Electric Vehicles Are Going to Suck; Here's Why [video]
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I don't believe this is true at all. Battery lifetime aside, cars are very reliable now compared to the past. Multiple studies back this up, but I think most people must anecdotally have noticed fewer broken down cars on the side of the highway and their own cars needing less maintenance and breaking down less often.
Yes, modern cars are often less repairable.
Lack of repairability is sometimes malevolent, but most times it's just a side effect of making things safer and more reliable. For example, engine computers reduce engine wear and prevent knocking, sealed systems leak less, safety systems require sensors in fenders and wing mirrors and crumple zones result in cars being written off. I have had a car that would have suffered a catastrophic engine failure in the past, but thanks to modern sensors and electronics, instead shut itself down, preventing serious damage.
By comparison, my old carburettor car was incredibly easy to repair just using tools in my toolbox, but it always had something going wrong, was a bitch to start in winter and driving in wet leaf conditions was seriously terrifying. My current car is a 2009 petrol with 150k miles and has never had any work outside of the routine service schedule or basic consumables.
LFP batteries are usually rated for 750,000 kilometres of range.
I didn't go into EV battery tech because it's still relatively new technology and doesn't really have any relevance to the planned obsolescence angle. But as you point out, newer battery packs have very long design lifetimes.
It remains to be seen how well this will translate into actual lifetimes, but at this point it seems like EVs will end up being much more reliable than ICEs. Almost every other part of an EV is much simpler and more reliable.
Honestly, even with modern ICEs, it's rarely the engine and drivetrain causing problems towards the end of its life. The interior starts to fall apart, the weather proofing fails, buttons stop working, things start to rattle, etc. until eventually you get bored of the constant minor repairs, meanwhile new cars are so much more comfortable and better designed, better fuel economy, lower emissions/taxes, etc.
I only drive an old car because I don't drive often.
Electric cars don't eliminate this kind of stuff, but they do reduce it. Brake wear is almost completely eliminated, differentials usually are eliminated, transmissions are single speed transfer boxes, CV joints are sometimes eliminated, et cetera.
I owned a Toyota Prius for many years, and while not a pure EV, it still used regenerative braking, and after several years of driving, the brake pads were no more worn than when I bought it.
I traded it for a Fiat 500e, pure EV, and I don't expect to have to replace the brake pads on it, probably ever.
It'a rust.
Rust eats cars like nothing else, and until automakers start using more corrosion-resistant materials (aluminum, stainless steel, galvanized steel, etc.), or cities stop spraying salt on roads, in these areas rust will continue to be the #1 car-killer.
In the UK and elsewhere they put Salt on the roads during winter!
Which gets into everything from the underside of the car and slowly destroys things!
YMMV :-)
Complexity reduces the grey zone where end users will attempt a ductape fix themselves. Paying more for an accreted mechanic to do more complex repairs is probably another cause of increasing road safety.
For example, I somehow misplaced the brake fluid cap for my car and needed to buy a new one. OEM would have required that I buy a new master cylinder assembly (including pump and more) for £200 and no garages seemed to stock the particular cap I needed.
As I couldn't find anyone willing to sell the cap on its own, I ended up buying the fluid tank from a breaker on eBay for £30 and just used the cap and put the rest in my loft just in case I ever need it.
That being said, the reason this is harder than it used to be is because fewer people need to buy individual parts nowadays. The market is evaporating. Still, some standardisation or legislation about what counts as a "part" could be valuable, but I'd be concerned about over-regulation reducing innovation and reliability, so it's hard to find a balance.
Is this meme still alive?
> In 2017, the company confirmed it did slow down some models as they aged, but not to encourage people to upgrade. It said the lithium-ion batteries in the devices became less capable of supplying peak current demands, as they aged over time. That could result in an iPhone unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.
The Tony Seba version is much more optimistic, instead actually the data shows cars are lasting twice as long or more as ICE, which is easily provable by watching what fleets do. They are much more sensitive to longevity than upfront capital cost. Cars are tipped to work for 1 million km’s soon.
Not to mention grid optimisation and a whole another topic on synthetic protein development and it’s possible we will actually beat the 2° target just with technology and human greed chasing lower cost goods.
[0] https://ir.hertz.com/static-files/bf4780e2-5bd6-4236-8b11-ed...
(common sense: cleaning, body and interior repairs, tires, windows/locks, climate control, etc should all be the same - implying that motor-train maintenance is half the total maintenance cost, and the EVs need zero maintenance...)
