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Comment by gioele | Hacker News Reader

In the early 2000s there was an Italian company in Emilia Romagna doing these combustion → electric makeovers on an industrial scale. Their average customers where municipalities and large businesses (airports, for example) converting their existing fleet of ICE cars into electric vehicles.

They lost most of their businesses around 2012 when Italy passed a bill making all these converted cars not roadworthy without an explicit permit from the original manufacturer, permits that very rarely where granted. (That law got partially overturned in 2017, but the FUD and the chilling effect remain today.)

Source: a friend of mine being laid off by that firm in 2012 + http://mondoelettrico.blogspot.com/search?q=retrofit

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An Italian friend of mine told me that Fiat group and Eni, the oil and gas company, lobbied hard against this and any other electrification efforts in the country.

Could this be the reason?

As a Fiat owner, I feel disgusted, but while they do make decent ICE cars, they have been worringly absent from the electric-car stage.

> Could this be the reason?

Probably is seeing how VW/BMW/Mercedes, PSA/Renault and Fiat are important to their respective host countries (Germany, France and Italy). Those companies are always lobbying hard regulators at national and since the 90's at European level to gain advantages and protect their market.

There is a very telling anecdote from the 80s/90s in Europe, where supermarket grew in size and were ready to take on all retail business including car resale. This was made an exception so European car manufacturer could keep their high profit margin (relatively) allowed by their approved resale points.

The Fiat 500e has been in production since 2013 (by Chrysler, in Mexico), but due to weird regulatory incentives, is only for sale in California and Oregon.

> The Fiat 500e has been in production since 2013 (by Chrysler, in Mexico), but due to weird regulatory incentives, is only for sale in California and Oregon.

You mean, due to it being a compliance car only? Fiat actively discourages people from buying them - or at least the CEO does/did.

https://insideevs.com/news/353886/kbb-secures-amazing-deal-f...

There is an all-new electric Fiat 500, based on a new electric-only platform, in development for a 2020 release.

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/motor-shows-geneva-motor-...

Interesting. The existing version uses stock powertrain components from Bosch that are common to several other small EVs. I wonder if they have developed a new lower cost system internally.

I think they lose money on every car, but are required to sell a certain percentage of them to remain on those markets.

Often called a “compliance car.” Any electric car produced in low numbers and only sold in certain states is probably being sold at a loss to meet some efficiency, emissions, or electrification target in the law.

I'm aware of at least 100 people that took advantage of a screaming good lease deal on them a few years back, that was ~$80/month with 0 down for 3 years. They were desperate to move them. The deal was absolutely insane, though. Given the cost savings on fuel, it was virtually a free car, and that's before you even factor in other kinds of savings.

Looks like Fiat/Chrysler banked on a merger, they just recently tried and failed a merger with Renault, which has a successful electric car programme with the Zoe. They look significantly behind the times.

I don't often believe conspiracies, but I cannot understand these sort of things... what was the justification for such law? security? Industry protectionism?

Safety is a legitimate reason, unless they were doing the full-blown car certification, including crash-testing. I'm definitely in favor of giving green technology a pass to some extent, but it would be hard to figure out exactly to which extent. Unregulated cars were deathtraps.

Safety and ‘explicit permit from the original manufacturer’ are unrelated. If they had required say crash test data that could have been a safety issue, but permissions from the manufacture is simple corruption.

Agreed, if that's the whole story. I was thinking that permission from the manufacturer would be an alternative to doing tests which were infeasible at their scale.

> permissions from the manufacture is simple corruption

Depending on interpretation that would open for liability of a modified vehicle by a third party for the manufacturer.

or, depending on interpretation, it wouldn't.

>Safety and ‘explicit permit from the original manufacturer’ are unrelated.

Maybe. But your source is an anonymous poster on the forum. I'm not saying they made it up, but that there's likely more to the story. It isn't exactly far fetched to think there is strict regulation about how you can modify your car for the roads. The "explicit permit" might be to signify that everything is done to the highest standards.

I don't need to get permission from Jeep to modify my car, I just need to get it inspected and approved. This is clearly a power move to protect their industry.

You aren’t doing mass volume conversions adding fuel tanks in areas where they were not intended which is basically what happened when you add lithium batteries

Yes, but it is still the state safety regulators responsibility to allow or disallow a car on the road and not the company.

>I just need to get it inspected and approved

By whom?

>This is clearly a power move to protect their industry.

You're arguing against a conspiracy for which not a shred of evidence has been provided.

Obviously a power move? Do you, in fact, know that paperwork from the manufacturer is required for any modifications, and what the source and/or requirements of it are? Or have you dreamed up some conspiracy where permission from the manufacturer is required to modify your car because you read a random comment on HackerNews (despite the fact that there's a massive aftermarket modding community in the real world)?

I also find it quaint that some posters here think we need to regulate mortgage loans because people aren't capable of calculating interest and what they owe, but the same people should be able to replace the fuel tank in their vehicle with 1000lbs of combustibles, in their garage, and then take it out onto the road. With no oversight.

