Here’s something we don’t see nearly enough of, and that’s an electric vehicle on a lift, in a service shop. Now why is it that we don’t see them? Well, because most people who own an electric vehicle seem to think that zero emissions means zero maintenance. Well that’s true for certain parts of the car, not in all parts of the car. So, what do we have?

Well, we don’t have an engine so we don’t have oil changes and filters and all of that stuff. We don’t have a fuel tank, we don’t put gasoline in them. And we don’t have a transmission in most of them so we don’t have transmission fluid and so on. But why do they need to go to a repair shop? Well, most of them have cooling systems for the batteries. They have all of the same mechanical things underneath. Things like control arms for the steering, the steering rack, the axels for the drive wheels, things like that. So all of these things should be checked on a regular basis. 

Now additionally it should go into the shop every 7500 miles or so to have the tires rotated so that you get the best wear on the tires. And at the same time just like on an internal combustion car, what the technician should be doing is going over all of these other things. The suspension, the brakes, a battery test, not the electric battery but the battery that operates the radio and all of these other components that are 12 volt on the car. So these are things that should be a routine for any electric vehicle just like it is for a gas powered vehicle.

So, the other thing is if you are a do-it-yourselfer I would highly recommend against much of doing anything other than tire rotations and maybe checking the brakes or something. Do not get near the orange wires. They can be very dangerous. So do a little preventative maintenance on your EV and you’ll get a lot better service life out of it. If you have a question or comment drop me a line right here at Motorweek.