--copy/paste--
Stephen M. Scherr - Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. - CEO & Director The answer is unequivocally yes. In fact, last week, we did kind of re-underwrite on the EV fleet, how it's playing, how it's presenting relative to what we thought it would do on the initial decision to go in. So I'd say a couple of things. First of all, we continue to take delivery of Teslas, and we'll continue to do that, number one. Number two, I think you should expect in the coming months that you'll see announcements from us about purchase of electric vehicles in sizable quantity from other OEMs as we try to sort of build out kind of a broad population of vehicles across a range of OEMs, and we'll see those at very attractive kind of price entry points. Third, we are capturing, I think, as I said in the remarks, kind of a $30 to $35 premium on this. That premium has been fairly sustainable. And in the TNC channel, we're renting these for about $334, $335. We have found kind of just the right price point where, given all sorts of externalities around economics for an Uber driver, they want to and are excited about renting that, and they can turn a profit there. What that means for us, by the way, particularly in the TNC side, is fewer touch points on the car over a course of a month, maybe by as many as 5 to 7x. That reduces cost considerably. We're obviously passing some of that on because the weekly rental is lower for the TNC driver than the per diem or per day rental out to the normal RAC. On maintenance, I think Kenny said to you, we are running kind of 50% to 60% of what maintenance costs are on ICE vehicles. That's roughly in line with where we are. If there's any one surprise, it's probably slightly higher expense on tires, but not much more, and that's embedded in the figure I'm giving you. So I would say, overall, we're very pleased with the results. They're coming in roughly in line with what we thought when we first underwrote the move in this strategic direction.
They've found a profitable market where they can rent out EVs to Uber drivers slightly more long term which is cheaper for them and they pass some of that onto the drivers creating a win win.
But, renting more cars out to professional drivers should in theory increase mileage and so maintenance. I believe by maintenance here they're not talking about the touch points, but what most people would think of when you say "maintenance".
As they said, lower maintenance was not a surprise. It's been widely reported by fleets of EVs as a benefit.
I don't drive much and cars aren't a symbol of status anymore in my generation. So I have a 1000$ car (significant upgrade from my previous 500$ car) that gets repaired by a friend. It is extremely cheap for me. While I am by no means a car mechanic, attaching another piece of metal or exchanging some parts can be quite fun.
But repairs are simply not possible, even by qualified mechanics if they don't have access to proprietary diagnostics software that you sometimes need to just reset some error state. Of course a 0.50$ sensor also does cost hundreds of dollars if you need to get them from the manufacturer. The small circuit attached to the sensor supplies power and DRM. It would probably cost another 0.50$. The guy that blew up his Tesla was right, although Tesla isn't even the worst offender. The car industry is full of this shit.
I had an old Fiat which was a delight to repair. You could tell everything was designed to be easily accessible for quick and easy repairs with basic tools or even tool-less. Air filters were just held in place with clips you can undo in 2 seconds and swap them yourself. Now I own a modern Fiat and the filters are bolted down with custom screws and even the user manual tells you to visit your dealer to ... replace your air filters. Sorry, but fuck off Fiat! That's the last time I'm giving you my money. I hope the EU fines your greedy ass for these deliberate anti consumer designs. Though I would expect Italy to veto any such moves.
It's no wonder that some of the most desirable second hand cars are the one build around the mid 2000's as they have enough electronics for safety and comfort while still not having enough planned obsolescence built in, being reliable and cheap and easy to repair.
Modern cars are becoming an expensive subscription service rather than something you own and it seems like the big German brands are leading the pack.
If a few cells fail, the replacement is cheap... if the battery is actually designed in a way individual cells can be reached (physically) and replaced.
Given the price of new cars, there's no way I can justify getting rid of my Focus.
That was back when a former Boeing engineer was running Ford after Boeing promoted a bean counter over him.
But _all_ EVs are crazy reliable too. The engine has one moving part and it either works or doesn't.
The presenter in the linked video argues that all cars - EV or ICE - are getting both better and worse. Better in purely mechanical terms where technological marvels enable them to achieve great durability... worse in overall terms where some electronics is going to fail somewhere and suddenly the entire car won't start.
So i don't think you're wrong to say in specific benchmarks EVs are crazy reliable. But from what i've seen and understood of modern cars, complexity and interdependence of secondary subsystems make them super brittle and very highly likely to end up in a landfill under a decade after leaving the factory.
In fact we already have stats on that where car recalls keep on increasing (more than x4 in a decade), and EVs are not exempt from that as they seem to have ~2x more probability to be recalled (on average) than an ICE car.
https://www.stout.com/en/news/stouts-2020-automotive-defect-...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/541703/united-states-veh...
An older Focus would be on a belt I'm pretty sure. Even the newer Ecoboost-engined ones have a notoriously time-consuming wet belt to replace.
The issue with belts/chains is if the engine is designed for interference or not. If the belt/chain breaks do the valves and pistons come in contact with each other or not? That's a design decision with costs and benefits.
With an interference engine, a broken belt means a destroyed engine - preventative maintenance is mandatory. Or you go with a timing chain.
If you don't have an interference engine, you replace the broken belt and drive away. Preventive maintenance is a good idea but not quite so critical.
Interference engines can run with much higher compression ratios and get better performance for their size. So you see more timing chains with higher performance engines. If your car doesn't have a turbo and isn't aimed at the speed racer crowd, chances are better that it has a timing belt.
That 1.5 TSI is not really a performance engine and it needs to be as inexpensive as possible. Chains are more expensive than belts.
