then there’s the trap that past performance does not indicate future results.

All the manufacturers are designing and building new platforms with wholly new drivetrains. Some are recycling a lot of previous experience, and others are not (eg VW has a lot of experience with chassis and interior whereas BYD is new). But all cars are increasingly software dependent and manufacturers are assuming that they can fix bugs in production, so the prior experience is mostly limited to physical arena.

We can make assumptions and generalizations based on what the corporate culture has produced over the previous decades - Germans tend to be higher maintenance and require more precision in their repairs than other cars but they have good dynamics; Japanese cars are boring but require minimal maintenance; American cars are increasingly complex and leaning towards German levels of precision but with highly variable levels of reliability.

Overall though, electric vehicles have vastly fewer moving parts; the WeberAuto teardown of the Bolt EV drivetrain demonstrates it - I think there’s fewer than 10 moving parts including transmission, whereas there’s more than 10 parts in a single cylinder’s exhaust valve train in an ICE. So it comes down to the resilience of the electronics - is the heat managed properly, are the components sized adequately to handle the load over long term, are they waterproofed for the long term, vibration managed, etc. It’s hard to assess that.