6 ms·

This is exactly why I’m so uninterested in driving en EV. I usually word it as “I don’t want to drive a computer”, but the reality is that I don’t want to be on

by JSR_FDED 11mo ago

This is exactly why I’m so uninterested in driving en EV. I usually word it as “I don’t want to drive a computer”, but the reality is that I don’t want to be on the wrong end of the power imbalance that comes from this amount of complexity.

jkterhune 11mo ago
PHEV in the title is plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. Different from a pure EV.
- mannykannot 11mo ago
  Does that make a difference in this regard? If so, how, and is it an unavoidable penalty for PHEVs? I can see PHEVs having a complexity penalty from having an IC engine over and above the EV components, but that does not seem to be the source of the problems here.
  - dghlsakjg 11mo ago
    I would say so for this particular failure. The issue in this case has everything to do with the electronics design and close to nothing to do with propulsion. The issue described is happening because German car makers love to put generic parts inside proprietary modules that cannot be repaired, and require extensive OEM tooling to replace. This kind of dumb shit happens on ICE cars and EVs that follow this design paradigm. As described int the article the actual failed piece is ~$50 if you can replace just that pyrofuse. BMW doesn’t allow tha though. So you have to replace the entire module
  - adgjlsfhk1 11mo ago
    Well designed PHEVs can actually be simpler than pure ICs (at least on the hardware side. To build a combustion only car well, you need to balance efficiency, power, and responsiveness. This means you need all sorts of complicated tech, like correctly sized turbos, variable valve lift, variable valve duration, etc. In a PHEV, otoh, you have an electric engine (which can also steal power from the driveshaft), which means you don't need to worry about responsiveness of the combustion engine. You can fill half a second of turbo lag with the motor, and optimize for narrower RPM ranges since you can charge/discharge the battery to keep the engine running in its happy place. You also no longer need fancy and complicated brakes because you can do 99% of your braking with regen. All of this does come with more complex software, but the hardware can end up with significant simplification.
- GMoromisato 11mo ago
  This is true. EVs are much simpler than ICE, and PHEV basically have all the complexity of EV+ICE.
  - NewJazz 11mo ago
    Plus more. My Volt had a component fail that was responsible for switching the cabin heater between the battery and the motor, so if I placed the vehicle in pure EV mode then I couldn't heat the cabin, oops!
  - jgilias 11mo ago
    PHEV means a lot of things. Toyota PHEVs with e-CVT are simpler than a normal ICE. VW PHEVs where there’s an electric motor tucked into their DSG gearbox - not so much.
    - spockz 11mo ago
      And then the kicker. VW doesn’t allow the dsg with electric motor to be repaired by dealers. If something is wrong it needs to be replaced completely. At the cost of €15k (NL, 2021). The only serviceable thing is the clutch and the mechatronic. IMHO this is something that should be regulated away as consumer unfriendly and environment unfriendly. (Not to say hostile.) In the end I got a DSG specialist fix the problem in two hours by replacing two simple components physically. The car then spend an hour retraining the dsg.
  - rswail 11mo ago
    PHEVs mean that half the time your using your battery to drag around an ICE, the other half the ICE is dragging around a battery. A very temporary phenomenon in the evolution from ICE to EV.
    - torginus 11mo ago
      Your phrasing implies this causes extra weight gain - just to illustrate, the new Prius is about 1.4t (while having decent PHEV range), while the ID4 (a similar sized EV) is 2t.
fyrn_ 11mo ago
Many modern ford cars have 6 CAN buses. ICE cars are not simpler. The tech _has_ been beaten with the hammer of incremental improvement for a long time, but ICE cars are not less computer controlled. If anything ice engines require many more "computers" and sensors to be efficient
- SkyPuncher 11mo ago
  My Hybrid F-150 is so freaking complex. They basically seem to have swapped many components over to electrical drive (like the F-150 Lightning), but they still have to slap all of the ICE components in there as well.
fHr 11mo ago
Absolutely, also I'm not stupid rich and most are not but I witness how much they spend more on services and repair that I can very very easily do on my "stupid" gasoline car myself. I buy my used cars for 5k and a used ev is like 20k-25k where I live so I on purchase save the first 20k. The gas cost I save with lower insurance and service/repair costs easily. So it's juat a waste of money in my opinion and a bit of an itelligence test.
Panzer04 11mo ago
EVs are not complicated. Modern carmakers might make them complicated, and you're well within your right to avoid those, but in general electronic propulsion is pretty simple. The problem is car manufacturing is a very expensive industry that's extremely difficult to disrupt, so incumbents aren't really worried about staying ahead of hungry competitors. Go look at small-scale PEVs - ebikes, scooters, unicycles, etc. A huge, huge range of players making every possible variation under the sun, with simple designs and extremely low costs. This is what the car space is missing out on, because of regulations etc owing to their larger size and much higher danger levels that entails. I suspect many places have regulations that largely exclude smaller, simpler cars from being viable as well.
- pandaman 11mo ago
