Given that speed and alcohol are the top two causes of traffic deaths, mandatory SAE J3016 Level 4 self-driving would prevent a lot of deaths. But of course, it will make the price of a "safe" automobile many times the annual income of 99% of North American and EU drivers.
Even a FAANG HENRY who would buy a BMW i7 M70 won't be able to afford a "safe" automobile in a "safe" country.
A Waymoid is your future, first-worldians!
Self-driving is a bandaid for a problem that is made by cars. It doesn't address the hundreds of other issues caused by them. Also it adds to the incremental squeezing of the middle class out of existence.
Then there's whole long term thing - very little spare parts availability cuz most EVs are niche models, some already ceased to exist, service tools not available or insanely overpriced.
Some like Kia/Hyundai are notoriously unreliable to begin with.
> missleading
Please check spelling before posting
First people said "competition is coming" for about a decade. Now the competition has finally half arrived, but it's still so far behind. Perhaps the closest is BYD, but most BYD drivers would prefer to be driving a Tesla.
Also, because the gas engine mostly runs at its most efficient RPM, there is little stress on it so it runs very reliably.
Capitalism fundamentally does not view human life as sacred. Or rather, it puts a finite value on human life. The bond between a mother and son is priceless, there is (in the case of a loving relationship) no price that either would put on the life of the other. That is to say, there is no amount of money that either would accept in exchange for the death of the other. As actuaries know, this is not true from a capitalist viewpoint. The value of a human life is frequently calculated by various means to be somewhere around 3.5 million dollars at birth. Which is to say, if a policy change costs an organization (private or public) over 3.5 million dollars to save one human life, it does not make financial sense. So when you look at a decision by an automaker to include a "safety" feature, you have to ask "did the amount of money that this costs the company work out in terms of human lives". In this case, BMW likely concluded that the financial damages of settling an insurance claim for a battery fire, and damage to their brand from the massive negative publicity of battery fires (see Tesla) would be more than the cost of implementing this "feature". This is also true from the legally mandated standpoint of crash safety features, which result in cars being much easier to total because of crumple zones. The cost of a $100k vehicle is much less than the cost of a $3.5 million human life. On the other hand, the carbon and pollution cost of replacing many $100k vehicles is borne by the public. An interesting view of this topic is summarized in the Wikipedia article "Value of Life" under the heading "Uses", which specifically covers the cost of implementing emissions regulation vs. the cost of the human lives that reduced emissions would save. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Uses
As has been pointed out many times, vehicles these days are cost engineered to last as long as the average buyer of a new vehicle will hold onto the car. Since BMW targets a luxury market, that lifetime is likely on the order of 4-5 years. A Toyota is probably closer to 10 years. Automakers do not (as far as I know) make a meaningful amount of money on the maintenance of used cars; OEM parts do not necessarily come directly from the automaker, but rather a company that contracts with them or a subsidiary whose financials are not counted as part of the manufacturer's bottom line. Therefore, in our modern era of late-stage capitalism, companies have no incentive to make cars that last longer, and complaints from customers who wish that their end-of-life cars were easier to repair will fall on deaf ears. Those of us who wish our cars were less "safe" in order to contribute less to the criminal waste of disposal of otherwise sound vehicles and carbon cost of making a new vehicle would do well to consider the financial calculations that went into those decisions. Is making batteries that are easy to fix but kill someone when improperly repaired in 1/1000 crashes more ethical than installing systems to prevent batteries from ever being misconfigured? Are there more BMW crashes than other brands due to the target demographic? Is the number of batteries that will be repaired improperly significant enough to cause a large number of battery fires? I don't know.
This is by no means an excuse of these practices, but merely an attempt to understand them. I would love to hear where my reasoning is flawed so I can better understand this. It certainly seems to me that the risk of a shade tree mechanic soldering a piece of wire into a BMW battery computer is astronomically low, but I have seen repairpeople of all shades do really stupid things to save money so probably not zero.
It is still very bad: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesl...
Overview: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...
That said, BYD is outcompeting most other Chinese players as well, and it can be argued that this is due to the fact that BYD is also a private sector player unlike most of it's domestic competitors.
The only competitor in China that can compete against BYD is SAIC - an SOE owned by Shanghai's government.
That said, the EV glut has become a significant headache from a local government fiscal perspective - the majority of Chinese automotive companies are owned by state and local governments - a large number of whom ended up spending eye bleeding amounts of yuan on EVs despite no competitive advantage, and it's these state and local governments that are now increasingly holding the bag - which Chinese market regulators have increasingly raised red flags about [0] (and I myself foreshadowed on HN a couple times [1][2]).
