Pardon my coarseness, but the author has his head so far up his own ass as he can’t tell whether the sun is up or down. I say this as a person who ordered a Nissan Leaf the first day they were available, has way too many shares of TSLA in their portfolio, and would love nothing more than watch Exxon Mobile go out of business. But they won’t be dismantling the Keystone pipeline any time soon, let alone in eight years.
Sure, ICEs are complex. But it is a known complexity. So well known that our 80K Scion xB has never had the valve cover off (IOW, nothing internal to the engine has broken). In fact, we’ve done nothing to it but tires and oil. Having never done it, from the shop manual I’d guess I could have the engine of our 200K mile VW camper van on the ground in about 30 minutes, have it rebuild over a weekend, and it’s good for another 100K miles. Complicated though they might be, ordinary humans can figure them out. Hell, the inner workings of an Intel CPU surpassed my understanding years ago, but they still sell millions of them, and my ignorance doesn’t stop me from writing software for them.
Look at the list of common repairs in the article. Almost all of them have one thing in common: the repairs are dictated by emissions testing, not because they’ll leave you at the side of the road. O2 sensor? The car is likely to still run, just poorly. The driver might not even notice. Catalytic converter? Unless it’s plugged from flooding the engine (raw gas will plug a cat), the car will still run. And yada yada for the rest. Of the items on the list, only an ignition coil is going to leave you at the side of the road. Let me put another way: I like our old VW because it gives an opportunity to still work on cars once in a while. The rest of our vehicles, modern cars and motorcycles all, are fucking appliances that don’t need the tender care of an old mechanic. So let’s discard the “ICE cars are complex and unreliable” argument, shall we? And there’s more to the ICE world than passenger cars, as you won’t be plowing a field with an electric tractor anytime soon.
Using a Prius as an argument for EVs is just dumb, because you know what else a Prius has under the hood beside an electric motor? So the more one makes the case with the longevity of a Prius, the more one argues that ICEs are pretty reliable.
By the time I got to the self-driving car portion, I checked out. In six years, new car sales will drop to near zero? That’s not an argument worth having, because you’re arguing with a kook.