Valdemar said:
Repair is not maintenance. For the former my concern is there are expensive electronic parts, like the onboard charger, which if failed and need to be repaired out of pocket, will quickly eat up all the savings.
that concern is valid but no more valid than if you had a gas car. keep in mind a gas car is more likely to have a major repair simply because it has a lot more major components to break.
its really all boils down to the law of averages but in two different directions.
EV technology being newer means that there is not billions of road tested miles design experience on EV specific components which could lead to failures a few years down the line.
AZ heat might be bad for batteries but a gasser carries around its own blast furnace which means its gets the AZ heat year round which means more failure points, more systems to guard against the heat which in turn is more systems that can break.
add to that the sobering fact that modern cars dont really have any cheap fixes anymore. No matter what breaks, a very expensive piece of electronic gizmo is probably going down with it. Might even be a few of them. innocent bystanders of heat gone wild.
I think that before I started worrying about something that might not happen, I would start crunching the here and now. Fuel savings alone can add up to $2000 a year which can pay off the "EV" premium in a few years.