I like that car too and getting parts is ridiculously cheap and you can exchange almost everything yourself. Although Teslas will perhaps one day have the same advantage because older cars that were numerous once are significantly cheaper to repair.
cough crack cough
Think he's an ex Tesla engineer though, but I don't think that's neccessary.
https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/why-fords-electric-crate...
Tesla is pretty arrogant today, but going forward you have to conclude that battery interoperability and standardisation will be a big thing given that it's the single most expensive part. That will be motivated by lower costs for standardised parts.
Doesn't this just mean that whatever over current protection system is in place isn't user serviceable?
More modules that can be replaced individually or used to diagnose a problem is a good thing.
If an ICE car had all the fuses in a locked box (which required replacing the whole thing when one burned out) you would correctly identify that as a negative for the end user.
I'm sure there were reasons why they went for the alternative at Tesla but "easy to work on" wasn't one of them.
"FUD" is such a terrible term in this context. Uncertainty and doubt are good for the discussion. Any discussion, frankly.
I do the same, I am an amateur mechanic and I have worked on Tesla's and other EVs. In my experience, repairing an EV is no different from modern ICE cars.
In my experience, most people who believe that EVs are harder to repair appear to be owning older, simpler cars. These people often have either no experience with repairing cars, or only have experience with repairing older cars. Most have never owned, or worked on an EV car. And yet, they have a very strong opinion about its serviceability.
Yes, you need specialized equipment to work on EV drive-trains, just as you need specialized equipment to work on ICE drive-trains. You may not have this equipment, but professional repair shops do. You also need access to vendor specific software to perform certain repairs, I don't condone that, but reality is that this is needed for all modern cars, regardless of the drive-train type.
As technology advances, professional mechanics need to keep learning to stay up-to-date, just as how software developers do. Those that don't, can still keep working on old cars for a long time to go, so not every mechanic or shop owner chooses to do so. The same goes for software developers. However, these are also often the type of mechanic (or graybeard programmer) who are always grumpy about new tech they don't understand, and how much better everything used to be, just because they do understand old tech. It's these mechanics that spread the 'EV bad, carburetor good' nonsense, which seems to stick with most people.
Serviceability of cars in general is becoming worse, but this has nothing to do with the drive-train.
That's precisely the point the presenter of the conference was making. She even explicitly mentions there's actually good, repairable products in the electric motorbike category.
Still, that's a sad situation that's damaging to the environment and to the countless trapped customers who have a mechanically-valid car but can't drive it due to electronics/software shenanigans. Given that electric cars are marketed as an alternative to save the planet, we could reasonably expect that they be held to a higher serviceability standard... not higher than ICE vehicles mind you, just higher than the "fuck you buy a new car" attitude all car makers are displaying right now.
Opening the hood on a modern ICE is intimdating. So much (neatly, precisely) crammed in there (covered with plastic) I wouldn't even know where to start. Compare that to an old truck, where you can practically climb inside the engine compartment beside the motor...
This is a problem in itself, but is exacerbated by overcharging for replacement parts, and by lack of free-software support to hack around such issues. Examples are given of specific models exhibiting such undesired behavior.
Is this shown in data? My experience is quite different. <50% of my issues have been electrical in nature and the electrical ones are usually much cheaper to fix.
https://www.stout.com/en/news/stouts-2020-automotive-defect-...
There were more or less as many cars recalled in the USA in the 2010s decade than there are human beings residing in the USA:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/541703/united-states-veh...
I agree with you an electronic failure can be easy to fix. Or it can be okay not to fix, for example i don't care if my central car computer can't control the opening/closing of my windows. The problem is, are manufacturers making it easy/cheap to fix? And are they making it so a tiny fault in a subsystem crashes the entire car to a halt? The answers are, in my humble opinion, no and yes respectively.
These things feel like they'll be market-sorted in the future. Computers become cheaper, we know that. Software does too, as it becomes tried and tests and its marginal cost drops, or it moves to open source.
We are still so early in the EV revolution. I know lots of people with lots of cars, and only a handful have EVs.
I've heard this argument in so many fields, but never seen it play out. Housing was supposed to be market-sorted, yet there are still millions of empty dwellings outnumbering by far homeless people.
In a field that's closer to HN fields of interest, i've heard the very same argument about FLOSS on smartphones. There certainly were some progress in Android land with the mandatory device trees, and on niche products like Librem/Pinephone, but there were also major regressions with for example iCloud/Knox locking becoming a pain for second-hand hardware.
Overall, i don't trust an industry whose greedy interest is to keep us buying more to regulate itself to provide better services for existing products.
Only for people who own something prolific enough for it to be worth the aftermarket's while to support.
Look at the state of tuning for first and early 2nd gen fuel injection systems. It's basically trash unless you own one of a few supported platforms
It's basically the opposite of what you would want in a military vehicle.
What I would criticise is that there is often not a real technical reason why things got harder to replace or that there is an absence of a general purpose diagnostic unit.
However, inconvenient access to diagnostic software and rare parts/components that can only be sourced from the official dealer are a big problem, and one that the market cannot solve because there's little incentive for value chain to do so.
