"Auto dealers eye a weird electric future" service-free EV is a hypothesis - article link

[Tooney]

https://www.eenews.net/articles/auto-dealers-eye-a-weird-electric-future/

A few clips:
"Dealers in 2022 find themselves in a stressful spot. Customers are clamoring for electric vehicles they don’t yet have in stock. The automakers promise that the cars are coming, sometime, but want dealers to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare for them right now. Dealers aren’t sure this crescendo of EV buyer interest will last, or how this brave new ecosystem is supposed to make them money.

“Everything that’s being introduced is version 1.0,” said John Malishenko, the operations manager of Germain Motor Co., a dealer group with locations in four states."
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"The expenses, however, are real. Rostron estimated that the dealership has invested more than $150,000, including $80,000 to build charging stations.

To prepare for the coming electrics, dealers have bought new, taller electric lifts needed to access the battery, and new forklifts to carry the battery around. They need new tools. They pay servicepeople’s wages as they learn how to repair this new platform."
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"In a presentation to a clutch of riveted salespeople, Renee Stephens called the service-free EV “a hypothesis.”

Stephens is a vice president of We Predict, an analytics firm. It crunched the service records of 19 million vehicles spanning four years. The results for the EV portion were surprising. In the first three months, EVs cost three times as much to service as gas-powered cars. In the first year, that gulf narrowed only slightly.

The reason, she thinks, is that the platform is new. Automakers haven’t perfected their manufacturing techniques; vehicle recalls are more common. Customers pay more for labor hours because repair workers, still learning the technology, take twice as long to diagnose the problem.

In the ensuing years, the price of servicing an EV drops dramatically, until by year three, the cost of service is equal to that of an internal-combustion-engine car.

“People ask if EVs need less repairs, and I say, ’Not yet,’” Stephens concluded." "

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[nickmdp]

Either the writer or the presenter has no idea what the word hypothesis means, and makes me question the entirety of the article. Calling something a hypothesis is just declaring your initial guess before you do more rigorous study of the subject. It neither implies true or false, and calling it out like that seems more like bad writing.

That said, if the only point at which EVs cost more to maintain is in the first 3 months, well then that's great news, because if I have to pay for any repairs for a brand new car (even the cheapest ones you can find, let alone a Porsche) in the first three months, I'll probably start cursing out the entire dealership.

Also, if the service costs drop dramatically after a very high first year and is equal to an ICE by year three, that means to me that EVs actually do need fewer repairs in the long run. This just seems like a half-baked article where they didn't really do much research or editing, just kind of wrote things down and posted it.