Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects. With hard work and expertise, basically any old vehicle could be restored and operated: On YouTube, you can watch a man drive a 1931 Alvis to McDonald’s. But the car itself was stuck in time. If the automaker added a feature to the following year’s model, you just didn’t get it. Things have changed. My Model 3 has few dials or buttons; nearly every feature is routed through the giant central touch screen. It’s not just Tesla: Many new cars—and especially electric cars—are now stuffed with software, receiving over-the-air updates to fix bugs, tweak performance, or add new functionality.
In other words, your car is a lot like an iPhone (so much so that in the auto industry, describing EVs as “smartphones on wheels” has become a go-to cliché.) This has plenty of advantages—the improved navigation, the fart noises—but it also means that your car may become worse because the software is outdated, not because the parts break. Even top-of-the-line phones are destined to become obsolete—still able to perform the basic functions like phone calls and texts, but stuck with an old operating system and failing apps. The same struggle is now coming for cars.
Software-dependent cars are still new enough that it’s unclear how they will age. “It’s becoming the ethos of the industry that everyone’s promising a continually evolving car, and we don’t yet know how they’re going to pull that off,” Sean Tucker, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. “Cars last longer than technology does.” The problem with cars as smartphones on wheels is that these two machines live and die on very different timescales. Many Americans trade in their phone every year and less than 30 percent keep an iPhone for longer than three years, but the average car on the road is nearly 13 years old. (Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment about how its cars age.)
Taxi companies don’t keep specific vehicles for 20 years, they wear out long before then. Keeping them maintained to pass inspection at that point would be a costly nightmare.
The first Tesla only came out 17 years ago, and it was a 2-door sports car… so yea it’s not really surprising you wouldn’t see 15 year old Teslas regularly. They do exist though. The Model S has only been out for 13 years, and there are definitely still first run Model S vehicles driving around. There are 8 from that original year for sale on Autotrader.com right now, all in running condition.
There are only 2 Prius C from 2012, and 2 more Prius V from the same year. Those were the first years of each of those models as well, just like the Tesla.
I think Teslas are shit though. They’re designer brand electric cars, poor quality, and they make zero financial sense at all compared to full EV models from the likes of Hyundai, Kia, or VW.
Also, like I said in an other comment, Taxis are not driven the same way that a regular person drives their car. Hybrids are absolutely perfect for the Taxi driving use case. They make almost no sense when used once a day to go to work, and then hit the grocery store and gym on the way home.