this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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[Dormant] Electric Vehicles
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The repairability is a much bigger concern for me than reliability. When even opening the motor housing is grounds for warranty termination in most EVs, it's easy to understand why so many people are still buying ICEs
EV only vehicle manufacturers are not doing a great job on the servicing side of the business with months wait times. Robison is up to 6 mo right now. That’s unacceptable when your AC fails. This is where the large manufacturers have the upper hand, if they can ever get it together and make 1) vehicles that aren’t a 2nd mortgage and 2) cheaper to repair.
A rear quarter panel on a Rivian R1S is $20K+ as the entire side of the vehicle has to come off to get to it. Rivian only sells the quarter panel with the entire side. You can’t just get the rear quarter panel. Absolutely insane engineering.
It shouldn't be up to manufacturers to monopolize servicing their products in the first place!
They’re following the model of the tech industry, which makes sense because there’s a lot of crossover there
I fixed an acer laptop yesterday. It was a gaming one, like a $700 laptop. Wouldn’t turn on. Acer said the motherboard had to be replaced. When I got it I found a blown capacitor shorting the main power rail, replaced it, and it works fine now. A part that costs like 3 cents in bulk. Repair was roughly 45 minutes including diagnosis.
For this one a motherboard swap isn’t the end of the world but the additional point is that for many of modern laptops and for all phones this results in a superior repair. This laptop in particular had removable nvme storage but tons of laptops have the ssd soldered directly to the motherboard so swapping the motherboard means you lose all your data. No one ever has backups lmao
But acer, apple, Lenovo, hp, etc all do this. It’s much easier to train their techs to just do board swaps, it’s much more lucrative to make repairs a several hundred dollar endeavor instead of the pennys it would cost to replace passives or basic ics, etc. they then send the “junk” boards off to the manufacturing depot in sea to actually get fixed and then sell them again as refurbished
Volkswagen did this with the Fox in the 80s. The whole side from the A pillar to the taillight, roof to rocker, was one piece. And to add insult to injury, they shipped them bare. 100% of them required repair by the body shop before putting on the car.
Far less moving parts though. No oil changes. Simpler “transmission”. Regenerative breaking means it takes forever for you to need to replace brake pads. Etc etc.
Less moving parts means an entire drivetrain replacement when something inevitably goes wrong and maintenence =/= repairs
Not necessarily, in theory anyway, but we all know big auto likes full replacements of everything so effectively yes, absolutely. It doesnt matter what powers the car though. The [undisclosed purpose sensor #7] fails and suddenly you have to replace the car computer which is encased in opaque resin for some reason and not even servicable by the engineer that designed it.
If I recall, teslas are built like shit so they have to be replaced entirely. the last statistic I saw was electric cars have 2/3 the maintenance costs of gas cars and will last as long as their frame does.
The Magnuson-Moss Act has entered the chat.
There's nothing really to repair.