I would like to see legislation that forces manufacturers to publish free-to-everyone specifications, firmware and diagnostic software whenever the component is commercialized for some amount of time, like 5 years or whatever makes sense. That would made old cars much more maintainable and prolong the life for several years and/or several 100 thousands kms.
The suppliers of car makers probably would gladly sell the components but they have to be careful as their largest customer might want to grab a premium here as well. Sometimes they still sell the exact same parts under another brand name though.
I believe Tesla has far fewer suppliers as other car makers so they probably also have a larger influence on the few that they have.
Aren't polyswitches too sluggish for a car of electronics? Perhaps sensible for starting the motor though.
Since electric cars are mechanically much simpler they will be easier to repair and cheaper overall. Currently economies of scale have not kicked in but when they do (and battery tech improves) the most popular cars will be very cheap, lower range models with standard parts made by third parties. You need to look at consumer electronics and home appliances for the likely model, not the high-end car business model that dominates the electric car industry at the moment and is transitory.
Once the volume of production goes up that market will become global. Once EVs filter into the Shenzen markets, parts availability at various price/quality points will explode.
I disagree with the idea that electric vehicles are inherently more difficult to repair. If anything they are simpler, more modular, and with a greatly reduced part count, will in general require less specialised knowledge to undertake common repairs compared to modern combustion vehicles.
> "But repairs are simply not possible, even by qualified mechanics if they don't have access to proprietary diagnostics software"
Tesla, for one, makes its service manuals available for free to anyone. Their diagnostic software ("Toolbox 3") is also available to anyone, but with a paid subscription.
The environment as a whole is not one gas but one (type of) gas is the one that's going to cause global pain rather than merely local irritation
I've mentioned similar thoughts before, but a shop that specializes in providing and/or installing standardized "restomod packages" with tuneable ECUs, modern solid-state power management[1], reliable sensors, wire harnesses, and other supporting parts (silicon coolant hoses, oil cooler upgrades, etc.) across a range of popular 90s/2000s vehicles, or even "de-teching" more modern cars like current-gen BMWs: great-driving RWD chassis, rock-solid B58 inline-6...but....monthly subscription for heated seats?! GTFO... Pull all the electronics out and replace with a race-grade harness connected to Denso (aka Toyota) sensors! Then drive for 20 years with nothing breaking. Basically expanding what I call "the Singer treatment" to a line of vehicles beyond air-cooled 911s[2].
[1](I'm not an ECUMaster distributor but I like their products) https://ecumasterusa.com/collections/power-management/produc... [2]https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2019-11-16/driven-po...
That Tesla was completely stripped from all drive train components, including battery, before blowing it up. Those parts are now in use in an EV conversion project, in a Mercedez Benz G-Class vehicle, working just fine.
So only an empty Tesla shell was blown up, everything else was repurposed.
At the moment it's a bit of a pain but there's an upcoming amendment to standardise the access process.
[0]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
- replace wipers as necessary - rotate summer & winter tires semi-annually (cold climates) - inspect & lube brakes annually - test brake fluid biannually - replace cabin air filter biannually - replace A/C dessicant bag every 6 years.
So if you learn how to test your brake fluid (really easy with the right gauge), replace the cabin air filter and lube your brakes, you only have to go in for maintenance once every 6 years. All of those things are easier than changing your oil on a modern car IMO.
From the POV of car manufacturers this is a risky business decision. "Can this new audience and the increase in sells justify my loss in repairs?".
Regulations will eventually happen, at least in EU. I guess we will see how effective they are.
Ditto all of the above with the MG ZS EV, MG EV5 and the upcoming EV4 - those are cheap, simple EVs, that shouldn't be difficult to maintain at all.
Of course when you look at the market and only see all the E-Trons and EQCs and iX3s and whatnot, it might seem like the EV future is hostile for customers - but those brands were making cars like that even without electric drivetrains. Ask anyone how much fun maintaing a brand new ICE BMW or Audi is exactly.
But, that's not the whole market. There is still plenty of competition from cheaper, more maintainable EV cars, and there will only be more as time goes on.
The presenter in the video says only 3 micro-controllers should be required to operate an electric car in a road-safe manner. However every car model now has hundreds of these and a failure in a single part can take the whole car to refuse to start. So if you find an electric car with few and standard off-the-shelf components, you struck a gold mine and should let us all know about it :)
That would be awesome.
Look at Apple's laptops - one blob of RAM and CPU is way less likely to break than huge connectors that you gonna mingle with your greasy fingers.
Waterproof iPhone is way harder to open and seal after, but it's a fricking waterproof iPhone. Mine has been in water multiple times now (also slapped concrete 10x times with no case with 0 damage).
There is no inherent conflict between reliable and easily repairable in that domain.
Because every single connection is a failure point. Every screw, every clip and so on is a failure point.
A very reliable car would be cast in a single part. That would not be reparable.
If you want to make things reparable you need to make them in many parts that can be individually replaced. That means many failure points.