  EV is indeed easy. Safe and reliable EV is hard. Vehicle environment is hostile to electric components, where they are exposed to vibration, dirt, and moisture. Even if you get "safe" chemistry in the battery cells of an Alibaba e-bike, it only means the cells themselves are less likely to explode in a chemical fire. It still has enough current to melt metall and set off a regular fire. And in the best case it will just stop working and good luck repairing some random components, which might have been from a short production run and there are no spares in the existence.
- stinkbeetle 11mo ago
  > EVs are not complicated. > Modern carmakers might make them complicated OP did not say they would not travel on electric trains or unicycles or elevators or electric forklifts or electric container ships. They said they don't want an EV. The things that modern carmakers make complicated.
  - Rohansi 11mo ago
    > They said they don't want an EV. The things that modern carmakers make complicated. It's probably more of a sign of what's coming in the future. There is no need to make EVs difficult/expensive to repair. The change in technology is just an excuse to lock everything down and rake in more money for repairs/new vehicles. They could do the same for ICE vehicles too.
8note 11mo ago
EV and "driving a computer" are orthogonal chances are that you are driving an ICE computer, with all the problems driving a computer comes with. the EV itself is simpler than ICE is. fewer moving parts, and short supply chains once you actually have the thing. how much complexity goes into making and supplying your gas?
- nomel 11mo ago
  Yeah, modern ICE is a massively complex control system problem, requiring so much more compute than EV, just to meet regulations. Here's a funny example: the fuel vapor recovery system. It stores fuel vapors from the gas tank, that otherwise would have leaked into the air, in a canister of activated carbon. When under appropriate driving/environmental conditions, it opens valves and feeds the vapor into the intake stream, so it's burned. [1] https://www.motor.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Evap_0319-1.png https://www.motor.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Evap_0319-1... Article: https://www.motor.com/magazine-summary/vapor-tales-understanding-evap-fault-codes-march-2019/ https://www.motor.com/magazine-summary/vapor-tales-understan...
- p0w3n3d 11mo ago
  However when you advertise your car as eco friendly, you should be forbidden to create a non-repairable apple phone on wheels
vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago
In principle and EV car should be much simpler than an ICE car. It seems they are adding a lot of extra stuff that's not really necessary.
- teo_zero 11mo ago
  I think you are referring to BEV cars. The definition of EV includes hybrid and plug-hybrid (which the fine article is about, by the way).
aetherspawn 11mo ago
Teslas are dead simple, to the point where people are putting Tesla anything in virtually anything you can think of - classic cars, random sedans, you name it. There’s also that guy on YouTube who updated the electricals in his original Model S with electricals from a 10 years later Model 3 Highland just by buying spare parts, and it was pretty doable with fairly basic and limited tools/public information. So the complexity in this article is just a BMW/PHEV thing, not an EV thing.
- rconti 11mo ago
  As they point out, the Tesla pyro fuse (at least on a Model S) is a cheap part. However, in some model years it's on top of the pack, which means you have to drop the pack to get to it. And, from memory, it's a 10 year lifespan part. However, on other Model S cars, it's easily accessible from the bottom. I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars. Obviously, right-to-repair and allowing access to documentation and tools for independent shops is a a necessary but not sufficient step. I shudder to think at some of the other possibilities -- heavy-handed attempts to regulate how much specific repairs can cost. Maybe mandating the sale of manufacturer-provided extended warranties for no more than x% the cost of the vehicle purchase price would be an incentive to keep repair cost in check?
  - radium3d 11mo ago
    The majority of their cars (Y/3 models) have the penthouse (top) of battery pack super easily accessible from under the back seat, no need to drop a pack. Not to mention Tesla has the best service mode system in their computer of any brand of all time. They also have the best free to owners assembly/disassembly manuals in the service portal https://service.tesla.com/ https://service.tesla.com/. They have taken self-service literally to the next level compared to anything I've ever driven ICE, Hybrid or EV and I've owned all of them.
    - mrexroad 11mo ago
      +1 for the Tesla service manuals. My wife’s was making a clunk from front suspension. Before my assistant (my kid) had finished taking off the wheel, I found the up-to-date official torque specs on service site. Usually it takes me a while to find torque values and cross check with another source. It was beyond refreshing to see Tesla buck the trend of selling service-manuals-as-a-service. Service documentation / manufacturer software required for cars I currently wrench: - Early 20’s: Bookmarked URL to the official online documentation (Tesla). With that said, I haven’t had need beyond checking mechanical connections, flushing brakes, and replacing filters. - Early 10’s: VM containing a mid-00’s version of windows that runs a cracked copy of the long defunct manufacturer software service manual. Also runs software to interface with car, but simply painful to use. Beginning of era where tasks like replacing the 12v