Eyes wide open: Swapping pistons for electric motors doesn’t mean things will not go wrong

What are the common issues with EVs and what are the repair bills like compared to similar problems encountered by ICE engines?

It’s a question with some potentially serious implications, as many electric cars on our roads are now past the point of their original warranties, while many have also outrun their original eight-year, 160,000km battery warranty.

Does buying a used electric car, or keeping one in the longer term, open you to a world of financial pain? No, not quite. It’s more of a case of all cars can be potentially unreliable, so the trick is to buy carefully (especially second-hand) and keep up with maintenance.

Regular maintenance is, even in the electric age, the true secret to keeping any electric car reliable in the long term and making sure that any repair bills that do crop up at (hopefully) the more affordable end of things.

Many electric car makers have stretched out servicing intervals for their battery-powered cars, reckoning that the fact that these cars have fewer moving mechanical parts means that they need less regular attention.

This, though, isn’t a good idea – even if the recommended service interval is every two years for a new EV, we’d suggest you should still book your car in for an annual check-up, as it means you’ll catch problems when they’re still small.

Initially, the biggest number of issues seen with electric cars, according to data taken from reliability experts at JD Power, was nothing to do with big-ticket items such as batteries or motors, but with infotainment systems.

These problems can be generally categorised as minor, but they can still be a major pain in the backside, not least because glitching or “bricked” screens are expensive to put right out of warranty, and can mean you don’t have access to all of the car’s functions.

The best advice here is to make sure you’re uploading all of the software updates that are released for the car – that should help to keep you one step ahead of any issues.

If you need a full replacement screen, such as the one used by a VW ID.4, that can be as much as €2,000 just for the part, let alone the labour cost, but this is certainly not an EV-only issue. Equally, you can get used and reconditioned parts such as a screen for considerably less than that.

Of course, the big worry is the battery, and what if something goes wrong with that? In general, batteries aren’t cheap in any sense to replace or repair, but that’s not just down to the physical item. The cost of a full replacement battery will vary wildly depending on the electric car you’re talking about. For a smaller car such as a Hyundai Inster, it could be around €7,000. For a larger car, such as a Volvo EX90, you could be looking at €20,000 and even more.

Those are big, scary figures and at the top end there’s little else in the motoring world, short of a total chassis swap, that compares.

At the lower end, back down among the Insters and the old Nissan Leafs, the cost comparison is more in line with those for combustion cars.

With a smaller battery, the unit replacement cost may be in and around the same for a diesel car’s main engine control unit (ECU).

There’s plenty of chatter in insurance circles about EVs being written off because of minor damage to the battery, but such is also true of relatively recent combustion-engined cars that suffer ECU damage either through a collision or just through water getting into delicate electrics. It’s important to keep these things in perspective.

Equally, it’s very, very rare that a whole battery will need to be replaced. US-based electric car experts Redcurrent carried out a major large-fleet EV survey last year and found that only 2.5 per cent of all electric cars on the road had ever needed a complete battery replacement.

So yes, the “My EV battery died and cost me €20,000” headlines can be true, but are also rare. If only 2.5 per cent of EVs needed new batteries, then that means 97.5 per cent didn’t. Those are good odds.

Carmakers are also starting to design more repairability into their vehicles. Jean Louis Martins is a battery expert with Dacia, which is just launching its second-generation Spring, and he told us that the battery in that car has been specifically designed to be simple to repair when needed: “We’ve really thought about repairability, and you can see if you look at the battery pack that the cells and the electronic control systems are quite separate, so it’s easy to remove a module for repair, or even an individual cell.

“It was thought to be to be repairable from the start. It’s not the case in some other brands where you know that when you’ve got a problem with the battery, you’ve got to replace the whole pack.”

That repair and replacement of modules rather than whole batteries is the answer to keeping longer-term EV running costs down to acceptable levels. A full, new battery for the hugely popular Tesla Model Y can cost as much as €18,000 but a battery module – and it’s usually only one damaged module that’s causing a problem at any one time – can be as little as €1,100 if you buy a used one that’s been reconditioned.

Of course, part of the cost puzzle is labour prices, and these are being driven up both by a need to give expert training in handling high-voltage batteries to servicing technicians and also to simply find, train and bring into employment enough technicians – although the staff shortages of 2022 and 2023 have eased a little, it’s still an issue for many.

Encouraging more independent garages to train and equip for electric car repairs would doubtless help, but at that level there are still issues. We spoke to independent technician David Corbally, who runs the Service Stop garage in north Co Dublin.

“There’s an attitude problem in the industry, where the carmakers are focused on PCP deals that last for three years, and for the most part warranties that last for three years, and once those are up the car is traded in, out the door, and not their problem any more,” said Corbally.

“My whole thing with EVs is that the reward system is wrong – you should be rewarded for producing a quality product with longevity, not for producing substandard vehicles that you then sell lots of.”

Corbally’s reasoning is that if carmakers were made, through legislation, to stand over a product that lasts, repair costs and reliability issues would become a thing of the past. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it’s very obvious to me that the carmakers’ systems are designed to maximise car sales, but it’s because they’re not accountable. If they were accountable, it’d be a very different playground.”