Do you have a source? I see that 20% of car sales are fleet cars: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
But, I didn't find anything about >50%
Tbh that could also be slightly misleading, because if you run a car leasing company, you also count as a "company buyer" even though your final customers aren't that.
- Dacia Spring is 19.5k€
- Renault Twingo Electric is 24k€
- Peugeot e-208 is 19.9k€
- Fiat 500e is 26.2k€
This is without carbon bonus, which is about 1k€ in france.
It is the secondary market that care about this. The market here would be then, if there would be such a manufacturer, then the cars on the secondary market hold better value then the others. So that the market value of the other cars vanished. That would increase the premiums on the lease for the first time buyers. So then the first time buyers may consider the more cheaper lease.
That is a very complex market. For that reason it is easier for the OEM to focus only on the first time buyer than the secondary market. Also they want to sell cars. So they shouldn't be around for too long.
Disclaimer: I work with automotive industry. I own mainly historic cars. My newest is an Volvo S60, which I bought brand new from factory ordered to my specification in 2001. Now the repairs are eating me with 2.000 EUR to 3.000 EUR every f-ing year.
Currently the demand on EVs is so high that good EVs hold their resale value even with poor repairability.
Of course, it hasn't shipped yet - but because it is based on a standard frame (Honda CBR500), there are many options for spare parts and upgrades on the market.
Its going to be very interesting to see how far we hackers get with electric vehicles. I've already got my OBD debugging gear ready to go ..
IMHO, vendors who work on removing bespoke parts from their designs, are going to get the electric transportation business ..
And many of those people are just normal families with 1-2 people that earn a fair amount and can afford ID4 or Model 3 or something. And those people car about reliability.
You act like only billionaires buy EVs.
Your “normal” might not be that “normal”.
> billionaires
Change one letter.
If you saw a family in a Tesla Model 3 you wouldn't be like 'wow look at that'. You see it everyday. I can literally walk 10m from where I'm sitting and see like 5 Tesla driving by. Its a normal everyday thing.
I don't mean to be offensive, but you might live in a bit of a bubble. I know this is Stack Overflow so people tend to assume that San Francisco (or other North American tech hubs) are "normal". They are quite the opposite, when compared with the rest of the world, and even with "the west" (however you define it).
> If you saw a family in a Tesla Model 3 you wouldn't be like 'wow look at that'. You see it everyday.
Teslas are infrequent enough for me (living in a first world European country) to point them out to my wife when we cross one on the highway (because she's not familiar with their shape/logo). I remember doing that at least once in the last two weeks.
Also, 'this is Stack Overflow' what?
But granted, I meant Hacker News. Slip of the mind.
Not Just Bikes has an excellent new video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA
I rode my electric bike to work today in fact. Instead of our EV, ironically. But our family uses only one car at least.
We don't necessarily need simpler cars, we need better electric bikes. Or electric motorbikes/scooters. And better public transportation.
Something like this would be a nice option for some usecases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPyIwY2hJ_A
GetAround is making renting cars more viable too. We do actually have a second car now, but I've been renting the old one out until we're ready to sell it and until we're sure we can handle two kids in kindergarten without it. It's been way more popular than I anticipated.
Or golf carts. Just like so many creatures in nature evolve into crabs, personal transport appears to evolve into golf carts. The Japanese have kei cars, which are just heavy golf carts and there exist cargo bikes, which are just underpowered, three-wheeled golf carts.
There are even golf-cart oriented towns:
I am right now shopping for one after ten years of not being able to afford and/or justify one. "But you will get killed!" ... probably not.
Big anecdata:
We have old automotive, and especially Mercedes vans, with no replacement parts anymore. Those usually cost a fortune. two summers ago, i went in one of those van to Lyon. The van is falling into pieces, but was still ok to drive. Until it wasn't. We were sure it was the end of its life, so we took an hostel nearby and look into car cemetery (don't know the actual name in english). We found a weird garage and my friends, who was very attached to this van, wanted to give it a shot.
The garage wasn't looking professional. The mechanics looked nothing like the mechanics in our remote, rural area (they looked very young), but they were the only one available (i think the insurance wasn't going to pay anyway, so it wasn't sanctioned mechanics either, lot of under the hood repairs and stuff i think). There was only scooters, solex and very, very old motorbikes.
They 3d printed a few pieces, slow melted rubber tube to make them smaller, and milled a few metal pieces. For one of them they said "we are not sure if we got the inside totally right, we had to cut the OG in two and ours isn't as smooth, you should come back in two years and we will check it out". We weren't confident, but we never had a motor-related issue the rest of the trip (and we traveled through the Alps...)
Two years later, my friend went back there, left his van for a week. They recreated everything. Repaired his doors, the seats, the mechanical windows and every piece that looked fragile was re-milled from metal (or actually 3d printed when no force was applied and only the rust and their thinness was a danger).
