Hopefully it'll be easy to repair. I'd hate to replace entire chassis because of light collision.
I'm betting once EVs start making their way into fleets, you'll find your 300k mile, low maintenance, minimal electronics American/German brand.
I'm in the middle of converting a Mazda RX-8. Just got the motor/clutch/transmission assembly (mostly) in place last weekend. It's kind of fun, but it's also a lot of work. It seems like a tremendously inefficient way to get the car I want: electric, no phone-home or over-the-air update capability, ability to control how everything works, easy to fix, manual transmission, modern safety features. I thought about buying a Model 3, but decided it was a lot of money for something that wasn't quite what I want. 200+ mile range would have been nice though; it's hard to get that in a conversion without making it unreasonably heavy.
It's a bit of a trade-off. To use Tesla as an example, they take the approach of just putting a massively overpowered motor in each car so that they can overcome the lack of a low gear. That works fine, but the kind of parts you need in that sort of system are expensive. Not just the motor, but the motor controller and the batteries have to handle that much power.
A different approach is to just have a normally-sized motor and an ability to shift gears. It should make for a lighter, more efficient car. (Though you also lose some efficiency in the gearbox.) The conversion I'm doing has a 120 horsepower motor, and it's going into a car that's about 3,000 pounds. I won't win any 0-60 races with a Model S, but it'll probably handle corners better and generally be more fun to drive, not to mention be about 1500 to 2000 pounds lighter.
I'm willing to concede that wanting an EV with a stickshift may be an unpopular opinion, but it's hard to know if there's a market for that kind of thing until someone starts manufacturing it. (And I don't mean the Taycan, I mean something that some ordinary middle-class person might buy.) It seems kind of a shame that we have all these legacy car companies that know how to build transmissions, but none of them seem interested in using that as an advantage they have over Tesla for that part of the market that want an electric car but would rather drive a manual transmission.
Sounds like a very educational project.
I wouldn't be so quick to just brush off Tesla engineering as having bad tradeoffs, or make assumptions about the fun of cornering, but I'm sure the project will be an eye opener and maybe will lead you to test drive an M3P sometime.
Definitely it's hard to beat an RX8 with cornering but that's before you load it down with batteries.
Edit: I had some doubts about your weight claims but I wasn't thinking about the fact that you are losing the engine weight, which puts you pretty far ahead! Sounds like a cool project.
I did actually consider buying a Model 3, and even put down a thousand dollars to preorder back when it was announced. I test drove a dual-motor version (I would have gotten the single-motor version, but it's what they had). The acceleration is fun. Otherwise it seemed like a solidly built yet kind of generic car. In the end, the main things that kept me from buying it were Tesla's secretive nature when it comes to service information and the prospect of some minor component failing and bricking the car (like that flash chip soldered to a giant motherboard that had issues in early models) after the warranty expires, and the price being a bit more than I cared to spend on a car. Awhile later a friend showed off a Ford Ranger pickup truck he'd converted with an electric motor and I thought: hmm, this isn't actually as expensive or difficult as I thought, maybe I should do a conversion...
The weight breakdown is something like this: the RX-8 is about 3,000 pounds stock. The rotary engine is about 300 pounds with all its accessories attached. The dual-shaft version of the Netgain Hyper9 AC motor I'm using is 130 pounds. The exhaust system is maybe a hundred pounds or so removed. The gas tank is another hundred pounds or so (when full). I'm adding about 450 pounds of lithium iron phosphate batteries, which gets me about 27kwh and maybe 100 miles of range if I'm lucky. (Used Tesla cells have a lot better energy density and are actually reasonably priced, but they wouldn't have fit very well in the places I wanted to put them. They're also a bit more dangerous than LFP cells and require liquid cooling.) I'm also adding in some weight for battery boxes and the motor mount and motor/transmission adapter. In the end I figure the car'll be about 200 pounds heavier or so, and most of that weight is very close to the ground.
(This is not a claim that the batteries described in the article are a fire hazard - I don't know)
I guess a full discharge first.
But what about your accident, and the jaws of life? Will they conduct? Will the wrenched apart car have conductive edges?
In the Teslas, the power system is shunted through a single disconnect point... Cutting that line isolates the battery from the rest of the vehicle.
In Waymo cars, firefighters needed to be made aware that high-power electrical conduit and liquid cooling channels go up through the pillars, which are usually empty of energized components or contain only low-power channels (for things like overhead lights).
This doesn't happen organically. Manufacturers were happily iterating toward a different optimum before regulation forced their hands.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/automobiles/50-years-ago-...
I'm not sure if most modern EVs have manual disconnect switches on the main power cables where they meet the batteries or if you're just expected to wear rubber gloves and use non-conducting wrenches to unbolt the cables. I'd expect any modern EV will at least have contactors to connect the battery to the motor controller (these are basically electrically actuated switches, like a mechanical relay), which will be disabled when the car is off. In general, though, I'd expect the main power cables to be something that doesn't need maintenance and mechanics can generally steer clear of.
I hope they develop a mechanism that allows exchange of the battery and can bear load without the battery with some sort of mechanical movement that can shift the load to a more permanent structure (not that this is necessarily a good idea either but proposing an option). Or, perhaps the battery never needs changed, and by that I mean the life of the product lasts as long as it would with a replaceable battery. They can't just redefine the life of the product as the life of the battery to get around this (unless the life if the product was already defined by the life of the battery for a long time before).