Absolute agree with this. With reduced ability to repair them the ecological balance might even be worse than for conventional cars, even if you heavily focus on just carbon dioxide.
I don't drive much and cars aren't a symbol of status anymore in my generation. So I have a 1000$ car (significant upgrade from my previous 500$ car) that gets repaired by a friend. It is extremely cheap for me. While I am by no means a car mechanic, attaching another piece of metal or exchanging some parts can be quite fun.
But repairs are simply not possible, even by qualified mechanics if they don't have access to proprietary diagnostics software that you sometimes need to just reset some error state. Of course a 0.50$ sensor also does cost hundreds of dollars if you need to get them from the manufacturer. The small circuit attached to the sensor supplies power and DRM. It would probably cost another 0.50$. The guy that blew up his Tesla was right, although Tesla isn't even the worst offender. The car industry is full of this shit.
I fix wrecked cars for fun, and have fixed about 10 Teslas so far. I would say model 3 and Y are easier to work on than most ICE cars. They have fewer parts, most parts are relatively easy to replace, there are no fuses to replace, no light bulbs to replace, and they have service manuals for all repair procedures available for free online. Price for parts is still high and they charge too much for their toolbox diagnostics software though.
I do the same, I am an amateur mechanic and I have worked on Tesla's and other EVs. In my experience, repairing an EV is no different from modern ICE cars.
In my experience, most people who believe that EVs are harder to repair appear to be owning older, simpler cars. These people often have either no experience with repairing cars, or only have experience with repairing older cars. Most have never owned, or worked on an EV car. And yet, they have a very strong opinion about its serviceability.
Yes, you need specialized equipment to work on EV drive-trains, just as you need specialized equipment to work on ICE drive-trains. You may not have this equipment, but professional repair shops do. You also need access to vendor specific software to perform certain repairs, I don't condone that, but reality is that this is needed for all modern cars, regardless of the drive-train type.
As technology advances, professional mechanics need to keep learning to stay up-to-date, just as how software developers do. Those that don't, can still keep working on old cars for a long time to go, so not every mechanic or shop owner chooses to do so. The same goes for software developers.
However, these are also often the type of mechanic (or graybeard programmer) who are always grumpy about new tech they don't understand, and how much better everything used to be, just because they do understand old tech. It's these mechanics that spread the 'EV bad, carburetor good' nonsense, which seems to stick with most people.
Serviceability of cars in general is becoming worse, but this has nothing to do with the drive-train.
>most people who believe that EVs are harder to repair appear to be owning older, simpler cars.
Opening the hood on a modern ICE is intimdating. So much (neatly, precisely) crammed in there (covered with plastic) I wouldn't even know where to start. Compare that to an old truck, where you can practically climb inside the engine compartment beside the motor...
> Serviceability of cars in general is becoming worse, but this has nothing to do with the drive-train.
That's precisely the point the presenter of the conference was making. She even explicitly mentions there's actually good, repairable products in the electric motorbike category.
Still, that's a sad situation that's damaging to the environment and to the countless trapped customers who have a mechanically-valid car but can't drive it due to electronics/software shenanigans. Given that electric cars are marketed as an alternative to save the planet, we could reasonably expect that they be held to a higher serviceability standard... not higher than ICE vehicles mind you, just higher than the "fuck you buy a new car" attitude all car makers are displaying right now.
Btw yesterday I took off a rear motor off a model Y. Probably took me about 2 hours to remove. So much easier than removing am engine or a transmission from an ICE car. Most difficult part to replace is the HV battery- it’s a whole day job. The biggest problem with EVs right now is that there are not enough third party (affordable) shops that are willing to work on them.
Would it be possible for me to convert a classic car to electric if I got my hands on a drivetrain and battery? I used to fit V8 engines into old cars so I can fabricate stuff, but I’m worried a bit about the battery voltage and safety.
