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.
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...
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.
https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/why-fords-electric-crate...
Think he's an ex Tesla engineer though, but I don't think that's neccessary.
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.
"FUD" is such a terrible term in this context. Uncertainty and doubt are good for the discussion. Any discussion, frankly.
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.
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.
cough crack cough