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Comment by Bancakes | Hacker News Reader

Modern cars have reached their endgame for at least a decade. There is nothing to replace and recycle. There are no major upgrades. The whole point of electric vehicles is, excluding the battery, they have almost nothing to wear out relative ICE. The best way to upgrade a EV is to slap a modern battery pack in it like putting a 5000 mAh battery in a OEM-2500mAh phone.

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Have you ever owned a car?

The last car that I had to sell because I could not afford fixing had a $5,000 repair quote. Not because of the ice engine. Not because of the gasoline.

Because the wire harness was corroded.

Stop dreaming that electric cars do not need maintenance. Maybe not as regular maintenance as ice cars, but definitely they will be eoled in the same lifespan as ice cars.

I have no idea how you rack up a $5000 bill despite regular maintenance. Was that a used sports car?

Rust. In the northern US, we salt the bejeezus out of our roads in winter, and it eats our cars. Modern cars are far better in this regard, but not immune to salt cancer.

I live at the sea and often just straight up spray wd-40 underneath. It's literally its designated purpose.

Jeez, that sounds like a lot of WD-40 use! Do you spray annually or just as needed?

Every oil change

Given age, that's easy enough if you include work.

Wiring harness is a real pain. Many shops won't even do it. The few that do can charge a premium.

I have a classic from '82. The wiring harness is a mess, at some point people all kind of accessories to the standard wiring, including a second switch for the main head lights and a totally illegal boat horn with a separate switch to turn it off. I figured out the horn and the head lights, since then I decided to not touch it as long as it works. The car has all of three fuses, no way to have a simpler harness. I once asked a garage, for what turned out to be a faulty relay, and I got a conservative estimate of 2k just for diagnostics. It took me almost two weekends to figure the relay out by sheer chance.

Replacing, and diagnosing, a modern cars harness for 5k is actually quite reasonable if not even cheap. Especially since the harness rebuild means basically disassembling the majority of the car simply to get access.

It's true that carmakers have made self-repair inconvenient or impossible nowadays.

But wear and tear impacts all cars operated in the real world, not just gasoline cars. An EV is not magical, just another type of vehicle. Its most frequent failure modes are still being discovered as we put more miles on it and gain experience.

Source: work in the automotive manufacturing industry.

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