“The problems with internal combustion engines are mostly sorted,” Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports senior director of testing, told me. “The new problems are mostly associated with electronics: Electric vehicles that use brand new platforms and power trains.”
EVs in model years 2021-24 suffered about twice as many reliability problems as internal combustion engines, or ICE, according to CR’s survey of about 70,000 vehicles.
Hybrids were the big winners, with an average 26% fewer problems. Faring worst were plug-in hybrid vehicles, an extremely promising technology that features a bigger battery than a regular hybrid, so the vehicle can go farther on electricity in daily driving, but also has a gasoline engine for long trips. PHEVs had 146% as many issues as ICE vehicles.
If we are to give a bit of credibility to all the news on advances in EVs, that horizon is closer than farther.
Engineering is not as much a trial and error endeavor as it once was. Computer models and simulators do wonders to sort out many of the fails and the real world fails are the expected unexpecteds that always come about.