I think he should change his motor entirely, it guzzle too much gas, but anyway, this might be the future. Two guys with obvious talent from a poor area of a big city basically rebuilding an engine/car from scratch. One day, if we manage to force a law that force manufacturers to put their plans online once the piece isn't made anymore, we will be able repair our stuff ourselves, in fab-labs or places like this kind of garage.
From what I understood, they rented their tools and equipment (above the counter) to a lot of low wage workers/gig workers (it was on the fringe of the less reputable/poorest neighborhood of the city), so the overall atmosphere was weird for a garage. It was like a fab-lab for the working poor.
And "my" garage was unable to glue the loose door seal back on and recommended I contact the manufacturer. I fixed it with some double sided tape :)
Your garage has the luxury of being pretty assured that there is some nitwit willing to pay $1k for a brake job who will walk in the door after you leave.
The kind of shop that deals in reverse engineering stuff that's no longer available doesn't have that luxury of having a ready supply of those kinds of customers or they wouldn't be reverse engineering stuff.
The term you are looking for is "junkyard". Awesome story about the custom fabricators, I love that sort of stuff!
Well, electric cars can produce minimal atmospheric emissions, or medium, or huge. It depends.
What I'm missing from the talk is that the total emissions of ICE cars are inherently bound to be higher.
Atmospheric. Emissions. These are the immediate problem, not an abstract "environmental soundness". OP is actively diffusing attention from where the poor of the world need it the most.
Yes, I'm saying that the scrapyard full of five-year-old electric cars is bearable and can be dealt with much less priority than the real environmental disaster we're heading into, full-steam.
I applaud the drive to buy less stuff, I really get that. I also get that our civilization has its own fundamental dynamics and you cannot just look at the buyer-side and treat that as an independent system. It's quite telling that OP's response to "why even focus on private property of cars?" is "because I want to" (at 30:40).
Well, the people that owned these cars won't go "welp, was nice owning a car for five years, let's go public transport now". Instead, they'll order a new EV and cause a massive amount of emissions during its production, which might even result in more emissions than if they simply continued to drive their old ICE all along. So yes, this is very much a problem we'll need to deal with now.
It's massive today. Why do you predict it will remain massive? It's not like producing EV physically requires pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, like when using combustion engines.
The people over at openinverter.org are doing amazing work implementing open source controller boards for OEM inverters.
Sure, a lot of ICE-based skill sets are going to become obsolete. But, as things stand now, if you have solid CAN sniffing skills and can code C++ (I can’t), you can make Leaf, Tesla, Prius, Mitsubishi or (soon) BMW components do your bidding.
The real risk is if OEMs adopt an obfuscatory stance and start locking people out of CAN networks. But I haven’t heard of that happening yet.
Openinverter SimpBMS Orion BMS Lebowski controller Zombieverter
It's time to accept that the age of excess and unlimited resources are over.
The 'smart' electronics and UI are always early to break, become obsolete or unsupported, and they're usually by far the most expensive 'component' to repair or replace, and often aren't even available after a few years. Also they're completely custom - there's no way to substitute something generic.
We need to get back to more modular hardware.
Recent improvements on the hub motor and battery made it possible for the various light-weight toys to be a practical city commuter. Kick scooter, unicycle, hoverboard, skateboard, onewheel and such.
Unfortunately, the law isn't up to date with these vehicles in most countries. It probably took us decades, if not a century to accept these light-weight electric vehicles.
How about a nice name. Eternia.
Anyon willing to invest?
At worst, you can still scim off as a middle man like some selective add blockers..
As the night falls, they all start charging at 00:00 with a huuge load spike on the grid. My bet is soon after, night time will cease to be the cheapest time to charge. And EV companies will be required to pay taxes to cover infrastructure costs , in turn hiking EV price.
An average daily charge for an EV is < 10 kWh since the average daily usage of a car is < 40 miles. That's less than what a whole house A/C will use on a hot day.
So any grid that can handle A/C charging on a hot day can handle EV charging at night. Not all grids can, but that means that they'll need to be upgraded whether or not we add EV's to the grid.
I broadly agree with the motivation for the talk and many of the ideas presented, here's some more context from my point of view:
Screens break. Nothing critical should ever be in a screen. Buttons and knobs work and are replaceable. (again my opinion, if you love your screens, good for you)
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This talk reminded me of the saying "they don't make them like they used to". I heard this saying very often when I was growing up in the 1980's and 90's. You don't hear it much anymore. People could repair cars from before the 80's. They also HAD TO repair cars from before the 80's, because a lot of stuff wore down quickly or broke.
It was much harder for individuals to repair cars from the 80's, and even harder in the 90's, and you still had to repair them, because a lot of new systems were added that weren't fully baked. In this time frame, it made sense to say "they don't make them like they used to". If you rewind to the 70's, people could also say the same, because cars in the 60's were better than cars in the 70's - the oil crisis hit, insurance hit cars with too much horse power, smog systems were mandated, and a few more things really did make cars worse from a consumer perspective.
But then in the 2000's, we worked out the computers and metallurgy and paint and coating processes and cars really did get better. Horsepower went back up, and fuel efficiency went up at the same time, which is frankly a miracle of engineering and deserves recognition. The computers managing ICE engines are pretty good now, actually, and so are materials and build processes. Even most plastic parts are pretty good now.
