How Much Is Electric Car Maintenance?

What’s the difference between maintenance costs for EVs versus gasoline cars?

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It’s a widely held assumption that electric vehicles (EVs) have lower maintenance costs than their gas-powered counterparts. If you think about it, that assumption makes sense. EVs don’t have a gasoline engine, so there are no oil changes, valve adjustments, belt replacements, or other expenses that go hand-in-hand with owning a gasoline-powered vehicle. Plus, with fewer moving parts in an electric car than in a gasoline-powered car, there are simply fewer things that can break.

However, EVs aren’t totally maintenance-free. They need regular maintenance for things like brakes, tires, and so on. Then there’s the battery pack and battery degradation. When do EV batteries need to be replaced, and how much will a replacement battery cost?

Let’s take a look and compare the maintenance cost of EVs and gas-powered cars to see if there are hidden costs of owning an electric vehicle.

Where EVs cost less to maintain

Obviously, there are certain things you may be used to doing to a car that an EV will never need. For starters, no combustion engine means electric cars don’t use oil, so EV owners can kiss oil changes goodbye. Additionally, even though it’s not strictly a maintenance item, an EV won’t ever need to have a smog check either.

If you’ve ever opened the hood on your gas-powered car, you’ve probably seen one or more belts connected to one side of the engine. These drive things like the alternator, the air conditioning, water pump, and other accessories, and they wear out over time and need to be regularly replaced. EVs power their accessories with … you guessed it … electricity, so they don’t have belts that need replacing. Additionally, some gas engines require something called a timing belt to be replaced every 80,000 miles or so, a roughly $1,000 expense that EV owners can permanently scratch off their to-do list.

Another area where electric cars have an edge is the braking system. EVs use something called regenerative braking, which uses the resistance of the electric motor to help slow the car (while recharging the battery a little). This means the car relies less on the mechanical brakes—you know, the rotors and pads—than a conventional gas-powered car does. They still get used of course, just much less frequently, reducing the frequency of brake maintenance and saving the owner money.

Finally, you might be surprised to know that EVs still use a transmission to get power from the electric motor to the wheels. This transmission will require the occasional fluid change, although the service intervals for EV transmissions tend to be longer.

What maintenance does an electric car need?

While EVs don’t have any expenses related to the operation of a gasoline engine, that doesn’t mean that maintenance on electric cars is nonexistent.

It might surprise you to find that EVs go through tires more quickly than gasoline-powered cars. It comes down to weight. An electric car weighs more than a similarly sized gasoline car due to the added weight of the battery. Take the Chevrolet Bolt, for example. This small EV weighs about 3,600 pounds even though it’s smaller than a Honda Civic; as a point of comparison, a 2020 Honda Civic weighs less than 3,000 pounds. The Bolt even weighs more than the considerably larger Toyota Camry SE midsize sedan, which weighs around 3,400 pounds. The added weight of the EV results in more wear on the tires. Of course, some tires are designed to wear longer, but it’s an inescapable fact that an EV will go through the same set of tires faster than a non-EV will.

Another area where some EVs are similar to their gas counterparts is in the coolant system. Many EVs, such as the Tesla Model 3, use a liquid-cooled battery with a complex system of hoses that includes a radiator and radiator fluid. Just like a gas car, it needs to be inspected and maintained with occasional fluid changes.

Since EVs are cars, they’re also subject to replacing routine items such as windshield wiper blades and cabin air filters. Due to the additional stress EVs put on their tires, tire rotation takes on additional urgency to help preserve tread life as long as possible.

Even though an EV comes with its own set of maintenance expenses, a gasoline-powered car will still rack up more costs over time. These costs are tracked by the federal Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, which has concluded that an EV costs 6 cents per mile to maintain while a gas-powered car costs 10 cents per mile. These are averages, of course, because the frequency and costs of maintenance are very dependent on how, where, and what you drive. For example, the maintenance costs for an aggressively driven luxury car in New England will be different than for a frugally driven economy car in the desert.

Electric car battery costs

There is one expense EVs will deal with that a gas-powered car will never need to: replacing the lithium-ion battery. Battery degradation is inevitable despite advances in lithium-ion battery chemistry and charging technology. Just like with a smartphone, the battery in your EV will gradually degrade. But instead of less browsing time, an electric car will have less driving range. In order to get that range back, the battery will need replacing.

Most electric car manufacturers warranty their batteries against excess degradation for eight years or 100,000 miles, although in some places like California that’s extended to 150,000 miles. That “excess degradation” is usually defined as the battery holding only 70% of the charge it did when it was new, which is a useful figure for us to use as well.

True, 70% could still mean a lot of battery capacity. If you’re driving something like a Chevy Bolt, which originally had 259 miles of range, 70% of that still gives you about 180 miles, which is plenty useful for around-town trips and occasional unscheduled errands even if you forget to charge every night.

On the other hand, if you’re driving a 2018 Nissan Leaf, which came with only 149 miles of range, 70% of that is just over 100 miles. That means you’ll need to be a lot more judicious about charging, and maybe have a list of polite excuses lined up for why you can’t join your friends across town. We have a lot more guidance about how much EV range you really need here and in this video.

EV battery replacement costs

So how much does an electric car battery cost? Well, unlike your smartphone, it’s not cheap. The price has been coming down steadily over the years, and as of 2022, federal estimates put the cost of replacing EV batteries at about $153 per kilowatt-hour. (A kilowatt-hour, or kWh, is a measurement of how much electricity a battery can hold, just like you measure how much gasoline your tank can hold in gallons.) That means that, all things being equal, the bigger the battery, the more expensive the replacement.

For example, that Nissan Leaf owner is going to be looking at an estimated $6,000 to replace the Leaf’s 40-kWh battery. Replacing the 65-kWh battery in a Chevy Bolt would cost nearly $10,000. If you’re replacing the 82-kWh battery on a Tesla Model 3 Long Range, you’re going to be looking at an estimated cost of more than $12,500. And remember, that’s just for the battery itself and doesn’t include the labor of installing it.

Ultimately it’s up to the owner to decide if a battery’s degradation is impacting the person's lifestyle enough to warrant replacing. Just be ready to tap into your savings because unless the battery is still under warranty, it can be a hefty out-of-pocket expense.

We’re not picking on EVs here, and of course gasoline-powered cars can have some pretty big expenses as they get closer to that 150,000-mile mark. All those moving parts in the engine and transmission begin to wear out, and paying to fix them can cost thousands of dollars. For example, a transmission replacement costs about $5,000 on average.

The difference is that with a gas car, you might have engine or transmission issues, and you won’t know when they’ll strike. With an EV, you know that battery is eventually going to wear out, and that big bill is somewhere on the horizon.

Conclusion

It’s true that, generally speaking, electric cars have lower maintenance costs than similar gasoline-powered cars. That doesn’t mean they’re maintenance-free, and they’re actually harder on their tires than you might expect. The biggest expense will be replacing the battery, which can seriously eat into any savings. When to do that is ultimately up to the EV owner, but if you plan on keeping your electric car for the long haul, just remember to keep that expense in mind as your car gets older.