battery require manufacturer software to interface (though simple things still had undocumented secret Contra-like button sequences to do so). - Early 10’s car: folders of screenshots and pdf exports collected over a decade for various procedures I needed to do. OBD-2 dongle + generic app handled basic things. Not much different than decade prior vehicle. - Early 00’s: PDF of a seemingly printed-and-scanned copy of a digital version of the service manual. Off by a model year, surprising number of inconsistencies given its German. Computer and K+DCAN connection required for re-coding new parts, flashing, etc. Some fancier OBD-2 scanners could do majority of service related functions (cycle abs, reset airbag light, etc). - Late 80’s: PDF scans of the dozen+ service books (still trying to luck into a physical copy of the set without paying an absurd sum). Most mechanically complex vehicle I own. No computer necessary, but soldering required.
dangus 11mo ago
The article points out that it’s specificity BMW making this hard and expensive. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. If you own a BMW you’ll be dropping $5k on a repair someday. It’s a matter of when not if. That’s why most people lease them and move on to the next one.
inferiorhuman 11mo ago
This seems like more of a BMW issue than EV. On my E46 and E39 there's a pyrotechnic fuse on the negative battery terminal. It's somewhere around $400 in parts to replace. It's only gotten more expensive and more complex with their newer ICE cars. Back in the 80s and 90s Ford's solution was a reusable inertia switch.
nutjob2 11mo ago
You're blaming the wrong thing. EVs are ultimately much, much simpler than ICE cars, it's just that certain manufacturers are taking this opportunity to turn their cars into elaborate scams. Everything is a computer these days, but that doesn't mean that they have to be needlessly complicated. I think EVs are great, but I won't be buying one until they start selling cheap, simple ones.
- floxy 11mo ago
  What are the biggest overcomplicating issues with something like the Nissan Leaf? Especially on something like a 2018-2025 S trim?
CalRobert 11mo ago
I am, perhaps naively, hoping the Slate pickup can be better about this.
teiferer 11mo ago
None of the issues in the article are specific to electric cars. This isn't even one, it's a plug-in hybrid. A modern ICE car will have the same issues of having too much electronics inside.
- jandrese 11mo ago
  One would expect a plug in hybrid to be the most complex of all the vehicle types. It has all of the complexity of an EV combined with all of the complexity of a gas burner.
bob1029 11mo ago
The complexity here is partially a consequence of the energy storage mechanism and may be essential. It is not possible for an entire tank of gasoline to spontaneously detonate in the same way that an EV battery can. If a mechanic fucks up a procedure and drills a hole through fuel tank, it's not fantastic but you can usually detect and recover from this before it gets to be catastrophic. If you accidentally puncture an EV battery or drop something across the terminals it can instantly kill everyone working on the car. These are not the same kind of risk profile. I would not want work on anything with a high voltage system. Especially if it had been involved in an accident or was poorly maintained. These fuses and interlocks can only help up to a certain point. Energy is energy and it's in there somewhere. You can have 40kW for an entire hour or 100MW for 2 seconds. Gasoline cars usually throw a rod or something before getting much beyond 2x their rated power output.
a2128 11mo ago
EVs are not intrinsically complicated as some sibling commenters say, but the issue is that EVs are new and mostly made after the point when automakers started building cars as computers. And it's also a good excuse to put even more computers inside because an EV has to look modern with big screens and cool chimes right? I think this genuinely hampers EV adoption and governments should take some sort of action if they want to transition the market to EVs. Not that the average consumer chooses cars based on how many computers are inside it, but this builds a general impression of fragility and creates such negative stories. We need simple, reliable, serviceable EVs, but the incumbents are not going to build it on their own. (Government excessive regulations for safety, backup cameras, speed limiters, etc arguably created this problem in the first place)
Tade0 11mo ago
In terms of (unnecessary) complexity of modern ICE cars the Car Wizard has a few words that might interest you: Title of the clip: Why does it cost over $4K to replace a simple $50 gasket? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJMWvyDP3j8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJMWvyDP3j8 It's not an EV issue. It's a modern car issue.
brikym 11mo ago
Are ICE cars really any better with BMW? The used values indicate they are very expensive to maintain.
boudin 11mo ago
The problem of repairability and independent garages to have access to the tools, software and training to repair cars is not specific to electric cars. The level of electronic and automation is related to safety norms which applies to any car.
dyauspitr 11mo ago
PHEVs are particularly complicated because they have to support two drive trains. Just EV’s are very simple outside of the battery management. It’s power from the battery going to a motor.
Beijinger 11mo ago
" power imbalance that comes from this amount of complexity." Look what happened in Russia: https://www.autoblog.com/news/all-of-russias-porsches-were-bricked-by-a-mysterious-satellite-outage https://www.autoblog.com/news/all-of-russias-porsches-were-b...

