> If you screw up your electric car by tinkering with it, you could easily kill people. People tinker with ICE cars all the time, to the point of slotting full

> If you screw up your electric car by tinkering with it, you could easily kill people. People tinker with ICE cars all the time, to the point of slotting full-size V8s in four-pot engine compartments. Componentisation makes standardisation possible, and control logic is generally done through fuzzy feedback loops, not hardcoded values, that's why I can swap whole brake lines, discs and pads and still have ABS/ESP work properly as long as I stay within reasonable tolerances. Also, I fail to see how swapping an electric engine with another would affect an entirely separate and purposefully isolated component such as LIDAR given proper design. I see the point of Jalopnik here, there is an long run opportunity to be had, like we went from the C64/Apple II era to the modern Intel/AMD platform where you can pop in a GPU/sound card/screen/whatevs and have it just work in an instant because we standardised stuff and are provided with relevant information (such as TDP) allowing responsible tinkerers to do safe things. Hell we standardised stuff so much that external GPUs happens to be a thing basically out of thin air. The very architecture of electric cars makes things such as upgrading the engine or battery pack a much more approachable affair that currently is, possibly even as easy as swapping alloys or tires, pending proper regulation (which could be much easier to achieve due to the tech's inherent simplicity compared to ICE engines and a proper standardisation effort, as well as certified compliance by entities like TÜV).