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4 days agoEV batteries are rated for 100K miles without any maintenance, and can often exceed that many times over.
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/02/nx-s1-5706658/electric-vehicle-battery-lifespan
You cannot run a Toyota more than 15k miles without maintenance. Usually it’s just an oil change, but there are so many moving parts that need regular maintenance, and many engines will just up and die before a battery will.
EV cars also have rhe benefit of needing less brake maintenance, though that is offset by the tire wear and weight of long range EV cars.
Something like a Citroën Ami will probably wear out the interior before any mechanical component dies. Maybe some rare maintenance like a tire change.
If that was true, why are they still saber rattling? Stupid dictators and bloodthirsty supporters lead to stupid wars, so I wouldn’t count it out.
Look at Ukraine. Russia had already de facto annexed most of the land that they hold today. Ukraine wasn’t willing to fight them to get it back. All of Russia’s neighbors were too scared to join EU or NATO. Europe was dependent on Russian gas and vulnerable to Russian coercion.
Putin started the war anyways.
Four years later and hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead, and the economy is crashing. Ukraine is bombing the shit out of Russia and occupied Ukraine and trying to take it all back. Oligarchs are going poor/dying. NATO now has a much larger budget than the Russian military, arguably stronger than it ever was during the Cold War. Putin has no way out of this war, if he withdraws he probably ends up in the Hague.
If he had stopped after 2014, Putin could have kept everything, but he kept breaking the ceasefires and escalating.