EVs Could Last Nearly Forever–If Car Companies Let Them | Hacker News Reader

EVs Could Last Nearly Forever–If Car Companies Let Them

theatlantic.com

21 pointsfortran7714 comments

The reason why cars get thrown away in Europe is not because some mechanical problems, but because problems related to old age of whole device such as

* Rust. It will eat your car. Especially if you are salting roads. At some point you won't pass mandatory technical inspection and it is over for the car. Sell it scrap yard.

* PVC degradation. Insulation on cables is slowly degrading (if on source of UV light, then the process is very fast) and eventually naked cores of cables will show up, which will cause intermittent short circuits which can manifest in weird behavior of the car in specific conditions to outright fire.

So no, it can't last forever unless you want to invest in it huge amount of money every now and then.

Can't both of this problems be solved by repairing?

The body is a complex thing, but it still can be replaced - piece by piece or as a whole. Same for wiring - a lot of it is rather short and local and doesn't need complex operations for replacement.

I guess that's what you mean by huge amount of money. Can we quantify "huge"? And can we also have this expense designed to be minimal?

Not really. When your car will start rusting inside, because water got in through rusted through holes, then without extensive repair it can't be saved. Such repair will be more expensive than remaining value of the car.

Wiring is even more problematic. When PVC will degrade, you need to change whole wiring not just the broken part, because changing only the broken part will make more problems in different parts thanks to the fact that you will need to manipulate with rest of the harness and degraded PVC has tendency to get hard and break off. Wiring for the car can cost several thousand EUR because it is basically manual labor without much prospect for automation. If it is car older than 10 years, it makes no sense to do that.

"The car has had its share of repairs, including several battery and motor replacements."

If you completely replace all the important parts of an ICE car it too can last nearly forever...

https://archive.ph/rjpob

> Carmakers’ approach may not resemble planned obsolescence so much as “planned improvements,” McDonald said—making older hardware incompatible with software updates or other new functions.

Or they may just move to the "leasing" model, where you pay a subscription to have your war work. Then, if you miss a payment, it locks you out and returns to a distribution hub, like some Tesla's have done.

C is not very close to W

“Sorry, Colonel. Nice tank you’ve got here. It’d be a shame if it caught fire, wouldn’t it.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz0_r4PDyCs&t=1m31s

might be autocement.

(I learned early on to turn off all that stuff on my phone, so if I mistype, I can probably figure out where my fingers were and what I meant)

Wait, are you saying that some Teslas have driven themselves back to a distribution hub when a lease payment was missed?

Right, I saw it on Reddit first, but here's something from HackerNews:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30145971

and

https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/29/please-make-a-dumb-car/

Well, Techcrunch needs to stop printing nonsensee, then. That's not real.

> Then, if you miss a payment, it locks you out and returns to a distribution hub, like some Tesla's have done.

No such thing has ever happened.

Paywall -- needs an archive link.

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