Yes there are kits for sale that will allow you to interfere with the Tesla drivetrain, you would wire that ecu to the accelerator pedal, etc. Most conversations use battery modules from model S/X as they are smaller modules than ones from 3/Y. You would need to fabricate mounting for the motor(s) and possibly custom half shafts and suspension. And custom mounting for battery modules, custom cooling system, power steering and ac must be converted to electric. Lots of work.
There are companies offering conversion parts and people self-building EVs out of ICE cars if you look for them online. Haven't looked up much, as for me a car is just a money sink, but they exist.
I would recommend you watch the talk in its entirety. The presenter explicitly addresses this point. She says modern cars are marvels of technology and the problems lie in the electronics/software architecture making the entire car operation dependent on every single part. That means if one part is broken (say central door locking) modern cars often will refuse to work at all.
This is a problem in itself, but is exacerbated by overcharging for replacement parts, and by lack of free-software support to hack around such issues. Examples are given of specific models exhibiting such undesired behavior.
> the problems lie in the electronics/software architecture
Is this shown in data? My experience is quite different. <50% of my issues have been electrical in nature and the electrical ones are usually much cheaper to fix.
I agree with you an electronic failure can be easy to fix. Or it can be okay not to fix, for example i don't care if my central car computer can't control the opening/closing of my windows. The problem is, are manufacturers making it easy/cheap to fix? And are they making it so a tiny fault in a subsystem crashes the entire car to a halt? The answers are, in my humble opinion, no and yes respectively.
>This is a problem in itself, but is exacerbated by overcharging for replacement parts, and by lack of free-software support to hack around such issues.
These things feel like they'll be market-sorted in the future. Computers become cheaper, we know that. Software does too, as it becomes tried and tests and its marginal cost drops, or it moves to open source.
We are still so early in the EV revolution. I know lots of people with lots of cars, and only a handful have EVs.
> These things feel like they'll be market-sorted in the future.
I've heard this argument in so many fields, but never seen it play out. Housing was supposed to be market-sorted, yet there are still millions of empty dwellings outnumbering by far homeless people.
In a field that's closer to HN fields of interest, i've heard the very same argument about FLOSS on smartphones. There certainly were some progress in Android land with the mandatory device trees, and on niche products like Librem/Pinephone, but there were also major regressions with for example iCloud/Knox locking becoming a pain for second-hand hardware.
Overall, i don't trust an industry whose greedy interest is to keep us buying more to regulate itself to provide better services for existing products.
I think part of this is a deliberate measure to make it harder for modern cars to be used as weapons (of course, there are other more prominent factors like fuel efficiency and safety in accidents). With crumple zones and crash sensors, vehicles are often rendered inert in the event of a collision, and I think this is intentional; compare that with the Nice truck (which was obviously much larger than a car) that barreled through 80 people.
It's basically the opposite of what you would want in a military vehicle.
There certainly is a difference to older cars. That is what I wanted to say, it is not specific to EV cars, Tesla was just an example for a car which is controlled through central electronics. Fuses are easy to replace as they are meant to be replaced. EV probably need fewer because its batteries offer smoother voltages than your alternator. Lights don't need to be replaced as often but it got more complicated. And deeper operations like replacing a track rod is almost impossible or very work intensive in newer cars. And these are maintenance parts too if you assume a longer life span of a car.
What I would criticise is that there is often not a real technical reason why things got harder to replace or that there is an absence of a general purpose diagnostic unit.
Conventional fuses are probably replaced by electronic, auto-resettable fuses like polyswitches (some kind of temperature coefficient thermistor). Alternator or not, fuses are needed to limit the amount of energy a circuit can draw in the event that it malfunctions or is short-circuited.
Replacing a track rod ends is not a deep operation, is a routine one and very easy to perform even if you can not elevate the car as most shops do. It does requires an alignment afterwards.
However, inconvenient access to diagnostic software and rare parts/components that can only be sourced from the official dealer are a big problem, and one that the market cannot solve because there's little incentive for value chain to do so.
