Today I completed the annual maintenance on my 3.5 year old electric car. I refilled the wiper fluid and added a bit of air to the tires. That’s it. Except for two other things, that’s all I’ve done in the life of the car, though one of those things was a doozy.
The promise of the electric car is that it needs almost no maintenance. There are no oil changes or minor, regular and major service appointments. There are far fewer parts and fewer things to go wrong. In time, I’ll need new wiper blades and a few other minor things. Many drivers report their brake pads not wearing out after 200,000 miles because EV driving almost never uses the brakes.
I did change out the internal air filter to add a HEPA filter for the wildfire and Covid problems of today. That cost about $40 and a bit of time, and probably will need doing again 3 years later.
The doozy was needing new tires at around 28,000 miles. That was too early, far before their rated life. One reason for this was a stupid mistake on my part. In the past, I’ve taken my gasoline cars in for regular service, and they were rotating my tires as needed during this service. Not taking my EV in for service, I never got the rotation done. That not only meant the drive tires of my car wore out faster, it also meant I could not make a warranty claim on them. Lesson learned. READ MORE...
