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Comment by sackerhews | Hacker News Reader

Making something that only you can repair can be quite a lucrative business. This documentary is quite interesting:

McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4

Or maybe not. Extensive discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26936774

Yeah, the non-sinister explanation is that mcdonalds decided to go with a self-cleaning machine to reduce the possibility of workers messing up the cleaning cycle, taylor implementing that badly, and no one else using self-clean machines.

McDonalds has very strong incentives to reduce labour costs to zero. This started with very clear & limited roles which meant cheap rates, but now means reducing the number of employees. At $5/hour it's cheaper to train and manage people to do the job; @ > $15/hr you can justify an army of machines and a few technicians, even if your ice cream machine seems to be broken a lot of the time.

A similar thing is happening with EVs.

Many car dealers don't make their money from selling cars, they make most of their money from being the only authorized repair shop for said car model. And to keep the warranty valid, you need to service the car at an authorized shop.

EVs, by design, don't require as much maintenance or as often as ICE cars. This will result in a disruption in the existing chain at some point. We'll see what actually happens in 5-10 years.

Batteries will need swapping (not often, but a high price), and there's the added bonus of being able to "encourage" people to come in for repairs by just tweaking some OTA updates. I wonder who will get caught doing that first.

> And to keep the warranty valid, you need to service the car at an authorized shop.

Magnusson-Moss repudiates this for US consumers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson–Moss_Warranty_Act

Yea, same for many EU countries.

Also EVs require some specific knowledge and equipment random Mom & Pop shops won't have for a while. Just working with HVDC systems alone is a huge hassle.

Some dealers make bank on the service.

Some dealers are basically in the business of originating loans.

It all depends on how the owner happens to structure the business.

Often you'll have multiple dealers in the same network that take a different route because that's what works for their brand and location niches.

I keep hearing this thing about EVs not needing as much maintenance. Apparently nobody has looked at their maintenance schedule on their cars. Most cars don't need anything except a few oil changes by 100,000 miles. So many dealers throw in free oil changes now... and you can still have them done by Jiffy Lube if you want for about $50. People regularly hit 200k miles just doing oil changes, and changing out all the wear items that EV owners also have. If you can't afford the oil changes, you probably can't afford an EV either.

Brakes, coolant, tires, gearbox oils? Your EV still has all that. The power unit itself on an EV may be simpler, but mechanical failures in an engine in an ICE car are pretty damn rare. You're not servicing anything inside the engine, just like you're not taking apart the electric motor in your EV for maintenance.

200k miles? That's over 320000 km?! There's exactly zero chance a statistically significant number of combustion engines get that mileage with "a few oil changes".

I've owned cars with 200k km in them an I would describe them as "beaters" at best. I've had to replace clutches, radiators, turbos and god knows what else and they haven't even gotten close to the 300k km mark.

As for my EV, the first maintenance on schedule that isn't just replacing the air filter is at 160k km. I've saved hundreds if not thousands just from scheduled oil changes at that point.

>Apparently nobody has looked at their maintenance schedule on their cars.

Pot, meet kettle. EVs and Plug-in Hybrids cost less to maintain than ICE vehicles. [1] Over 200k miles, ICE vehicles are about double the maintenance cost of EVs or Plug-in hybrids.

At 50k miles; EVs $600, Plug-in $1,050, ICE $1,400.

100k miles; EVs $2,000, Plug-ins $2,600, ICE $4,400.

200k miles; EVs $6,300, Plug-ins $5,900, ICE $12,300.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/owning-an-electric-car-...

Great conclusion. This video could have been summarized in 10 minutes though. For the most part, no real information about the problem was given. I guess this is just how YouTube documentaires in 2021 are.

Making something only you can repair lands you on my personal everlasting blacklist of shame (and I guess the everlasting blacklists of shame of others as well).

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