I would like to see legislation that forces manufacturers to publish free-to-everyone specifications, firmware and diagnostic software whenever the component is commercialized for some amount of time, like 5 years or whatever makes sense. That would made old cars much more maintainable and prolong the life for several years and/or several 100 thousands kms.
> because there's little incentive for value chain to do so.
The suppliers of car makers probably would gladly sell the components but they have to be careful as their largest customer might want to grab a premium here as well. Sometimes they still sell the exact same parts under another brand name though.
I believe Tesla has far fewer suppliers as other car makers so they probably also have a larger influence on the few that they have.
Aren't polyswitches too sluggish for a car of electronics? Perhaps sensible for starting the motor though.
Yea can’t really service the new pack :( have to replace the whole thing. Right Tesla battery packs are expensive (~$8K for a used pack) but once battery costs go down, in perhaps 10 years, I imagine a third party shop would be able to swap the battery for about as much as it currently costs to replace an engine in a typical Volkswagen.
Stupid thing is that battery packs are eminently repairable, usually a few cells go bad and can be replaced.
Tesla is pretty arrogant today, but going forward you have to conclude that battery interoperability and standardisation will be a big thing given that it's the single most expensive part. That will be motivated by lower costs for standardised parts.
That's where the "reconditioned" market comes in, right? With aeroplane piston engines you can send in a "core" and get back a reconditioned engine. Your original core is then reconditioned and sold to the next customer. The same could be done for battery packs.
More modules that can be replaced individually or used to diagnose a problem is a good thing.
If an ICE car had all the fuses in a locked box (which required replacing the whole thing when one burned out) you would correctly identify that as a negative for the end user.
I'm sure there were reasons why they went for the alternative at Tesla but "easy to work on" wasn't one of them.
No light bulbs to replace? LEDs die too, you know. Only a matter of time before they start flickering or burn out. Replacing them will be fun, as they probably weren’t meant to be replaced. Seen a great deal of such “long life” LEDs die prematurely.
totally different from my old Toyota IQ. To change a LED you had to disassemble partially the motor. So it was 30 bucks for lamp and 120 bucks for the service.
Same thoughts. The EV revolution is one step forward, one major step back. This hasn't started with EVs though. The frog was being boiled for the last 15 or so years with ICE cars. Like you said, repairing any modern car is a huge DRM minefield designed to milk the customer dry.
I had an old Fiat which was a delight to repair. You could tell everything was designed to be easily accessible for quick and easy repairs with basic tools or even tool-less. Air filters were just held in place with clips you can undo in 2 seconds and swap them yourself. Now I own a modern Fiat and the filters are bolted down with custom screws and even the user manual tells you to visit your dealer to ... replace your air filters. Sorry, but fuck off Fiat! That's the last time I'm giving you my money. I hope the EU fines your greedy ass for these deliberate anti consumer designs. Though I would expect Italy to veto any such moves.
It's no wonder that some of the most desirable second hand cars are the one build around the mid 2000's as they have enough electronics for safety and comfort while still not having enough planned obsolescence built in, being reliable and cheap and easy to repair.
Modern cars are becoming an expensive subscription service rather than something you own and it seems like the big German brands are leading the pack.
I bought a VW Golf several years ago. Sales guy showed off user-replacable zero-screws bulbs as a major improvement. Which was sort of true, since my previous card, Ford Focus, required unbolting and removing headlight to replace it's bulbs...
A major improvement would be LED headlights which have a MTBF that is so high that they can essentially last for the lifetime of the vehicle. Zero "bulb" replacements. (LED headlights exist BTW, and I'm sure there are VW Golf trim levels that include them nowadays)
The problem with LED headlights is they cost a fortune. And you can't have a standardised aftermarket replacement. Of course they're nice if nothing wrong happens. But with old cars, eventually it will fail. Meanwhile for classic lights, you can polish the glass, maybe reflector, put in new bulb and it will keep working forever.
