I fix wrecked cars for fun, and have fixed about 10 Teslas so far. I would say model 3 and Y are easier to work on than most ICE cars. They have fewer parts, most parts are relatively easy to replace, there are no fuses to replace, no light bulbs to replace, and they have service manuals for all repair procedures available for free online. Price for parts is still high and they charge too much for their toolbox diagnostics software though.
I do the same, I am an amateur mechanic and I have worked on Tesla's and other EVs. In my experience, repairing an EV is no different from modern ICE cars.
In my experience, most people who believe that EVs are harder to repair appear to be owning older, simpler cars. These people often have either no experience with repairing cars, or only have experience with repairing older cars. Most have never owned, or worked on an EV car. And yet, they have a very strong opinion about its serviceability.
Yes, you need specialized equipment to work on EV drive-trains, just as you need specialized equipment to work on ICE drive-trains. You may not have this equipment, but professional repair shops do. You also need access to vendor specific software to perform certain repairs, I don't condone that, but reality is that this is needed for all modern cars, regardless of the drive-train type.
As technology advances, professional mechanics need to keep learning to stay up-to-date, just as how software developers do. Those that don't, can still keep working on old cars for a long time to go, so not every mechanic or shop owner chooses to do so. The same goes for software developers.
However, these are also often the type of mechanic (or graybeard programmer) who are always grumpy about new tech they don't understand, and how much better everything used to be, just because they do understand old tech. It's these mechanics that spread the 'EV bad, carburetor good' nonsense, which seems to stick with most people.
Serviceability of cars in general is becoming worse, but this has nothing to do with the drive-train.
>most people who believe that EVs are harder to repair appear to be owning older, simpler cars.
Opening the hood on a modern ICE is intimdating. So much (neatly, precisely) crammed in there (covered with plastic) I wouldn't even know where to start. Compare that to an old truck, where you can practically climb inside the engine compartment beside the motor...
> Serviceability of cars in general is becoming worse, but this has nothing to do with the drive-train.
That's precisely the point the presenter of the conference was making. She even explicitly mentions there's actually good, repairable products in the electric motorbike category.
Still, that's a sad situation that's damaging to the environment and to the countless trapped customers who have a mechanically-valid car but can't drive it due to electronics/software shenanigans. Given that electric cars are marketed as an alternative to save the planet, we could reasonably expect that they be held to a higher serviceability standard... not higher than ICE vehicles mind you, just higher than the "fuck you buy a new car" attitude all car makers are displaying right now.
Btw yesterday I took off a rear motor off a model Y. Probably took me about 2 hours to remove. So much easier than removing am engine or a transmission from an ICE car. Most difficult part to replace is the HV battery- it’s a whole day job. The biggest problem with EVs right now is that there are not enough third party (affordable) shops that are willing to work on them.
Would it be possible for me to convert a classic car to electric if I got my hands on a drivetrain and battery? I used to fit V8 engines into old cars so I can fabricate stuff, but I’m worried a bit about the battery voltage and safety.
Yes there are kits for sale that will allow you to interfere with the Tesla drivetrain, you would wire that ecu to the accelerator pedal, etc. Most conversations use battery modules from model S/X as they are smaller modules than ones from 3/Y. You would need to fabricate mounting for the motor(s) and possibly custom half shafts and suspension. And custom mounting for battery modules, custom cooling system, power steering and ac must be converted to electric. Lots of work.
There are companies offering conversion parts and people self-building EVs out of ICE cars if you look for them online. Haven't looked up much, as for me a car is just a money sink, but they exist.
I would recommend you watch the talk in its entirety. The presenter explicitly addresses this point. She says modern cars are marvels of technology and the problems lie in the electronics/software architecture making the entire car operation dependent on every single part. That means if one part is broken (say central door locking) modern cars often will refuse to work at all.
This is a problem in itself, but is exacerbated by overcharging for replacement parts, and by lack of free-software support to hack around such issues. Examples are given of specific models exhibiting such undesired behavior.
> the problems lie in the electronics/software architecture
Is this shown in data? My experience is quite different. <50% of my issues have been electrical in nature and the electrical ones are usually much cheaper to fix.
I agree with you an electronic failure can be easy to fix. Or it can be okay not to fix, for example i don't care if my central car computer can't control the opening/closing of my windows. The problem is, are manufacturers making it easy/cheap to fix? And are they making it so a tiny fault in a subsystem crashes the entire car to a halt? The answers are, in my humble opinion, no and yes respectively.
>This is a problem in itself, but is exacerbated by overcharging for replacement parts, and by lack of free-software support to hack around such issues.