jkterhune 11mo ago

PHEV in the title is plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. Different from a pure EV.

mannykannot 11mo ago
Does that make a difference in this regard? If so, how, and is it an unavoidable penalty for PHEVs? I can see PHEVs having a complexity penalty from having an IC engine over and above the EV components, but that does not seem to be the source of the problems here.
- dghlsakjg 11mo ago
  I would say so for this particular failure. The issue in this case has everything to do with the electronics design and close to nothing to do with propulsion. The issue described is happening because German car makers love to put generic parts inside proprietary modules that cannot be repaired, and require extensive OEM tooling to replace. This kind of dumb shit happens on ICE cars and EVs that follow this design paradigm. As described int the article the actual failed piece is ~$50 if you can replace just that pyrofuse. BMW doesn’t allow tha though. So you have to replace the entire module
- adgjlsfhk1 11mo ago
  Well designed PHEVs can actually be simpler than pure ICs (at least on the hardware side. To build a combustion only car well, you need to balance efficiency, power, and responsiveness. This means you need all sorts of complicated tech, like correctly sized turbos, variable valve lift, variable valve duration, etc. In a PHEV, otoh, you have an electric engine (which can also steal power from the driveshaft), which means you don't need to worry about responsiveness of the combustion engine. You can fill half a second of turbo lag with the motor, and optimize for narrower RPM ranges since you can charge/discharge the battery to keep the engine running in its happy place. You also no longer need fancy and complicated brakes because you can do 99% of your braking with regen. All of this does come with more complex software, but the hardware can end up with significant simplification.
GMoromisato 11mo ago
This is true. EVs are much simpler than ICE, and PHEV basically have all the complexity of EV+ICE.
- NewJazz 11mo ago
  Plus more. My Volt had a component fail that was responsible for switching the cabin heater between the battery and the motor, so if I placed the vehicle in pure EV mode then I couldn't heat the cabin, oops!
- jgilias 11mo ago
  PHEV means a lot of things. Toyota PHEVs with e-CVT are simpler than a normal ICE. VW PHEVs where there’s an electric motor tucked into their DSG gearbox - not so much.
  - spockz 11mo ago
    And then the kicker. VW doesn’t allow the dsg with electric motor to be repaired by dealers. If something is wrong it needs to be replaced completely. At the cost of €15k (NL, 2021). The only serviceable thing is the clutch and the mechatronic. IMHO this is something that should be regulated away as consumer unfriendly and environment unfriendly. (Not to say hostile.) In the end I got a DSG specialist fix the problem in two hours by replacing two simple components physically. The car then spend an hour retraining the dsg.
- rswail 11mo ago
  PHEVs mean that half the time your using your battery to drag around an ICE, the other half the ICE is dragging around a battery. A very temporary phenomenon in the evolution from ICE to EV.
  - torginus 11mo ago
    Your phrasing implies this causes extra weight gain - just to illustrate, the new Prius is about 1.4t (while having decent PHEV range), while the ID4 (a similar sized EV) is 2t.

