It’s not been a rosy year for electric vehicles.

EV sales in 2024 are only 9% of vehicles sold – and seem to have reached a plateau. Automobile manufacturers such as Ford’s popular F-150 Lightning, GM, and Renault are quietly cutting production back. Even Volvo that pledged to be 100% electric by 2030 just pulled the plug on it’s efforts with Polestar. It certainly doesn’t help that average EV’s cost several thousand dollars more than gas and diesel powered vehicles.

Only 2 years after pledges to convert 25% of its fleet to electric vehicles by 2024, Hertz decided to sell 1/3 of it’s EV fleet (about 20,000 cars) in January 2024 and replace them with gas-powered vehicles – citing higher expenses related to collision and damages. By March 2024, and embattled Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr ultimately resigned over the fiasco as Hertz now focuses on a return to profitability. They’re not the only rental company quietly replacing EV’s with traditional vehicles.

Other shortcoming are starting to come out. Batteries are physical devices – devices that don’t work well in high temps of the Southwest nor in the cold winter temps of the upper states. There’s also range-anxiety, higher tire consumption and higher road wear due to the heavy weight of EV’s, higher repair costs, rising electricity prices, and now a new issue: reliability.

Now we have a few years of reliability data – and Consumer Reports says it’s not that good. The data says that EV’s have lower reliability ratings than standard gas/diesel powered vehicles. The worst reliability is for full plug-in hybrids that have 146% more issues on average.

EVs had 79 percent more reliability problems than a gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicle, on average. Plug-in hybrids fared even worse; these had 146 percent more issues on average than the conventional alternative. But simpler not-plug-in hybrids bucked this trend, with 26 percent fewer reliability problems than conventionally powered vehicles.

Consumer Reports via Ars Technica

It’s not just Consumer Reports.