https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eQz4aQjtY0&feature=youtu.be
Maybe not too surprising on this one. I hear the range on these are not great especially if you drive them spiritedly. And given it’s a first gen product on a new tech, no one really knows what these will be worth 5 - 10 years from now.
There’s very little that can go wrong on an EV though, gasoline cars are more a “death by a thousand cuts” kind-of deal, EVs have 3 main parts- HVAC system, high-voltage battery (and to a lesser degree) motors.
Motors are extremely reliable (except on Teslas, where they are just okay, though Model 3/Y seems to be a lot better than older Model S) and (relatively) cheap to replace. They are made up of essentially just one moving part and are dead simple, so there’s really not much to go wrong if you’ve made them well.
Batteries are getting more and more reliable every year as battery tech and cycle counts improves, you could often only expect 300-500k kilometers from an EV battery pack 10 years ago, now you’re likely to get over a million.
HVAC systems seem to be pretty reliable too, Tesla seems to be the only manufacturer I’ve seen any reasonable amount of replacements for, but reliability there is still pretty okay for them, and for other manufacturers they seem to be very reliable. And they’re still not exactly prohibitively expensive to replace if they do go wrong.
Overall just the fact they have so few moving parts means they are much easier to make reliable, the Hyundai Ioniq EV is easily the most reliable car Hyundai has ever made for example. Also 8-year battery warranties are basically the minimum any manufacturer is offering, so at least that shouldn’t be a worry at all.
Nissan not being able to put a CVT in the Leaf seems to have done wonders for its reliability, almost every single one of them is still on the road, even if Nissan, being the only manufacturer to put a passive battery cooling system in an EV hasn’t done wonders when it comes to battery degradation over time. Don’t think I know any ICE Nissan made in the last 20 years that has been more reliable than that car honestly.