The oil that lubricates the combustion chambers and pistons gets burnt and filled with nasty combustion goop. An impressive amount of cleverness goes to minimizing this, but the oil that sees the combustion chambers still goes bad at many times the rate of any other lubricant.

Even on an ICE vehicle, you have transmission oil and differential oil and lubricants in your air conditioning compressor and brake hydraulics and grease smeared on CV joints and door mechanisms and pretty much everything else that moves. But you still talk about "changing THE oil" and mean the oil-that-sees-combustion specifically (along with, typically, the filter that fights the constant battle of getting the worst combustion products out of it). I personally think that makes it fair to say "EVs don't require oil changes" because even though they don't magically eliminate the other lubrication systems or the need to maintain them, they do eliminate the one that is so much more obnoxious than the rest that we commonly called it "THE oil change" before this was ever a debate.

It does, plenty of things inside the EV require all kinds of oils, just the maintenance cycle isn't gallons and gallons every x months. You are looking at years.

I got service centers trying to rotate my tires every 3k miles because "ev". The oil change as well, oh you need to change oil every 5k because... because why?

They do have some gearbox oil that is usually considered to last a lifetime but some sources advise changing it every 100k miles or so. This is analogous to transmission fluid in an ICEV.

There is oil for the gearbox, but there's no scheduled maintenance for it at all, and in practice, people regularly get hundreds of thousands of miles without ever needing to think about it.

The seal between the piston and the cylinder isn't perfect, so when the engine runs combustion products will mix with the oil, making the oil eventually unusable. That's why ICE engines meed oil changes so often.

There are plenty of things that still need oil and grease in EVs still, but it is in such low quantities that we could synthesize most of that from air and it still not being a cost of any concern.

I would imagine if there is oil in the electric motors that is “lifetime” but test really probably 300k miles, so if you drive the car into the ground, you probably would want to service that at some point, assuming they are serviceable without destruction.

You’ve got parts with oil that have to be done every 10 years or are completely sealed into the part and are expected to last as long as the part does.

Yeah, but the intervals are much longer.

Nope. I've had a Model 3 since 2018 and besides swapping out tires and window washer fluid, no maintenance.

There was suggested battery fluid maintenance when I first got the car every 3 years or so, but they removed that recommendation.

It's one of the reasons I just can't go back to a regular gas car.

Surely at some point, but it hasn’t yet happened in my short 3 years owning one

The biggest one that needs changing would be the differential.

There is not. Just brake and washer fluid and coolant.

There’s still gearbox oil, diff oil, and brake fluid. These last far longer and are far smaller volumes than engine oil, though.

Transmission/differential oil tends to last a very long time (150-400k, unit doesn’t matter). Automatics require relatively frequent oil changes in comparison, but they’re using the oil to transmit power. Lots of greased parts, but again, the grease will last about as long as the part (mostly because the grease falling apart makes the part fail), which usually lasts the life of the car.

Bearings and shocks have grease, sure. But those things last decades after installation. They're probably two orders of magnitude lower in volume consumption than engine oil, which gets contaminated and disposed of at the rate of like a gallon or two per vehicle per month.

Like, the price differential is so high that the high end artisinal lubricant market is dominated by chemically synthesized products that aren't strictly petroleum at all (though many of the reagents used to manufacture them probably come out of the petrochemical world).

Correct. ~140k miles on my 2018 Model S, tires, wipers and wiper fluid, and one battery pack heater replaced (deprecated, no longer used in newer builds) are all that have been done. Motors are lubricated at manufacture and sealed for life.

https://ev-lectron.com/blogs/blog/tesla-electric-vehicle-pow...

Not really. Most stuff is sealed for life. So it's more replacing whole parts when they fail than changing the oil in something. But many bearings will last hundreds of thousands of miles and never need changing for the entire life of the car. Quite amazing really.

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