fyrn_ 11mo ago

Many modern ford cars have 6 CAN buses. ICE cars are not simpler. The tech _has_ been beaten with the hammer of incremental improvement for a long time, but ICE cars are not less computer controlled. If anything ice engines require many more "computers" and sensors to be efficient

SkyPuncher 11mo ago
My Hybrid F-150 is so freaking complex. They basically seem to have swapped many components over to electrical drive (like the F-150 Lightning), but they still have to slap all of the ICE components in there as well.

fHr 11mo ago

Absolutely, also I'm not stupid rich and most are not but I witness how much they spend more on services and repair that I can very very easily do on my "stupid" gasoline car myself. I buy my used cars for 5k and a used ev is like 20k-25k where I live so I on purchase save the first 20k. The gas cost I save with lower insurance and service/repair costs easily. So it's juat a waste of money in my opinion and a bit of an itelligence test.

Panzer04 11mo ago

EVs are not complicated. Modern carmakers might make them complicated, and you're well within your right to avoid those, but in general electronic propulsion is pretty simple. The problem is car manufacturing is a very expensive industry that's extremely difficult to disrupt, so incumbents aren't really worried about staying ahead of hungry competitors. Go look at small-scale PEVs - ebikes, scooters, unicycles, etc. A huge, huge range of players making every possible variation under the sun, with simple designs and extremely low costs. This is what the car space is missing out on, because of regulations etc owing to their larger size and much higher danger levels that entails. I suspect many places have regulations that largely exclude smaller, simpler cars from being viable as well.

pandaman 11mo ago
EV is indeed easy. Safe and reliable EV is hard. Vehicle environment is hostile to electric components, where they are exposed to vibration, dirt, and moisture. Even if you get "safe" chemistry in the battery cells of an Alibaba e-bike, it only means the cells themselves are less likely to explode in a chemical fire. It still has enough current to melt metall and set off a regular fire. And in the best case it will just stop working and good luck repairing some random components, which might have been from a short production run and there are no spares in the existence.
stinkbeetle 11mo ago
> EVs are not complicated. > Modern carmakers might make them complicated OP did not say they would not travel on electric trains or unicycles or elevators or electric forklifts or electric container ships. They said they don't want an EV. The things that modern carmakers make complicated.
- Rohansi 11mo ago
  > They said they don't want an EV. The things that modern carmakers make complicated. It's probably more of a sign of what's coming in the future. There is no need to make EVs difficult/expensive to repair. The change in technology is just an excuse to lock everything down and rake in more money for repairs/new vehicles. They could do the same for ICE vehicles too.

