I worry that the transition from ICE to EV will exacerbate economic disparities because of the cashflow challenges of battery replacement.

Today you can go out and buy a used ICE car for a fraction of a new price and then operate it with almost all further operating and maintaince costs being incremental and small unless you get into an accident or have a (quite rare) major drive-train failure, which effectively total the used car since they cost more to fix than getting another similar used car.

By comparison the EV will need its batteries replaced every N years at a substantial all-at-once price, which is currently at a scale of 2x what a perfectly usable ICE used car costs.

The EV's TCO still is better or competitive with the ICE car because the extra cost of battery replacement is offset by reduced fuel costs and maintenance costs. But this is a reduction of many pay-as-you-go incremental costs and a replacement with a big upfront cost, and so it imposes a significant cashflow burden.

To put concrete figures, my spouse bought a used Nissan Leaf a number of years ago for a price a bit higher than a comparable classed used ICE car would cost. At the time, we priced out the replacement battery in order to account for the future expense we could expect and IIRC were quoted $8k by Nissan. A number of years pass and the battery degrades, eventually getting down to a range of only ~45 miles which was becoming unusable for us. We contact Nissan about a replacement and are informed that the price was then $12k, and that's still with the original 24kwh battery type, not newer technology. 12k would buy you _two_ perfectly usable used ICE cars from a used car dealer, maybe three in private party transactions. We were able to find a mechanic that was able to install a 40KWh battery from a more recent generation all in for about the $8k we were anticipating, so we were ultimately happy with the outcome.

But when I think back to prior points in my life when I wasn't wealthy, these kinds of cashflow hits would have been devastating. Probably the biggest day to day difference between being poor or not is having access to the cash flow required to take on large infrequent expenses.

So I worry that this transition to EV will force many more less wealthy people into predatory financing. Access to transportation is key to economic mobility, since without it people are limited to whatever jobs are accessible from where they live and are limited in where they live accessible to where they work. Today people of limited means can own a car outright, and it's less clear to me that this is true in a EV world given today's battery economics.

I've seen a lot of discussion and debate over the total cost of EV's putting them out of reach of the less wealthy, and from my own analysis I agree that shouldn't be a major issue now. But I haven't seen any discussion about the cashflow impacts, which I think are very important too.

There seems to be a lot of hope that battery economics will continue to improve dramatically and I share it. But it's already improved dramatically and after some amount those improvements should diminish. I find it hard to accept that we should be setting public policy based on conjectural improvements that are far from guaranteed even in the sense of "if we adopt it the prices will drop".