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I don't accept Ryan's prognosis over the future of diesel cars, or the environmental penalty of EV's.
Before I purchased our Tesla Model 3 I did a lot of research on what the car would require after the battery warranty expired. Quoting Tesla:
"The closed-loop battery recycling process at Gigafactory 1 presents a compelling solution to move energy supply away from the fossil-fuel based practice of take, make and burn, to a more circular model of recycling end-of-life batteries for reuse over and over again. From an economic perspective, we expect to recognize significant savings over the long term, as the costs associated with large-scale battery material recovery and recycling will be far lower than purchasing and transporting new materials"
In short, rather than a single-use burn of fossil fuel, the battery cells are slotted to be recycled hence reused over and over.
Tesla have also indicated that after 1500 charge cycles or about 640,000km a new battery pack will cost about $A5000.00. I suspect the figure will be significantly lower, as the cost of lithium cells looks to be following Moore's Law.
We do about 15,000km per year on average, hence the 640k figure is unlikely to be tested by yours truly in 42 years from now....
The cycle limit will likely come up first, give we charge the car once every 4 days or so, and will arrive in about 16 years from now. But this is all moot.
The longest I have kept a car is 7 years (an E250 Diesel Merc...now 13 years old, and BTW I bumped into the new owner recently and pleased to hear he was delighted with the car and has not spent a cent on it other than regular services/tyres/pads....hardly "scrap" ).
As for me I'd expect to be pottering about in a "Tesla model 7" long before the Model 3 actually needs retiring.
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