According to the RAC, this bank holiday is expected to be the busiest since records began in 2015, with an estimated 19.2m leisure journeys planned – and more cars on the road means more breakdowns. Last year, the same weekend saw 10% of all summer breakdowns, according to the AA. But electric vehicle (EV) drivers can feel a bit more confident that they will reach their destination, according to statistics.
Earlier this year, ADAC (the General Germany Automobile Club) released figures showing that recently-purchased EVs were less prone to breakdowns than petrol or diesel cars of the same age. For every 1,000 vehicles registered in 2020, EVs had 1.9 fewer breakdowns than combustion engines. For cars registered in 2021, EVs increased this lead to 3.6.
The organisation stressed that it is early to draw a final conclusion on EV reliability, but other data backs up their findings. According to UK breakdown provider Start Rescue, EVs are 59% less likely to break down than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.
There are several reasons that EVs might be less likely to break down, says Greg Carter, technical specialist in AA’s public affairs office. As a former member of the organisation’s patrol force, Carter has significant experience helping stranded drivers, as well as access to breakdown data.
The numbers show that EVs are less likely to break down than ICEs, he says: “Making comparisons between ICE vehicles and EVs is getting easier. There are more EVs coming on to the market and getting onto the road, especially as they go into the second-hand market, which is where the vast majority of the usable data comes from.”
The most significant difference is the number of moving parts. The drivetrain in a typical EV has 20 or fewer parts, according to the AA, while ICEs can have as many as 2,000 moving parts.
The top causes of breakdowns are the same for both types of vehicle, Carter says – 12V starter batteries (not the high-voltage traction batteries in EVs), and tyres. “When you get outside of that,” he says, “the list of components we see for EV breakdowns is much, much smaller than it is for ICE vehicles.”
Other than 12V batteries and tyres, most of the breakdowns AA responds to are ICE issues related to “what's going into the engine, what happens inside the engine, what happens on the way out of the engine.”
Injection systems and engine management faults cause a lot of problems, Carter says. Mechanical parts in the engines can also go wrong, as well as fuel treatment systems, catalytic converters and more.
“Of course, EVs don't have any of those things,” he says. “An EV essentially is a battery… a motor and a control system.”
Most of the issues with EVs come from human interaction, he adds, such as plugging in the charging cable incorrectly, not turning on the charging point, or getting the cable stuck in the socket due to locking or unlocking it incorrectly. Those faults should decrease as people become more familiar with the vehicles and charging technology.
Running out of charge, a much-publicised concern with EVs, “has never really been a thing”, Carter says – the issue accounted for about 8% of EV breakdowns initially, but by June this year that was down to 1.6%.
“There was a lot of negative rhetoric around EVs – and there still is. You know, ‘People are going to be stranded left, right and centre, because they'll be running out of charge.’ But it’s just not something that we see happening, to be honest.”
Concerns that heavier EVs cause tyre and wheel issues also seems misguided, he says, as is the idea that they are responsible for the pothole epidemic. “Not all EVs are the same. They are relatively heavier than petrol cars, but they are by no means the heaviest vehicles on the road, and definitely not the most widely driven things on the road,” he says. “The reason we've got potholes is because of lorries and buses and delivery vans loaded up to the gunnels, driving around all over the place. That's the reason – and we have not looked after the roads.”
EVs’ better reliability seems like good news for future bank holiday getaways. “Going forward, the breakdown industry is going to see a reduction in numbers of breakdowns, assuming the uptake of EVs continues on its current predicted path, and the government sticks to this 2035 ban on ICE vehicle production,” Carter says.
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