This is an interesting point. I'm totally on-board with people being able to do this in their own garage. I'm fine with a person doing that contracting an engineering firm to build components of their conversion. I think even if a company provided the bits in kit form I could live with that. It starts getting a bit iffy to me when you can turn up with a donor and drive away in an electric vehicle and certainly if you can turn up and ask for an electric [insert car] and they source all of the parts and do the conversion.

A lot of this has parallels in the world of aviation. For example there are provisions for owner supplied parts on certified airframes. Experimental / homebuilt aircraft have to meet a standard of the amount of work completed by the original builder (usually 50%).

If an airplane has multiple, cascading failures, it can fall out of the sky. If an EV fails, it can pull over.

Personally, I do think that this poses some risk- I might be hesitant to put my kids on a converted EV school bus, for instance- I think it's probably a better idea for a specialized contractor to outfit a fleet than it is for the fleet's mechanic to do so, especially if it's something that they've never done before.

It's gonna be very hard unintentionally build a deathtrap if you're starting with a modern car and not going out of your way to do dumb things that make it likely to go up in flames.

Furthermore, in the case of an EV conversion you can basically just make sure the EV power-train does not occupy physical space that the ICE power-train did not and your crumple zones and airbags will work fine.

Edit:

Making batteries that don't catch on fire is a solved problem. Getting those electrons to the motor without starting a fire is a solved problem. You really only get fires when you're trying to push the performance envelope which is generally a low priority for commercial conversions.

Cars are not hyper-complicated non-deterministic black boxes. It is possible to modify them without causing unforeseen consequences. Just because you may personally lack the expertise to understand how the systems interact does not mean that nobody can understand it. A qualified engineer with an automotive background should have no problem creating an EV conversion that is every bit as safe as the base vehicle though it will probably be slightly less efficient in terms of materials and labor usage than a conversion for the same vehicle designed by an OEM team for manufacture at scale. The OEMs don't have people that are magically smarter, or different laws of physics if anything they will have a harder time engineering an equivalently performing system because they have many more constraints to optimize for than a conversion company.

I don't know. Some parts could be heavier or lighter and thusly change behavior during a crash (apply more stress to a member) that changes properties.

... gotta love it when the 'hackers' are disagreeing with the general sentiment that modifying things without vendor approval can be safe

I'll point out that there are companies that make 4WD conversion kits for vans. And some of those companies will do the conversion for you. I can't really see the difference between that and replacing a diesel drive train with electric.

If it was me, I'd be worrying about fire, from batteries and wiring.

Exactly it can easily turn into a ford pinto due to insufficient fire protection

Re the "physical space" argument, battery-electric systems tend to come up a /lot/ heavier than an equivalent ICE drivetrain as I understand it, and are in different places in the vehicle. The engine/motor becomes smaller and lighter, the fueltank/batteries become larger and heavier. The mass balance and overall mass changes, which will change the vehicle's crash characteristics and handling.

Agreed that they're not black-boxes and there's a lot of assumptions you can carry over, though. The NCAP rating of the donor vehicle won't be valid any more, but all that tells you is how well its siblings survived destructive testing - it's likely to perform similarly.

TLDR: it's not quite that simple, but assuming you're not driving like an idiot it'll probably be fine.

With regards to weight, my friends here in Austin (that run a company that specializes in ICE-to-BEV conversions) tell me that the most important thing is to maintain the relative distribution of weight between the front and rear wheels.

Cars are designed to operate in a certain range of weights, as they get loaded with drivers, passengers, cargo, etc.... so long as the distribution is roughly the same, then the careful tuning of the suspension and handling, etc... should all still mostly work the same.

Sure, it might be a bit more sluggish if it is significantly heavier, but that should be about it. You might b able to largely solve that problem by just putting some stronger springs in the suspension, which might already exist in the third party market for other people who are doing other kinds of work on the same type of vehicle.

Of course, you’ve got to actually do the work to make it right, but keeping the same basic weight distribution will probably solve at least 80% of the problem.

With regards to components being really heavy, consider that the engine and the transmission are two of the heaviest components in most any car. If you can eliminate those in your BEV conversion, that gives you quite a bit of weight to work with for the new heavy components.

If I make this car, I don't want you extending is useful lifetime. I want you to buy a new one to replace it instead.

AKA. Why you can't repair most cell phones now.

From the outside, it’s a hypocritical show when there is an established market of dominant companies, and then a new company enters the scene capturing a new secondary market related to the established market; then suddenly those established companies are up in arms screaming, “Regulations! Regulations!”, ready to support the government to throw the book at the new companies for <reasons>, as long as no regulations impact the established companies and they can continue to selectively skirt around which regulations they don’t like.

And once they establish business units to compete against the new company in the secondary market, suddenly the established companies aren’t so pressed about needing to enforce regulations anymore.

Every time a car is repaired and a piece replaced its lifetime is also extended. Maybe they have feared that it would also have an impact on yearly GDP since car sales are very often used as a metric.

You don’t have to believe in conspiracies. It‘s likely just lobbying and corruption.

Isn't the conjoining of lobbying and corruption generally known as 'a conspiracy'?

Don't think of it as a conspiracy theory. Think of it as the golden rule: people with gold make the rules.

Public safety, of course. Think of the children! That sort of thing always works for regulatory capture.

It seams you forgot to list stupidity and as one of the reasons

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