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/terminal/T3V4AWMB2SJX
Which is kind of exciting if you don't care about IP law.
Likewise their CR series/Fuxing high speed trains seem to be quite nice. They were spawned off their experience working on Euro/Japanese trains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuxing_(train)
The 2026 Leaf takes many of the Ariya’s good qualities and one ups them at one of the lowest price points in the industry.
And both can be parked in spots that no model of Tesla will fit. The 3, Y, etc aren’t even a consideration for me since they won’t fit my garage. Tesla badly needs a proper small hatch option.
Still costs $30k+ USD for base trim. Chinese cars are going for sub-$20k. Few governments want a repeat of the Japanese disruption of US/European car manufacturing, so they were banned before getting the opportunity.
If you ignore cost, then Tesla's cars are probably still better at this point, but the gap doesn't seem that large.
That means more complexity, sub optimal design, less efficiency, etc. However, competition is indeed brutal right now. Tesla did something that only some other manufacturers have managed to copy so far: make cars that are EV only from the ground up. Love them or hate them, they don't make any design compromises to allow space for a combustion engine, a generator, or whatever. There's no room for a transmission, a fuel tank, or even an engine compartment. That's where the Frunk goes. The result is a car that's simpler, more efficient, and more optimal for what it does.
BYD did the same. Kia and Hyundai are having a lot of success with their electric only line of cars. And in the EU Renault and the Stellantis group have some decent and competitive low cost models on the market. Tesla's advantage is rapidly evaporating here.
Japanese car makers have been more conflicted on this. But Nissan's collaboration with Renault is giving them access to the right tech to adjust course. And even Toyota is now using a lot of Chinese made drive trains and components to finally offer EVs that are actually not that bad. The danger is of course that "made in Japan" has very limited value in this world if all your core tech is effectively Chinese and European. That's something that might change in the next years of course.
Cost wise, buying a compromise car means having to deal with more that can break, more components that may need replacing, and a lot of increasingly obsolete parts and components that are no longer being modernized. Combustion engine R&D ground to a halt about fifteen years ago. All those fuel injection systems, and other computer intensive hardware that keeps them going is aging fast and not really being invested in a lot at this point. Sourcing replacement parts might get harder and more expensive over time.
Tesla lives in the limelight 100x more than any other car brand. Every mistake or possible scandal gets insanely amplified. They are by far the most repairable EV car and have the most durable engines. What they do not tell you is that in an EV the engine giving out is the more common scenario not the battery pack.
lol.
you wanna search about kona's gearbox and iccu's beforehand.
i'm not going to get into software.
As long as you don't compare them to BYD etc.
I own tesla s 2014, my neighbour has 2025, same car. tesla x was cool… in 2017. tesla 3 is like a worse looking kia and model y is like if you took tesla 3 and pumped some air in it.
Hyperbole, but essentially true
The Japanese beat everybody when ICE ruled. Their cars were miles ahead on every measure except snob value.
In the the of EV it will be the Chinese. Tesla has no hope of keeping up, they are already fallen behind on snob value, their cars have none now.
I think the comment about BYD drivers preferring Tesla is out of date now. Ti e will tell, but my money is on China
Honestly I'm cautiously optimistic about VW, especially after they've started backing away from those awful capacitive buttons.
To have a broadly usable car, you need at least 50+ kWh battery, 100kWish fast charge, and basically almost everything you need in a big car. If you don't have it your car is not really usable as the main car.
Motors are small and efficient so they are not big cost drivers.
Small cars, such as 'cheap' B-segment cars still need all this stuff. If you look at the weight of something like a Renault 5, you find its not lighter than a Model 3. The manufacturer still pays for all that stuff, but the car's supposed to be cheap so they cant pass on the cost.
But in a small car, you have packaging problems with having to fit the battery pack, meaning you need to build them taller and draggier - that means your highway range decreases, and the big weight means big (and compact) crash structures, which again are more expensive.
In contrast, in a Model 3, you can make the pack thinner, design a more aerodynamic shape, have the big roomy frunk as a crash structure.
Your extra cost ist like tens of centimeters of steel and glass, but customers will happily pay more because its an upmarket car.
You can't really go beyond that, because the acceleration and torque is crazy even at the base level and at high speeds your range will still suck.
This basically means imo that the Model 3 and Y are at the ideal intersection of what the technology's good and bad at, and market positioning.
That's why I don't think Tesla will make a C-segment car.
