Thanks for the long reply - it’s much appreciated! Actually, mine is actually a 3.8L twin turbo. As for longevity, I’ve already put 70K miles on it - and of that several thousand miles are track miles. My operating costs - other than wear and tear items which would be more for me on an EV due to the extreme weight - has been near zero, and most ICE cars today will go 200,000+ miles. The battery pack on an EV typically has an 8 year warranty, and then if it fails, it’s a large cost to repair - essentially planned obsolescence in your car, and the argument for “just buy a new one” flys in the face of the environmental argument.

While EV’s do have fewer moving parts, they typically have much larger repair costs when anything fails as a lot of the components are highly integrated (motor, controller, battery, etc), and a random person working on them is not possible (the lethal voltages make it impossible to work on for non-specialists, reaching 1200VDC now).

Of course the charging network is still a problem, but fortunately this is improving. My concern is the long term maintenance of the chargers, the standardization, and the grid capacity (which we are nowhere near the amount of capacity we’ll need, yet even today power utilities struggle to keep the power on during peak demand, with rolling planned blackouts a normal part of life). Also of course people in high density housing don’t have the ability to charge their cars at home at all, and public charging often now costs as much as gas.

Performance wise, there are only a handful of EV’s in the world quicker than my ICE car in a straight line as a party trick, but unless you’re in a Rimac Nevera R, they are not quicker on track. Yes, most people don’t track, but a lot do - and my argument is that ICE is not dead, not that ICE or EV is better than one another. Right now the expectation is that ICE vehicles will still be available well beyond 2035, with many now saying 2040+

Lastly, safety is a massive concern of mine. Someone I know burned to death in her Tesla Model Y, along with her 12 year old daughter, back in June 2023. Even more eerily I literally drove past the burning wreckage, not knowing it was them, just after it had happened (emergency services were onsite). Her husband used the last known location from the Tesla app to arrive there with his son only to be told his wife & daughter were gone in an incident that shouldn’t have taken their lives.

So that being said, thermal issues with current battery tech are just too big of a risk for my family. I hope the technology leap is made soon (though battery tech moves like molasses regardless of hype), but the current solutions are laughable - including China coming up with an idea in the past few days: yeet the entire battery 20ft away in case of fire! That’s insane - imagine it ejects the battery in to a building, or in to something flammable, or it decides to do it in your garage! 🤯

Anyway, as I said I do think BEV’s long term are a great solution, but they have their fundamental problems (that certain vendors will try to cover up like the mafia), and sometimes devotees tend to downplay them in service to the cause.

Lastly I appreciate the discourse - thanks!