Oh God - flashbacks to trying to replace a blown bulb in my Focus. "This will be easy". Two hours later and some bleeding knuckles later, took it to the garage for them to swear at.
Those concerns are overblown, it assumes that the only choices will be aggressively closed cars. Even today people are swapping out Tesla management systems on batteries and motors for third party systems and avoiding the software issue wholesale. People have also hacked solutions to keep the existing systems in place. Finally regulation is a given if car makers keep down the unrepairable path.
Since electric cars are mechanically much simpler they will be easier to repair and cheaper overall. Currently economies of scale have not kicked in but when they do (and battery tech improves) the most popular cars will be very cheap, lower range models with standard parts made by third parties. You need to look at consumer electronics and home appliances for the likely model, not the high-end car business model that dominates the electric car industry at the moment and is transitory.
Yeah there's a vibrant Tesla hacking community already, and companies selling control modules that'll plug right into the powertrain so you can drop it into the unexpected vehicle of choice.
Once the volume of production goes up that market will become global. Once EVs filter into the Shenzen markets, parts availability at various price/quality points will explode.
I disagree with the idea that electric vehicles are inherently more difficult to repair. If anything they are simpler, more modular, and with a greatly reduced part count, will in general require less specialised knowledge to undertake common repairs compared to modern combustion vehicles.
> "But repairs are simply not possible, even by qualified mechanics if they don't have access to proprietary diagnostics software"
Tesla, for one, makes its service manuals available for free to anyone. Their diagnostic software ("Toolbox 3") is also available to anyone, but with a paid subscription.
That Tesla was completely stripped from all drive train components, including battery, before blowing it up. Those parts are now in use in an EV conversion project, in a Mercedez Benz G-Class vehicle, working just fine.
So only an empty Tesla shell was blown up, everything else was repurposed.
I keep wondering if there is a good business opportunity here...
I've mentioned similar thoughts before, but a shop that specializes in providing and/or installing standardized "restomod packages" with tuneable ECUs, modern solid-state power management[1], reliable sensors, wire harnesses, and other supporting parts (silicon coolant hoses, oil cooler upgrades, etc.) across a range of popular 90s/2000s vehicles, or even "de-teching" more modern cars like current-gen BMWs: great-driving RWD chassis, rock-solid B58 inline-6...but....monthly subscription for heated seats?! GTFO... Pull all the electronics out and replace with a race-grade harness connected to Denso (aka Toyota) sensors! Then drive for 20 years with nothing breaking. Basically expanding what I call "the Singer treatment" to a line of vehicles beyond air-cooled 911s[2].
Maybe that’s balanced by requiring less repairs? In 4 years in my tesla all I had to do was change the tires. By that time in my ICE vehicle I had been to the mechanic and/or jiffy lube at least 15 times
I have an eleven year old Ford Focus and it's had an oil change twice a year and apart from tires, that has been the extent of the maintenance it has required.
Given the price of new cars, there's no way I can justify getting rid of my Focus.
That was back when a former Boeing engineer was running Ford after Boeing promoted a bean counter over him.
I think those smaller cars are also more durable. Heavy SUVs just have higher loads and need more complexity to support them ... which leads to a higher failure rate.
Same here. It is the european version, don't know if it is comparable with the US one. Maybe it also has another name in the US. Ford was one of the few manufacturers that did build specifically new cars for the european market. They became the most successful US manufacturer here. Or even the only one since I don't know any others. Focus was a model that just never had any issues aside from maybe a 20 year old lambda probe that lets makes starting an already hot engine an issue some times. They are ridiculously dependable cars.
I like that car too and getting parts is ridiculously cheap and you can exchange almost everything yourself. Although Teslas will perhaps one day have the same advantage because older cars that were numerous once are significantly cheaper to repair.