8note 11mo ago

EV and "driving a computer" are orthogonal chances are that you are driving an ICE computer, with all the problems driving a computer comes with. the EV itself is simpler than ICE is. fewer moving parts, and short supply chains once you actually have the thing. how much complexity goes into making and supplying your gas?

nomel 11mo ago
Yeah, modern ICE is a massively complex control system problem, requiring so much more compute than EV, just to meet regulations. Here's a funny example: the fuel vapor recovery system. It stores fuel vapors from the gas tank, that otherwise would have leaked into the air, in a canister of activated carbon. When under appropriate driving/environmental conditions, it opens valves and feeds the vapor into the intake stream, so it's burned. [1] https://www.motor.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Evap_0319-1.png https://www.motor.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Evap_0319-1... Article: https://www.motor.com/magazine-summary/vapor-tales-understanding-evap-fault-codes-march-2019/ https://www.motor.com/magazine-summary/vapor-tales-understan...
p0w3n3d 11mo ago
However when you advertise your car as eco friendly, you should be forbidden to create a non-repairable apple phone on wheels

vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago

In principle and EV car should be much simpler than an ICE car. It seems they are adding a lot of extra stuff that's not really necessary.

teo_zero 11mo ago
I think you are referring to BEV cars. The definition of EV includes hybrid and plug-hybrid (which the fine article is about, by the way).

aetherspawn 11mo ago

Teslas are dead simple, to the point where people are putting Tesla anything in virtually anything you can think of - classic cars, random sedans, you name it. There’s also that guy on YouTube who updated the electricals in his original Model S with electricals from a 10 years later Model 3 Highland just by buying spare parts, and it was pretty doable with fairly basic and limited tools/public information. So the complexity in this article is just a BMW/PHEV thing, not an EV thing.

rconti 11mo ago
As they point out, the Tesla pyro fuse (at least on a Model S) is a cheap part. However, in some model years it's on top of the pack, which means you have to drop the pack to get to it. And, from memory, it's a 10 year lifespan part. However, on other Model S cars, it's easily accessible from the bottom. I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars. Obviously, right-to-repair and allowing access to documentation and tools for independent shops is a a necessary but not sufficient step. I shudder to think at some of the other possibilities -- heavy-handed attempts to regulate how much specific repairs can cost. Maybe mandating the sale of manufacturer-provided extended warranties for no more than x% the cost of the vehicle purchase price would be an incentive to keep repair cost in check?
- radium3d 11mo ago
  The majority of their cars (Y/3 models) have the penthouse (top) of battery pack super easily accessible from under the back seat, no need to drop a pack. Not to mention Tesla has the best service mode system in their computer of any brand of all time. They also have the best free to owners assembly/disassembly manuals in the service portal https://service.tesla.com/ https://service.tesla.com/. They have taken self-service literally to the next level compared to anything I've ever driven ICE, Hybrid or EV and I've owned all of them.
  - mrexroad 11mo ago
    +1 for the Tesla service manuals. My wife’s was making a clunk from front suspension. Before my assistant (my kid) had finished taking off the wheel, I found the up-to-date official torque specs on service site. Usually it takes me a while to find torque values and cross check with another source. It was beyond refreshing to see Tesla buck the trend of selling service-manuals-as-a-service. Service documentation / manufacturer software required for cars I currently wrench: - Early 20’s: Bookmarked URL to the official online documentation (Tesla). With that said, I haven’t had need beyond checking mechanical connections, flushing brakes, and replacing filters. - Early 10’s: VM containing a mid-00’s version of windows that runs a cracked copy of the long defunct manufacturer software service manual. Also runs software to interface with car, but simply painful to use. Beginning of era where tasks like replacing the 12v battery require manufacturer software to interface (though simple things still had undocumented secret Contra-like button sequences to do so). - Early 10’s car: folders of screenshots and pdf exports collected over a decade for various procedures I needed to do. OBD-2 dongle + generic app handled basic things. Not much different than decade prior vehicle. - Early 00’s: PDF of a seemingly printed-and-scanned copy of a digital version of the service manual. Off by a model year, surprising number of inconsistencies given its German. Computer and K+DCAN connection required for re-coding new parts, flashing, etc. Some fancier OBD-2 scanners could do majority of service related functions (cycle abs, reset airbag light, etc). - Late 80’s: PDF scans of the dozen+ service books (still trying to luck into a physical copy of the set without paying an absurd sum). Most mechanically complex vehicle I own. No computer necessary, but soldering required.

