[mpg_numbers_guy]

Do you think electric vehicle batteries will ever decrease in cost, or as technology improves we will see batteries going for an increasingly high rate? Consider the 1st gen Insight battery for $1500 to the recent Prius battery for $2500+, to the new Leaf batteries for $5000-$8000. Basically once a car's battery dies, the car will be totaled. For batteries it's more of a when rather than an if; with gasoline engines some are unreliable, but others have proven reliable for decades and hundreds of thousands of miles. I'm all about hybrid cars - especially ones like the Insight and Civic Hybrid in their Gen 1 versions - where you can choose to run it with battery and without, but there are so many expensive points of failure with electric cars. Most of the time you can't perform major repairs on an electric car (I'm sure some can, so don't rake me over the coals for saying that), while an average car owner with decent mechanical knowledge can do most of the repairs on a gasoline powered car. I guess the main question is if the savings from no oil changes, potential transmission replacements from unreliable manufacturers, etc., will ever compensate for eventually having to replace a $4000-$8000 battery. If most cars ever go full electric, I imagine used car market prices will change drastically. Even now it's harder to estimate the value of a used hybrid compared to a general ICE-powered automobile.

(this coming from a guy studying computer engineering rather than mechanical engineering)