[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-life-cycle-greenhouse-gas-emissions-of-a-mid-size-bev-and-ice-vehicle
> “Almost all of the [electric car] batteries we’ve ever made are still in cars,” said Nissan executive Nic Thomas.
> “And we’ve been selling electric cars for 12 years,” he added.
> It’s the complete opposite of what people feared when we first launched EVs—that the batteries would only last a short time,” he reflected.
> It’s clear that most EV batteries will outlast the vehicles they were installed in, and even then, they have a worthwhile second life before they need to be stripped down for recycling.
> “At the end of the vehicle’s life—15 or 20 years down the road—you take the battery out of the car, and it’s still healthy, with perhaps 60 or 70% of usable charge,” said Thomas.
> “Taking the battery out [of an electric car] and putting a new battery in is not a viable proposition. It’s more sustainable to take the battery pack out of the car after 20 years, recycle the car, and reuse the battery.”
(My note: the motors Tesla uses in the latest vehicle builds is supposedly rated and validated for a million miles of service, to be seen in the field of course: https://electrek.co/2018/10/15/tesla-drive-after-million-mil...)
Modern cars (anything made in the last... 10-30 years, depending on how generous you are with the definition of 'electronics') all have electronics in them of some sort. People go through the same process with any old car as well; parts aren't made anymore, replacements are purely through parts from salvage or through aftermarket components... etc. At some point, it becomes non-economical to repair a vehicle, as stuff does inevitably break and the value of the car approaches zero.
Not sure how the part availability is any different for an EV. You can't run an ICE car if the engine ECU goes bad, for instance. And aftermarket ECUs are ruinously expensive generally, especially for an 'old' car.
EVs have vastly fewer wear components compared to ICE cars, so in terms of things that can even possibly wear out... there's just fewer things to go wrong.
Of course, your mileage may vary. Degradation is influenced by many factors. Many believe that only charging on Superchargers increases degradation because high charging rates generate a lot of heat which is bad for the battery. Also, storing the car at 100% charge will as well. Elon denies both of those, but I don't believe him. I only charge my Model 3 to 70% for daily driving, and only use Superchargers on road trips. After 3 years and 20,000 miles, my battery is showing no degradation.
[0] https://electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation-dat...
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/525820/tesla-battery-capacity-ret...
What about the age-old problem of rust? Most cars, even most (all?) EVs, are still made of traditional metal frames and body parts. That's usually what tends to fail in unrepairable ways first, even with ICE cars.
My guess is that the sticker shock from replacing battery packs on older electric cars is going to be the blocker for a lot of people. It's going to feel tough for a lot of people to justify a $10K+ expense in one shot for an older electric car, even if that expense makes the electric car run perfect again for another decade+.
To be fair, older ICE vehicles also come with their share of problems and necessary repairs, but those repairs are usually in piecemeal fashion, you might have a $300 repair one day and then need a $700 repair 6 months later of course. But it's rare that an older ICE vehicle has any single $10K+ repair: even replacing the entire engine out of a typical ICE vehicle probably wouldn't come near that.
We tend to think of plastics as "forever products" but most plastics are only truly guaranteed/rated for 15-20 years of active use. They just degrade in weird ways compared to other materials we expect to last. (And just being in a car dealing with all sorts of finger touches and all the jostle and motion of a moving vehicle can be quite "active use".)
My first car was an ICE I sold near its 15 year birthday. I severely under-utilize my cars, so it was still under 70K miles. The biggest push for me to sell and replace it was that the plastic knobs for its manual A/C controls had all started to break (and I was using pliers to adjust A/C, which is not fun, and quite dangerous while on the road), and even the manual window cranks were starting to have issues, and even the glove box was plastic and started to get real finicky about opening/closing.
Most EVs use touch screens and a lot of automatic controllers so there's fewer "common touch" plastics in an average EV than that first car I had, fewer manual knobs and cranks that can break, but there's still plenty of plastics holding up those touchscreens and in cup holders and other glove boxes/drawers/shelves/containers throughout the cabin interiors.
Most of that is "aesthetic" problems that don't truly impact the operation of the car, but as the user of the car you spend most of your time dealing with the cabin interior and problems with the cabin interior are easy to notice and easily become annoyances.
Cars aren't built to modularly replace the cabin interior (unlike some RVs which experience some of these same problems as they age but there's something of a market in refurbishing them every decade or so), so often the limits of cabin interior quality will be the "surprise" limits on car lifetime.
(ETA: Just to underscore, as my ICE example suggest, plastic degradation is not a new problem at all to cars, I just think that the circumstances that lead to it being a problem to me in ICE vehicle were unusual enough, because of low mileage. A high mileage ICE vehicle has a lot more problems to deal with before anyone even notices the plastics issues in the cabin interior. An EV even with high mileage may not have anywhere near as much in the way of serious maintenance problems, so plastics degradation may be the first maintenance issue some owners see/experience.)