dangus 11mo ago

The article points out that it’s specificity BMW making this hard and expensive. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. If you own a BMW you’ll be dropping $5k on a repair someday. It’s a matter of when not if. That’s why most people lease them and move on to the next one.

inferiorhuman 11mo ago

This seems like more of a BMW issue than EV. On my E46 and E39 there's a pyrotechnic fuse on the negative battery terminal. It's somewhere around $400 in parts to replace. It's only gotten more expensive and more complex with their newer ICE cars. Back in the 80s and 90s Ford's solution was a reusable inertia switch.

nutjob2 11mo ago

You're blaming the wrong thing. EVs are ultimately much, much simpler than ICE cars, it's just that certain manufacturers are taking this opportunity to turn their cars into elaborate scams. Everything is a computer these days, but that doesn't mean that they have to be needlessly complicated. I think EVs are great, but I won't be buying one until they start selling cheap, simple ones.

floxy 11mo ago
What are the biggest overcomplicating issues with something like the Nissan Leaf? Especially on something like a 2018-2025 S trim?

CalRobert 11mo ago

I am, perhaps naively, hoping the Slate pickup can be better about this.

teiferer 11mo ago

None of the issues in the article are specific to electric cars. This isn't even one, it's a plug-in hybrid. A modern ICE car will have the same issues of having too much electronics inside.

jandrese 11mo ago
One would expect a plug in hybrid to be the most complex of all the vehicle types. It has all of the complexity of an EV combined with all of the complexity of a gas burner.

bob1029 11mo ago

The complexity here is partially a consequence of the energy storage mechanism and may be essential. It is not possible for an entire tank of gasoline to spontaneously detonate in the same way that an EV battery can. If a mechanic fucks up a procedure and drills a hole through fuel tank, it's not fantastic but you can usually detect and recover from this before it gets to be catastrophic. If you accidentally puncture an EV battery or drop something across the terminals it can instantly kill everyone working on the car. These are not the same kind of risk profile. I would not want work on anything with a high voltage system. Especially if it had been involved in an accident or was poorly maintained. These fuses and interlocks can only help up to a certain point. Energy is energy and it's in there somewhere. You can have 40kW for an entire hour or 100MW for 2 seconds. Gasoline cars usually throw a rod or something before getting much beyond 2x their rated power output.

a2128 11mo ago

EVs are not intrinsically complicated as some sibling commenters say, but the issue is that EVs are new and mostly made after the point when automakers started building cars as computers. And it's also a good excuse to put even more computers inside because an EV has to look modern with big screens and cool chimes right? I think this genuinely hampers EV adoption and governments should take some sort of action if they want to transition the market to EVs. Not that the average consumer chooses cars based on how many computers are inside it, but this builds a general impression of fragility and creates such negative stories. We need simple, reliable, serviceable EVs, but the incumbents are not going to build it on their own. (Government excessive regulations for safety, backup cameras, speed limiters, etc arguably created this problem in the first place)

Tade0 11mo ago

In terms of (unnecessary) complexity of modern ICE cars the Car Wizard has a few words that might interest you: Title of the clip: Why does it cost over $4K to replace a simple $50 gasket? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJMWvyDP3j8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJMWvyDP3j8 It's not an EV issue. It's a modern car issue.

brikym 11mo ago

Are ICE cars really any better with BMW? The used values indicate they are very expensive to maintain.

boudin 11mo ago

The problem of repairability and independent garages to have access to the tools, software and training to repair cars is not specific to electric cars. The level of electronic and automation is related to safety norms which applies to any car.

dyauspitr 11mo ago

PHEVs are particularly complicated because they have to support two drive trains. Just EV’s are very simple outside of the battery management. It’s power from the battery going to a motor.

Beijinger 11mo ago

" power imbalance that comes from this amount of complexity." Look what happened in Russia: https://www.autoblog.com/news/all-of-russias-porsches-were-bricked-by-a-mysterious-satellite-outage https://www.autoblog.com/news/all-of-russias-porsches-were-b...