"DEAD EV BATTERY AT ONLY 40,000 MILES," proclaims the thumbnail of the latest Hoovie's Garage's YouTube video. The lie is dispelled in the first two seconds of the video, in which he's seen driving the car. That's not what "dead" means, Tyler.
The video's conceit is the same old story Hoover has been telling since the start of his channel. He buys the worst possible example of a car for an unfathomably cheap price, then acts surprised and scorned when it turns out to have a litany of issues. It's a good bit, and it's fun to watch someone actually throw money at bad ideas.
In most videos, the catastrophic problems he experiences are funny examples of him running the self-proclaimed "dumbest automotive channel in all of YouTube."
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EV Reliability
It's true that recent model-year EVs are less reliable than their internal-combustion counterparts on average. Yet most reported issues are with things like the infotainment system and active safety features, and random quality issues. All of these are mostly explained by EVs being newer products on newer platforms with more in-car tech. Motor and battery failures are rare.
Yet in the title of his latest video, he takes a bigger swing and whiffs completely. He claims that his "dead" $700 Fiat 500e he bought at auction "shows the miserable future of EV ownership. He's wrong on two counts.
First, the $700 car isn't dead, it's running and driving fine with working air conditioning. Second, his claim that a compliance car that debuted in the same month that Obama defeated Romney represents "the future" is absurd on its face. It's akin to saying that an iPhone 3G that's been left in a desk since 2008 with a dead battery is proof that smartphones have no future.
But let's start with the car. It was sent to auction by Carvana, a step dealers take when a car isn't suitable for sale on their lot. The car was left to completely die, something you should try to avoid with EVs, and its low mileage suggests it was rarely driven to begin with. Yet when it arrived at Hoover's mechanic, it still fired back up with just a charge and a jump.
Then the car worked fine. He drives it in the video. It's a running, driving, nice car. It is not dead in any sense of the word.
The problem he notes is that in five miles of driving, the predicted range drops from 76 miles to 61 miles. He extrapolates that the real-world depletion rate would give the car a true range of around 30 miles. In the video he does no testing to confirm that, and doesn't make clear if this is the first drive in the car since it's battery died—which would surely screw with its predicted range reading—but since he completely omitted this info I have to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Even if it's entirely possible that the car could have just been calibrating to its true predicted range—possibly closer to 60 miles—we'll assume he's not pulling this diagnosis out of his ass. A big assumption.
Regardless, with a supposedly "dead" battery, the 500e is still a usable city car with 30 miles of range. Hoover himself notes that many of the gasoline "multi-air" 500s blew up within 10 years, and that he's struggled to find any car of that era that's as reliable as older cars.
Think about it: How many DCT Ford Fiestas have survived without a transmission transplant? When was the last time you saw a 2016 Dodge Dart?
How confident are you that a $700 example of either car would be a safe bet? If I spent that much on any car 2014 Fiat Chrysler, I wouldn't expect it to run. It's amazing that the 500e still does.
Because the 500e wasn't exactly the best effort from a brand taking EV design seriously. California required automakers to offer zero-emissions vehicles if they wanted to sell cars in the state, and other states which follow its emissions rules. Fiat, Ford and many others built so-called "compliance cars" to satisfy this requirement at the lowest possible cost. Fiat didn't even sell the first-generation 500e in Europe, because it knew this wasn't a desirable product, and it didn't want to sell more than it had to.
"I hope you don't buy [a 500e] because every time I sell one it costs me $14,000," then-CEO Sergio Marchionne said publicly.
The 500e was offered to lease for as little as $49 a month in California. Of course buyers treated them as disposable. Of course the company designing it—which had no real EV experience—made some mistakes. In spite of all of this, though, 10 years on even a bad 500e still runs and drives. That's more than can be said for the worst gas 500s, and many similarly beaten-down compacts.
Hoover bought a car that was listed as being unable to go into gear. It can actually go at least 30 miles in comfort with everything working. After properly calibrating the battery—a step a commenter on Reddit pointed out as key after a full-zero depletion—it might do even better. The only real thing to hold against the 500e is that, if it does need a battery, it's expensive. Hoover says it'll cost around $7,500, more than the car is worth.
But he undercuts himself here, too. His mechanic notes that it's possible to swap out any faulty cells. It's just that most shops—which make all of their money on older ICE cars—have had little reason to learn how to do this correctly, and are understandably afraid of the risks. That's hardly a mark of death for EVs. Of course the third-party repair infrastructure isn't configured for them. They were a miniscule part of the market until recently, and the biggest player, Tesla, tries desperately to stop independent shops from getting to work on its vehicles.
Many Teslas, though, prove Hoover wrong. It's now a non-event to get a Model 3 past 200,000 miles on its original pack. Some Model S' have crossed 400,000 miles on their first packs. Recent data shows us that battery failure is exceedingly uncommon for batteries built after 2015. That "after 2015" is key, though, because earlier cars were victims of the first-adopter syndrome. Car companies were still working out how to make EVs last, and those early cars were prone to battery issues.
Modern ones don't seem to be. There are certainly quality issues as individual companies first go through the teething pains of volume production, but once an automaker learns a few hard lessons EVs become far simpler to build. That's why Tesla, a company not known for mastering the finer points of quality, has basically no drive-unit or battery issues on its mature platforms. There just aren't that many parts to worry about.
It's also worth noting that all battery packs in U.S.-market EVs have to be warrantied for at least 8 years and 100,000 miles, longer than most companies' powertrain warranties. That gives manufacturers heavy incentives to refine their chemistry. Even a 5% failure rate within 100,000 miles would be a catastrophic expense for the automakers. And if you want to have a near-0% chance of failure within 100,000 miles, you're going to build something with a high chance of making it past 200,000 miles.
That's a claim that can't be made for most of the engines built over the last 20 years. Sure, the GM 5.3s and Toyota 3.5s may outlast God himself, but the lion's share of cars will have severe mechanical issues before then.
Modern, mature EVs have some of the most robust drivetrains of any cars. As the Fiat proves, when they do experience degradation, they also remain drive-able. A Model 3 with only 60% of its original capacity will still go over a hundred miles, which is as far as most people will take a 200,000-mile car anyway.
So the lesson isn't that the EV future is bleak. It's that, if you buy a broken car for $700, it might not work perfectly. Who knew!
Contact the author: mack.hogan@insideevs.com