These things feel like they'll be market-sorted in the future. Computers become cheaper, we know that. Software does too, as it becomes tried and tests and its marginal cost drops, or it moves to open source.
We are still so early in the EV revolution. I know lots of people with lots of cars, and only a handful have EVs.
> These things feel like they'll be market-sorted in the future.
I've heard this argument in so many fields, but never seen it play out. Housing was supposed to be market-sorted, yet there are still millions of empty dwellings outnumbering by far homeless people.
In a field that's closer to HN fields of interest, i've heard the very same argument about FLOSS on smartphones. There certainly were some progress in Android land with the mandatory device trees, and on niche products like Librem/Pinephone, but there were also major regressions with for example iCloud/Knox locking becoming a pain for second-hand hardware.
Overall, i don't trust an industry whose greedy interest is to keep us buying more to regulate itself to provide better services for existing products.
I think part of this is a deliberate measure to make it harder for modern cars to be used as weapons (of course, there are other more prominent factors like fuel efficiency and safety in accidents). With crumple zones and crash sensors, vehicles are often rendered inert in the event of a collision, and I think this is intentional; compare that with the Nice truck (which was obviously much larger than a car) that barreled through 80 people.
It's basically the opposite of what you would want in a military vehicle.
There certainly is a difference to older cars. That is what I wanted to say, it is not specific to EV cars, Tesla was just an example for a car which is controlled through central electronics. Fuses are easy to replace as they are meant to be replaced. EV probably need fewer because its batteries offer smoother voltages than your alternator. Lights don't need to be replaced as often but it got more complicated. And deeper operations like replacing a track rod is almost impossible or very work intensive in newer cars. And these are maintenance parts too if you assume a longer life span of a car.
What I would criticise is that there is often not a real technical reason why things got harder to replace or that there is an absence of a general purpose diagnostic unit.
Conventional fuses are probably replaced by electronic, auto-resettable fuses like polyswitches (some kind of temperature coefficient thermistor). Alternator or not, fuses are needed to limit the amount of energy a circuit can draw in the event that it malfunctions or is short-circuited.
Replacing a track rod ends is not a deep operation, is a routine one and very easy to perform even if you can not elevate the car as most shops do. It does requires an alignment afterwards.
However, inconvenient access to diagnostic software and rare parts/components that can only be sourced from the official dealer are a big problem, and one that the market cannot solve because there's little incentive for value chain to do so.
I would like to see legislation that forces manufacturers to publish free-to-everyone specifications, firmware and diagnostic software whenever the component is commercialized for some amount of time, like 5 years or whatever makes sense. That would made old cars much more maintainable and prolong the life for several years and/or several 100 thousands kms.
> because there's little incentive for value chain to do so.
The suppliers of car makers probably would gladly sell the components but they have to be careful as their largest customer might want to grab a premium here as well. Sometimes they still sell the exact same parts under another brand name though.
I believe Tesla has far fewer suppliers as other car makers so they probably also have a larger influence on the few that they have.
Aren't polyswitches too sluggish for a car of electronics? Perhaps sensible for starting the motor though.
Yea can’t really service the new pack :( have to replace the whole thing. Right Tesla battery packs are expensive (~$8K for a used pack) but once battery costs go down, in perhaps 10 years, I imagine a third party shop would be able to swap the battery for about as much as it currently costs to replace an engine in a typical Volkswagen.
Stupid thing is that battery packs are eminently repairable, usually a few cells go bad and can be replaced.
Tesla is pretty arrogant today, but going forward you have to conclude that battery interoperability and standardisation will be a big thing given that it's the single most expensive part. That will be motivated by lower costs for standardised parts.
That's where the "reconditioned" market comes in, right? With aeroplane piston engines you can send in a "core" and get back a reconditioned engine. Your original core is then reconditioned and sold to the next customer. The same could be done for battery packs.
More modules that can be replaced individually or used to diagnose a problem is a good thing.
If an ICE car had all the fuses in a locked box (which required replacing the whole thing when one burned out) you would correctly identify that as a negative for the end user.
I'm sure there were reasons why they went for the alternative at Tesla but "easy to work on" wasn't one of them.
No light bulbs to replace? LEDs die too, you know. Only a matter of time before they start flickering or burn out. Replacing them will be fun, as they probably weren’t meant to be replaced. Seen a great deal of such “long life” LEDs die prematurely.
totally different from my old Toyota IQ. To change a LED you had to disassemble partially the motor. So it was 30 bucks for lamp and 120 bucks for the service.