I'm glossing over quite a lot of important detail, but my point is, I don't hear "they don't make them like they used to" very much any more.
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I don't know if manufacturers will voluntarily use the same standards, but Software Defined Vehicles are coming. Currently, cars are built with on the order of 50 electronic computer modules, and those modules are like appliances. You plug it in and it does what it does. There is some capability to flash the modules with parameters or sometimes firmware updates, but most are not programmable.
Software Defined Vehicles (SDV) will provide manufacturers an API that supports upgrades, so you won't have to find a module in 2035 that was only available in 2022-2025 or whatever. We'll see how it actually turns out.
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Quirks and Features. I have a whole rant about quirks and features. Today's feature is just something that will be broken in 5 or 15 years. A new BMW is much more affordable than a 15 year old BMW (rabble rabble rabble).
It's hard for companies to compete on durability, because today's durability is not apparent. Durability from 10 years ago is apparent. There are engineering trade-offs everywhere, and not just malicious or "value engineering" either. Lighter cars accelerate faster (yay) and use less fuel (yay), but reducing mass may weaken parts.
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EVs in junkyards - I don't think you'll see EVs in junkyards at a higher rate than ICE cars. Quite a lot of components from EVs can have a second life in industry or consumer applications. The batteries can be home power backup. The motors can be used in many applications. The parts can go to repair other cars (like normal).
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I think EVs are going to be really good in about 15 years. Bear in mind that the traditional automotive lifecycle is 5 years, so 15 years is a long time, but only 3 generations of vehicle product platform.
The biggest problem I have with newer cars is all the add-on stuff, and pickup trucks are the best example. My first truck, a 1985 F150 (straight-6 300, what a beautiful engine) didn't have power windows, locks, air conditioning, or even a radio. Why can't we buy a bare-bones vehicle anymore? You don't need that stuff on a farm or work vehicle. Why do we have to have touch screens and telemetry? Why do we have to have a full stack of software that is totally inaccessible to the end user? And what total idiots think that over-the-air interfaces (LTE) that let you program things like acceleration and braking were a good idea?
I admit I do like backup cameras, though...
I agree, in 15 years, we won't miss ICE for daily driving. EVs will be that good. I say this as someone who gets all nostalgic when I smell the motocross magic of VP and castor oil burning. We'll have solar panels on our roofs to help charge our vehicles, and I won't miss cleaning up 2-stroke trimmers and leaf blowers when they get all gummed up and won't start.
* far higher energy density, ~45MJ/kg compared to LiPo's ~1MJ/kg. (in fact the latter is probably the only reason LiPo is safe at all - more on that)
* essentially immediate "recharge" time
* 100+ years of ICE drivetrain expertise
* LiPo is a "two-part"-like fuel - it has everything it needs to release the energy stored inside of it (as opposed to gasoline that requires an external supply of oxygen). improvements to energy density necessarily make it less safe: LiPo battery fires are very difficult to extinguish, and release most of their energy in a short period of time.
to be clear, EVs have a place, for example, congested and population dense areas, where the primary concern is air quality, rather than global CO2 emissions.
i really think consumerism/capatilism coupled with society's less than healthy relationship with science & futurism have made EVs seem a lot more attractive than they really are. i'm not so sure i'm comfortable with the conditions of the mines where the rare-earth metals required for all these battery packs comes from.
IMO, technologies that capture carbon from the air and produce gasoline are far more attractive. the energy for which should naturally come from the sun, even if this process is "inefficient" - we receive the energy regardless of whether we use it or not.
more broadly speaking, right-to-repair/user serviceability has been degraded for most consumer platforms. even modern gasoline cars face the same problems as EVs. work (likely legislation) needs to be done on every front to improve this, in all facets of technology.
LiFePo doesn't have significantly less energy density, but they're far safer. Same with sodium batteries. Solid state lithium ion batteries have more energy density than Li-Ion/LiPo in some cases, but are generally far more safe, since there's no flammable electrolyte.
EVs, even with LiPo/Li-ion, are FAR safer than ICE vehicles, there's just no competition. Lots of oil and gasoline being piped around, with potential for leaks + old electrical wiring = recipe for disaster. We had a huge parking garage fire here in Norway recently, started - as they often do - by an ICE vehicle. Lots of EVs in the garage, but not a SINGLE EV battery pack caught fire. If all of them were EVs, the fire would be far less serious (the interior of the cars still burned, but that's all).
EV battery fires are tricky to extinguish, I'll give you that. But the fire department here in Norway say they already have the needed training/experience, and make it clear that EVs are far better for fire safety in general.
As for your points on whether they're better for longer distance, personal journeys.. I mean, yeah.. at some point they are. If you're driving 1000km in a day I'd definitely agree. But how many people do that often?
