No issue as long as it doesn’t need an expensive battery pack . Prices mentioned are pretty scary and not what buyers of used cars will want to lay out .
A petrol or diesel with a clapped out engine can always be fixed cheaply . Plenty of breakers selling engines for a few hundred . When I replaced the engine in my 190 , the engine cost me £250 , and it came with a freshly serviced gearbox still attached .
It took me one weekend to remove the old engine ( working by myself ) and the following weekend to put the new one in , so no financial cost - just my own time .
I can fix petrol cars , but wouldn’t attempt to swap out an ev battery pack , and I doubt breakers will start selling used ones anytime soon since even minor accidental damage can render them dangerous. And where would I get rid of a depleted battery pack ?
Bad enough getting rid of normal car batteries ( I normally find someone scrapping a car and chuck them in the boot ) .
A few considerations:
- What percentage of the motoring public does any servicing or repair work on their own vehicles, let alone an engine swap? (Answer - hardly any!)
- How many people drive old 190s or similar cars on a daily basis? (Answer - very few!)
- What are the likely fuel and servicing/maintenance costs for an old car vs. a modern EV? (Answer - fuel costs up to ten times as much, servicing/maintenance costs much higher)
You’re missing a trick with the scrap lead-acid batteries btw - most are worth c. £5-10 each so should be no problem getting someone to take them (and I’m sure any business that sells new ones or garage etc would take the old ones back if you aren’t going to weigh them in)
The honest truth is, cars have moved on a lot since the 1980s, a modern car with a clapped out engine is often scrap - the cost of even a secondhand engine plus labour to fit it would often render a ten year old vehicle beyond economical repair.
There’s a few scare stories out there about battery packs etc, whilst some people seem to have forgotten about the large amount of modern ICE engines vehicles that require very large repair bills.
I was travelling into London yesterday behind a 20-plate
Range Rover (Evoke or Sport, not sure!) which was smoking really badly - likely out of warranty and I expect although repairable would cost the owner a huge amount to rectify - this is not a unique situation.
Think of all the Ford Ecoboost engines and other similar vehicles with ‘wet belts’.
Mercedes M271s with chain issues.
BMWs with chain issues and oil starvation - a neighbour of mine had to have a new 4-cyl
petrol engine in their relatively modern BMW a while back (car is long gone now)
Minis again - similar engine issues I understand? I’m sure there’s plenty of others to balance the EV sceptics.
Even if the physical engine is okay, major repairs cost a lot of money to the average motorist - turbos, injectors,
catalytic converters etc and that isn’t an unusual occurrence - likely most ICE vehicles will need a few such like repairs in a typical lifespan regardless if the main lump is okay.
Think of all those fluid changes - ATF etc, clutches, brakes (EVs generally use very little friction material to brake) - those costs add up over time too (100k plus miles usage)
There’s some useful data on the RAC page here - nothing EV specific, but gives some background to the number of vehicles on UK roads, where they are parked and what sort of usage patterns exist:
Some of the facts I found interesting were:
- Cars spend only 4% of the time being driven (and parked for 96% of the time).
- The majority of cars (72%) are parked on private property or garaged overnight,
- Around 34 million cars licensed/on the road
- Average annual mileage around 7k
- Average car age is less than ten years old
None of that is from an EV fact source, but it does appear to support the fact that most people could easily transition to an EV quite easily.
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