The presenter in the linked video argues that all cars - EV or ICE - are getting both better and worse. Better in purely mechanical terms where technological marvels enable them to achieve great durability... worse in overall terms where some electronics is going to fail somewhere and suddenly the entire car won't start.
So i don't think you're wrong to say in specific benchmarks EVs are crazy reliable. But from what i've seen and understood of modern cars, complexity and interdependence of secondary subsystems make them super brittle and very highly likely to end up in a landfill under a decade after leaving the factory.
In fact we already have stats on that where car recalls keep on increasing (more than x4 in a decade), and EVs are not exempt from that as they seem to have ~2x more probability to be recalled (on average) than an ICE car.
Probably never because the industry almost completely transitioned away from belts to chains over the '00s because consumers hated having to do a multi thousand dollar service as preventative maintenance every 100k or so.
This must be unique to the US, many vehicles in Europe still have a belt. Even with a chain you'll probably still have auxiliary belts which need replacing, water pump, etc.
For small engines, a manufacturer will use the same one everywhere in the world with very little difference. Only when you get to large engines do you see things unique to the US.
The issue with belts/chains is if the engine is designed for interference or not. If the belt/chain breaks do the valves and pistons come in contact with each other or not? That's a design decision with costs and benefits.
With an interference engine, a broken belt means a destroyed engine - preventative maintenance is mandatory. Or you go with a timing chain.
If you don't have an interference engine, you replace the broken belt and drive away. Preventive maintenance is a good idea but not quite so critical.
Interference engines can run with much higher compression ratios and get better performance for their size. So you see more timing chains with higher performance engines. If your car doesn't have a turbo and isn't aimed at the speed racer crowd, chances are better that it has a timing belt.
They'll use the same engine, but quite often different engines are available in different territories. I know that the VAG 1.5 TSI (used in lots of cars here) still uses a belt for example, but the 2.0 TSI is chain. Perhaps in America only the 2.0 is available.
In the EU, vehicle manufacturers are required by regulation 2018/858 to give access to diagnostic tools to any repair shop. See Article 61 of 2018/858 [0].
At the moment it's a bit of a pain but there's an upcoming amendment to standardise the access process.
As a relatively non-car guy, Tesla's are so much easier to do maintenance on than gasoline cars. Mostly because there is so much less to do. Here's my maintenance schedule, which is more than what Tesla recommends.
- replace wipers as necessary
- rotate summer & winter tires semi-annually (cold climates)
- inspect & lube brakes annually
- test brake fluid biannually
- replace cabin air filter biannually
- replace A/C dessicant bag every 6 years.
So if you learn how to test your brake fluid (really easy with the right gauge), replace the cabin air filter and lube your brakes, you only have to go in for maintenance once every 6 years. All of those things are easier than changing your oil on a modern car IMO.
Not really. It doesn’t matter if I’ll get to choose between $10000 first party battery or $8000 replacement. Both of those prices are outside of my reach.
If a few cells fail, the replacement is cheap... if the battery is actually designed in a way individual cells can be reached (physically) and replaced.
If the current state of vehicle repair is any indication the only people who will replace "a few cells" will have a shop located in a rough part of town, not speak english and will require you to pay cash and the HN crowd will deride them and their business model for the most part.
I don't drive much and cars aren't a symbol of status anymore in my generation. So I have a 1000$ car (significant upgrade from my previous 500$ car) that gets repaired by a friend. It is extremely cheap for me. While I am by no means a car mechanic, attaching another piece of metal or exchanging some parts can be quite fun.
But repairs are simply not possible, even by qualified mechanics if they don't have access to proprietary diagnostics software that you sometimes need to just reset some error state. Of course a 0.50$ sensor also does cost hundreds of dollars if you need to get them from the manufacturer. The small circuit attached to the sensor supplies power and DRM. It would probably cost another 0.50$. The guy that blew up his Tesla was right, although Tesla isn't even the worst offender. The car industry is full of this shit.