Electric cars are already more reliable than gasoline ones, according to a German study

One of the advantages of electric vehicles compared to combustion vehicles on paper is their technical simplicity. Electric cars have fewer mechanical components than cars powered by diesel or gasoline engines, and their maintenance is more affordable. This is because current combustion engines, despite being refined, well-designed, and built vehicles, have more elements susceptible to wear, breakage, or failure.ADAC is Germany's leading roadside assistance provider, and for some years now it has been collecting analysis of the vehicles it has had to assist on the road in a study. This week the results for 2024 have been made public, in which the organization had to perform more than 3.6 million operations, 98.8% of which corresponded to vehicles with combustion engines. This figure is not very relevant if we consider that most of the vehicles circulating on German roads (or the rest of Europe) have combustion engines, but ADAC's analysis focuses on cars between two and nine years old and of which at least 7,000 units have been sold in the country.The results obtained by roadside assistance operators in Germany show that electric vehicles four years old register a breakdown frequency of 8.5 vehicles per 1,000 units sold in Germany, while four-year-old cars with diesel or gasoline engines raise this figure to 12.9 vehicles attended per 1,000 units sold on average. If the breakdown frequency is limited to the range of vehicles between 2 and 4 years old, breakdowns of electric vehicles stand at 3.8 cars per 1,000 units, while the ratio for combustion engine vehicles rises to 9.4 cars, practically triple that of zero-emission vehicles.The main cause of roadside assistance, however, has a common denominator among all the cars in the study, regardless of whether they are electric or not. This is because the majority of registered incidents are related to the car's auxiliary battery, which is responsible for starting the vehicle and has a real lifespan of around five years.Tesla and Volkswagen, the most reliable

The study includes the frequency of breakdowns of the main electric cars sold in Germany in recent years, with devastating results. The Tesla Model Y and Model 3 only registered an incidence of 0.9 and 0.5 vehicles broken down per 1,000 units registered, while the Volkswagen ID4 slightly raises its ratio to 1.0 vehicles broken down per 1,000 units sold. The Audi Q4 e-tron, for its part, achieved a result of 0.7 vehicles broken down per 1,000 units registered. The electric car that comes out worst from the study is the Ioniq 5, which registered an average of 22.4 breakdowns per 1,000 units in operation in the Germanic country.