* far higher energy density: don't forget to account for efficiency and regenerative breaking (hybrids get some of that benefit, but then you get all the downsides of both technologies) .. practical range difference is much closer than what your numbers would indicate. For most people the range of EVs is good enough, even for long trips.
* essentially immediate "recharge" time: Yeah, but it's still a couple of minutes and you have to stand there while it's filling. Almost every single road-trip charging session for me has been: 1. spend 30 seconds plugging in and beeping the payment card (with Tesla you don't even have to do this). 2. walk into a restaurant/cafe/grocery store and take a pee, drink some coffee, buy groceries for the trip, etc.. 3. come back to a fully charged car
* 100+ years of ICE drivetrain expertise: This is totally pointless. The only reason you need that expertise with ICE drivetrain is because it's so hard to maintain. Most EVs simply don't have anything to maintain, other than what all cars have (break pads, air filters, etc.). And I've never heard anyone here in Norway having trouble getting their EV fixed due to inexperience. The training isn't hard. You can even get people to change individual battery cells on some cars now.
* The last point I covered above.
not at all. in fact, i said their (comparatively) low energy density is what makes them safe. that low energy density is a problem for range, places a lower bound on the size of vehicle, and somehow fixing that issue will make battery storage a far less safe option.
> There's nothing inherent about battery energy density that makes them more dangerous.
yes, their absolutely is - gasoline requires air to burn. batteries store energy, and they can discharge that energy without any other materials: a battery could burn in space.
> What makes LiPo/Li-ion unsafe is that they have a flammable liquid electrolyte in the middle.
well its the combination of the electrolyte and the metals that make the battery the battery, it wouldn't be battery without it.
> EVs, even with LiPo/Li-ion, are FAR safer than ICE vehicles, there's just no competition.
indeed, and i don't disagree. i think you may have misunderstood what i was trying to say about about safety here: i'm not trying to suggest that gasoline vehicles are inherently safer, at all. i'm saying that if you were to create a battery technology that was even 10x more energy dense, i.e. 10MJ/kg, you'd have great difficulty in making that vehicle safe.
> But the fire department here in Norway say they already have the needed training/experience, and make it clear that EVs are far better for fire safety in general.
once the battery has started burning, it has basically inextinguishable. "clear the area" is the only option you'd have.
> As for your points on whether they're better for longer distance, personal journeys.. I mean, yeah.. at some point they are. If you're driving 1000km in a day I'd definitely agree. But how many people do that often?
in Europe? probably not much. in the US? India? Pakistan?
> [...] For most people the range of EVs is good enough, even for long trips.
likely true, and, as i mentioned, EVs have a place.
> Almost every single road-trip charging session for me has been: 1. spend 30 seconds plugging in and beeping the payment card (with Tesla you don't even have to do this). 2. walk into a restaurant/cafe/grocery store and take a pee, drink some coffee, buy groceries for the trip, etc.. 3. come back to a fully charged car
well there's a couple of issues there - adding 30/45 minutes to a journey like that might not be suitable for everyone. traumatic charge rates (above 4C) are not good for the battery, too.
> The only reason you need that expertise with ICE drivetrain is because it's so hard to maintain.
well even the linked video states that this isn't really the case these days for ICE vehicles, a point i largely agree with.
regardless, if gasoline could be recovered from the atmosphere - closing the CO2 cycle - what would be so bad about this? as it stands, with EVs alone, we're pushing the costs of a complete infrastructure change over to individuals. sure, government assistance might help us here in the west, but that's not the world a lot of people live in.
well, not exactly:
> [...] some batteries will give up their energy if they are penetrated with a sharp object. Some won't.
and your options for surviving punctures are essentially either:
* make the battery store less energy, or
* don't stack/roll the battery layers.
the first is clearly a non-starter, the latter necessitates very flat & space wasting batteries.
> [...] Some tolerate high temperatures, some don't.
lithium based batteries chemistries are completely unfavorable to high temperatures. there is no way around this, without changing the chemistry of battery (which is likely an energy density decrease), or adding thermal mass to soak up extra heat for some finite duration.
> Energy density is only loosely correlated with safety.
ok, consider this scenario: say we found a battery chemistry is resilient to puncture. can tolerate hundreds of degrees of heat without issue, and can sustain the power required to drive an electric car. ultimately you have 50kwh battery with a positive and negative terminal. you could put a bar of copper over those terminals. one of two things is going to happen;
* the copper will rapidly heat up and explode
* the battery will rapidly heat up and its container will explode
this battery is still very dangerous.
We do agree on one thing: significantly safer batteries have to use a different chemistry than Lithium NMC.
note, you can't stack these on top of each other (without loss of safety), otherwise you have a conventional battery again, this time with more conductors in between each cell.
few of these can viably use batteries (and when they can there's usually an additional consequence). not with out either a significant increase in energy density - which has its own risks - or another massive investment in things like rapid battery exchange.
great, your vehicle works for you. as i said, EVs have a significant role to play in our society. i don't want you to throw away your EV or have it taken from you.
all i'm saying is that i believe gasoline to be a better energy storage mechanism for a significant proportion of transportation needs.