Is it a bad idea to buy a new non electric car right now?

Chris_English

Herzlos said:

Chris_English said:

Herzlos said:

Chris_English said:

Money_Grabber13579 said:

A few people seem to be making the assumption that as the batteries only have an 8 year warranty, the car will be scrap after that period of time. Working on that basis, the vast majority of ICE cars would be scrap after 3 years… 

I accept the point that there is a bit of an unknown as to what will happen batteries when they get to 10, 15, 20 years old but the way things are going at the minute, it doesn’t look like batteries will be the problem which results in scrapping.

It may not be common, but there’s the occasional case being reported.

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/mercedes-owner-could-scrap-car-22886801

£15k for a hybrid battery sounds horrendous, but being a hybrid I assume you can drive it without one?

Maybe, but in the same way that you can drive a car with a holed piston it’d not be a good solution. 

The odd case like this isn’t enough to put me off, but it shows that the claims that it’s never an issue are a bit wide of the mark.

Not really, it probably runs for 95% of the time using the combustion engine anyway. It's not as if the battery is providing power most of the time.

So it's more like driving around with an LPG conversion fitted that you don't use.

Well no, the electric motor is providing a high fraction of the car's power, and fills in the troughs in the torque output of the engine.

Using the engine 95% of the time is very different from using only the engine 95% of the time. Performance will be awful with a failed battery, and will fuel efficiency, so it;s exactly like having a holed piston.

troffasky

Herzlos said:

£15k for a hybrid battery sounds horrendous, but being a hybrid I assume you can drive it without one?

Plug-in hybrid = yes

"Mild" hybrid = ???

"Hybrid" is used to describe several quite different ways of combining electrical and combustion power and if they're all just abbreviated to "hybrid" then confusion ensues.

Funnily enough, if you Google "mercedes 125V battery" you get a few pages of that Walesonline story and other sites that have re-posted it, and then it just descends into irrelevant nonsense. So is it really a 125V battery?