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Comment by jedmeyers | Hacker News Reader

The is no practical way to service a Tesla yourself or in a 3rd party repair shop, like you can a 15 year old Civic. Therefore used Teslas would quickly become financially disadvantageous to service and their price would approach zero on a secondary market.

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The is no practical way to service a Tesla yourself or in a 3rd party repair shop

Do you think that will still be true in 8, 12, or 15 years?

There's nothing about an EV that makes it fundamentally more difficult to service or repair compared to an ICE vehicle, other than the fact that they're not as common yet. But in time, EVs will be as ordinary as any Honda.

There's some interesting videos on YouTube where a guy in Switzerland bought a used Tesla motor and inverter, dragged it back to his flat and managed to power it up and spin it using his own custom built universal controller (he's planning to use it in his own electric car conversion).

The point is: EV aren't some magic black box that can't be understood by normal people. They can be hacked, serviced, repaired just like any other car.

Which current production car is easily serviceable at third party repair shops? They are pretty much all closed down computers. Also, most services required on the engine and support for older cars are just not required on a Tesla. So it is not obvious that it would be more expensive to maintain than any other car, most likely the opposite.

Things are really not as bad as you think. Even in brand new cars you can replace the brakes, suspension, wishbones, dampers, steering column, oil pans, all filters, oil&fuel pumps, service the air conditioning unit and I am reasonably certain you could do full engine maintenance as well. Most importantly, parts for any new vehicle are publicly available, be it a Fiat 500 or a Mercedes S-Class.

On the other hand, Tesla will not sell you the parts. Tesla can at any time deactivate your vehicle if they think it's not fit for driving(as they already do in case of accidents), even remotely, and you have to bring it to their dealership to have it reactivated after it passes their tests. I can't think of any conventional car that you have to do that for, I've seen Range Rovers after horrible crashes that have been fixed and put on the road again, and no one had to ask Land Rover for permission to do that.

But even if we forget about that - the biggest cost of owning a second hand Tesla is always going to be the battery. As the value of a Tesla falls down with time, the cost of a new battery for it will remain constant, making a purchase of a second hand Tesla prohibitive. Think about it this way - a cost of 2009 MacBook might have fallen down to around ~$100, but a new battery for it will cost you ~$150. The computer got cheap with time but the parts remained the same price, making a purchase of a 7-year old laptop a bad idea, unless you can do without a battery(and obviously you can't do that in a car).

In conventional cars, if you have a 20-year old Mercedes with a dead engine, you go online and find the same engine, with fewer miles on it and in running condition, you buy it for a few hundred dollars, get it installed and you are back on the road. In a Tesla, no one is going to fit you a second-hand electric motor if your old one dies, because Tesla won't allow it.

>Even in brand new cars you can replace the brakes

Just as a note, that's not always true. Replacing brake pads is one thing, but if you need to take the caliper off for service or air gets into the ABS system, you may find yourself unable to properly bleed the brakes without access to the tools needed to get the ECU to bleed the ABS system.

Depending on the car there really might not be any feasible way to complete some repair other than to have the dealer fix it. It's not even just obscure dealer only parts that other vendors don't make. When it comes to anything related to programming control modules, the manufacturers seem to want to lock this down as much as possible.

How do you get air into a closed system? Taking a caliper off does nothing to introduce air into the system. Taking a caliper off is how you replace the pads. (still trying to square how you think it's ok to replace pads but not take a caliper off, but it may come down to interpretation, to me, taking a caliper off is not the same as replacing a caliper, since the caliper is attached to the car and needs to be detached (taken off) to swap pads (and rotors for that matter)). During the course of the average brake job, the only items in need of replacement are the pads and the rotors. Calipers only if they are sticking or in need of an upgrade. Changing brakes is not out of the realm of possibility for 99% of car owners.

I would argue any suspension parts are user servicable, engines too. The computer doesn't car if you work on the car. Those plastic covers are just to make it look good. Now diagnostics are definitely different. But you can buy a service guide, a scan-tool, and maybe a multi-meter, and you can diagnose any modern car. You could probably fix them too. The addition of the computer has not changed the makeup of a cars engine, just the addition of sensors.

I still don't see why it would have to go to a dealer. Anything related to programming control modules? Are we tuning the car or repairing it?

>How do you get air into a closed system?

By disconnecting hoses or removing parts that suddenly make it an open system.

>Taking a caliper off does nothing to introduce air into the system.

No but gravity does, the brake calipers themselves actually don't move that far at all between no brake and full brake. It's only moving a tiny amount of fluid into the brake so just an air bubble or two is all it takes for the petal to go to the floor without doing much in the way of applying pressure.

