Hacker News Reader

Comment by bfrog | Hacker News Reader

Electric cars need a lot fewer mechanical repairs. Sounds like yet more reasons to avoid buying one of these overpriced over complicated petro vehicles.

View on HN

Sounds like you have no idea how dangerous is to put your hands around electric car batteries and how expensive certified electricians are. Without a mechanic that ALSO has an advanced expert certification for high voltage electronics, the blown BMS or contactor (500$) becomes a whole battery to scrap (20k). Then you add the 6 hours of diagnostics and labor on top of it. Electric vehicles are not an arduino circuit with a couple of led and an usb cable.

It sounds like you are the one who has no idea.

There are a few basic things you have to not do in order to work on an EV, basically the same rules as for airbag systems but with physically larger components.

No modern car is electrically simple, but they all do a pretty good job telling you where you ought to be looking.

He is correct. If you have no idea what are you doing with BEV, you can destroy the car and your garage without even realizing what has just happened.

This is flatly false. The HV operating procedures on cars add significant complexity and danger to working on them. In fact, any HV work will automatically add a huge chunk of labor hours to any work and is why anything touching the HV system instantly goes into the thousands of dollars as a baseline. We are talking hundreds of volts above fatal baseline and very high amps on accidental discharge. For comparison, its safer on your biology to stick a fork in 120VAC outlet deliberately than to make a mistake with HVDC.

This illustrates why the battery really needs to be decoupled from the car. We do it for other electrical appliances like flashlights. The EV auto mechanic should optimize for removing and installing the battery. Batteries should be taken offsite to a speciality facility where High Voltage experts work on the batteries - repair, recycling, etc.

If only I could find one that isn't a spy platform. That's a problem with all vehicles that are too new, not just EVs. That makes new cars a nonstarter for me, which as a side-effect makes all EVs a nonstarter for me.

I'm curious how in-depth you've been looking, especially investigating models where you can do a little bit of work to do things like unplug cell modems. I'm somewhat in need of a new vehicle and have just assumed the whole market is trash based of what I've read online and the new cars I've seen people get. But I'm hoping I've missed some gems of online communities still managing to eek out some freedom (and physical buttons, of course).

Disconnect the antenna, and optionally connect a dummy load in its place.

Some models you can literally just pull a fuse for the telemetry modem and the car will be offline. Worth considering.

This is my backup plan for the day when I can no longer get a good used car that's old enough. Until then, though, I'm not willing to reward auto manufacturers who do this by giving them my money.

I'm hoping we'll see EV kit cars with open software someday. There's conversion kits for a number of cars, and I've thought about turning my old 08 Civic into one just for the freedom from car manufacturers.

Yes but consider that they may need more electronics repairs. A car is a notoriously bad environment for electronics and this is not a solved issue. On top of that most modern cars, especially electric cars are so tightly integrated with all closed components and no real way to repair except beg the manufacturer for a replacement part. On top of that you are pulling a lot of reasonable reliable control and timing related issues into the electronics and software.

Current day electric cars are ripe for abuse from manufacturers (planned obsolescence or generic out of warranty obsolescence) and I would be surprised if any of them are still running for over 25+ years. Even though today you see a lot of cars from the 2000s and before. Especially since the market is very fragmented between models and manufacturers.

Basically any modern day electric car is worse in terms of repair-ability then any Iphone in my opinion.

This is mostly true, but the cost of maintenance, fuel, and repair doesn't offset the cost insurance, electricity, and battery replacement for me over the course of 10 years, so my next vehicle will still be a petrol engine car unless something changes substantially. The big thing is, for me, an electric vehicle insurance quote for me ranges between 4K and 6K per year.

Yeah nobody is willing to give up the revenue/tax from someone driving a car. In fact, I bet electric vehicles will end up more expensive per mile, mark my words.

I haven't seen that in practice. My last ICE car had only about 1/3 of its maintenance costs for components that wouldn't have been present on an EV. And the upfront cost and price for the remaining 2/3 of maintenance were so cheap that it's basically impossible for any EV to ever be cheaper.

In some cases, sure. My anecdote:

Electric car. Horn keeps failing. $15 part, $900 to do the work. Why? Because to get to the horn, the entire front end of the car has to be disassembled, including the hood, bumper, fenders, you name it.

My fuel car’s horn assembly is easily accessed through the engine bay with a single bolt to remove it.

Efficiencies in one area seem to have led to extraordinarily difficult repair abilities elsewhere.

I won’t even go into how the air filters are replaced — but it starts with removing the dashboard…

That has nothing to do with an electric car. It's the same trend of designing cars to be easily manufactured at the factory, not repaired at a dealer.

I won’t even go into how the air filters are replaced — but it starts with removing the dashboard…

That's just bad design having nothing to do with EVs. It takes me about 30 seconds to replace cabin filter in a Hyundai Ioniq 5. The horns aren't quite as easy, but certainly do not require removal of the car's front end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com