>still trying to square how you think it's ok to replace pads but not take a caliper off, but it may come down to interpretation

What I meant was to totally remove the caliper from the car and disconnect the banjo bolt for the hose. As for just changing pads, you leave that alone and just remove the bolt for one slide pin and then the whole caliper flips up exposing the pads on most cars.

The concern for needing to bleed the brake system completely instead of just a bit at a wheel is if you need to do anything like replace the master cylinder or there was a leak in a wheel cylinder that was fixed but had already drawn air in through half of the master cylinder. If there is a slow leak in a hose or seal it's not uncommon for someone to never check brake fluid level and the low brake fluid sensor might not even come on if it's stuck in position over the course of 15-20 years. Even if it does someone might ignore the brake indicator light because they can still stop okay until it draws air in.

>The addition of the computer has not changed the makeup of a cars engine, just the addition of sensors.

Not too drastically but the computer still needs to know when certain things are changed depending on the vehicle. For instance, on certain BMWs if the battery under the seat is replaced, there is some kind of battery management system that needs to be reset. Failure to reset this can even cause damage to the replacement battery according to BMW. http://www.bimmerforums.com/forum/showthread.php?1355106-Why...

>Anything related to programming control modules?

"Programming" isn't exactly what I would've called it but for better or for worse, that's the terminology. You're not flashing new software on it so much as configuring it. It's as much programming as "programming" an answering machine is. With that said, let's say I need to replace an instrument panel, ECU, PCM, body ECU, etc, then I very well might need a special tool to pair it with the car. For a new ECU or instrument panel you might need to program in the VIN, mileage, emissions related settings, etc. The point being that while it's not a given that you'll need some obscure dealer only tool to do that, things are trending more and more towards that. Adding more computers and sensors is certainly a good thing in the automotive world but it can be a detriment to repairability until manufacturers start being a bit more reasonable with access to all of the firmware on a modern car.

What car for example? Flushing the brakes is easy low risk maintenance - if there is a manufacturer that's actively blocking flushing via ECU I would like to avoid them.

For instance, Jeeps with ABS. It's not that the manufacturer is actively doing something to prevent you from bleeding the brakes, it's just that to properly bleed the ABS system, you need the ABS system to activate a certain solenoid while you're bleeding them. This necessarily means that something has to talk to the ECU and tell it to bleed the ABS system. The problem is that that something is proprietary tools and diagnostic equipment that the vendor has no real incentive in trying to make accessible to some small shop or the DIY crowd at AutoZone.

Flushing the brakes is fine on every car I've ever heard of. Bleeding air out of the brakes is where it can get more complicated but I'm only talking about cases where air could've feasibly have gotten into the ABS unit. So if you were flushing out some old brake fluid and you managed to drain the reservoir without noticing it, now you have air in the master cylinder and potentially the ABS unit.

The Mac example for batteries is an unrealistic one. For most computers, replacement batteries are actually relatively cheap.

You do make a good point about the motors, though. I haven't seen much hope for an outside replacement for that, though.

You are correct. We don't know what batteries will cost in 8 years though. They might be as cheap as a used Mercedes engine then.

Most of them.

The little third party garage I've used for years has enough of the diagnostic computer kit to handle most problems. When something unusual pops up they have a good relationship with at least some of the main dealers to proceed - without me having to pay main dealer prices on anything.

They have the added advantage that I trust them to have done the work they say they have.

They're not unusual as far as independents go, just a couple of guys doing a good job.

I don't think many independents can support electric vehicles, but I'm sure specialists will spring up as the market continues to mature.

My 2 years old BMW is one of those heavily computerized cars and can easily be serviced at third party shops. There's a whole network of them that specialize in BMW service, maintenance, and modding. Not to mention that anyone interested can, ahem, 'acquire' BMW service software and start hacking away at their car. You need to expand your tool set to include an Ethernet to ODB2 adapter, but that won't stop even an amateur tinkerer like me. Teslas, on the other hand, don't even provide a working ODB2 port, and attempts to hook up to the car's internal network were met with legal threats.

Teslas, on the other hand, don't even provide a working ODB2 port, and attempts to hook up to the car's internal network were met with legal threats.

I don't know about legal threats, but there is information available online about how to access the Model S CAN bus:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Exploring-the-Tesla-Model-S-...

My wife has a 9 year old BMW which is servicable at 3rd party shops. Including sensor work and debugging error messages. BMWs are so ubiquitous, perhaps part of the reason.

There is a small industry of third party companies servicing hybrid vehicles at the moment, including refurbishing of battery packs.

If the product is successful, similar services will emerge for Tesla products.

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