Both in software hardware and handing.
https://youtu.be/P-H-GJaGiUg?si=eq8YWy8gyJ5YS99X
I think it even surpasses Chinese brands.
[Note that this is not a BMW endorsement. I would only drive one if someone else pays for the car, insurance and maintenance.]
Wife's daily driver is a 4-series "Gran Coupé" (weird term to say it's got 4-doors and not two like the "coupé" but... "Gran" is not a french word: the french word would be "grand" so I think they somehow fucked up [1]) with the B48 ICE engine. Sweet car and really good looking.
But yeah: to each his own bad taste.
[1] not as bad as Audi and its "e-tron" where "etron", literally, means "turd" in french.
Hyundai unreliable?
A US$15,000 car is equally as unaffordable for most Chinese just as a US$100,000 car is for most Americans.
Heck, the median household in China only spent Yuan 4k (~US$550) a year [0] on transportation and telecom (the Chinese government chose to club both into a single bracket) in 2024 - meaning at least 50% of Chinese households cannot afford the vast majority of EVs domestically sold in China.
[0] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202501/t202501...
The latest BYD Atto 1 is AUD27K including all on-road costs.
Tesla 3 base model is AUD60K, BYD Seal base model is AUD50K.
You guys are missing out big time by not allowing Chinese cars.
Heck, the Volvo EX30 is for all intents and purposes a Zeekr X, yet sells for US$40k a year in Australia despite Australia having an automotive FTA with China (ie. no tariffs against Chinese exported cars).
On the other hand, a similarly specced Zeekr X sells for US$24k a year in Mainland China.
Tl;dr - you will never see a $20k EV in the US or Canada because even if a Chinese firm was allowed to export into the market, they would be leaving too much money on the table.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...
What actual information or data leads you to believe this?
All wheel drive, 375mi range and sub 4 second 0-60mph is disposable to you? I'm guessing your car is disposable by comparison.
Do me a favor and stop responding to my comments. Thanks.
Here's 2 Korean mechanics reviewing a BYD. They seem pretty impressed.
Again, what information or source or evidence leads you think this?
A lot of cars have that. My (gulp) BMW EV for instance. Newer BMW ICE cars too.
But sure, some brands have had problems getting it to work for some dumb reason, recently, even the keyless entry part, which really has been a solved problem since at least the 2010s.
Yeah, the recent BMWs (both EV and ICEVs) have Apple/Android CarKey UWB support, which is much more reliable and precise than Bluetooth.
wrote myself a reminder I need to make sure to spend $90k on the car when I become senile to forget to turn it off
2014: https://www.kbb.com/tesla/model-s/2014/
If this was like “find 5 differences game” you’d lose :-)
New motors, new battery pack architecture, chemistry, etc, new body structure (giga castings), new interior, new facia and body panels, new computer architecture, new door handles. It goes on and on and on. Find me a part on your 2014 that is the same on the 2025. Show it to me in the Tesla parts catalog. It’s online. Should be easy.
Get a grip.
Tesla entire lineup is old outdated cars. Ford has F-150 and then another 50 models to choose from…
The ford transit custom PHEV costs £4500 to replace the timing belt. Access issues mean dropping the hybrid battery and parts of the sub frame. Compare with the mk8 transit, i've done the wet belt myself on that and it requires no special tools (well, i bought a specific crank pulley puller for £20) and can be done in a day on the driveway. I believe in some markets the replacement schedule is down to 6 years for the new phev due to all the wet belt failures on older models.
So far my favourite brand to work on has been Mazda, the engineering is very thoughtfully done with consideration for repairs.
I hear a lot of praise for toyota but it's from people who haven't worked on a car themselves rather than mechanics and they must be talking about toyotas from a bygone era because i'm not impressed with a 2019 corolla engineering at all, specifically various parts of the electrical system. I believe that was the most popular car in the world at that time.
Tesla is remarkably well done. Simplicity is under rated. So much so i bought one with the intention to keep for a looooong time.
So either all EVs need to be scrapped forever, or BMW needs to engineer a more tractable solution to the problem, or BMW is overreacting and overcharging customers.
Sticking to old/cheap cars seems like an increasingly good option with so many scare stories about the pain and extreme expense of getting modern cars, particularly EVs, repaired.
And the impending ban on new ICE vehicles seems likely to lead to more older cars being kept on the road for a lot longer.
Making it a very complicated and expensive fix isn't what's saving your rescuer or mechanic from getting electrocuted while working around your car.
It's not excusable to do this to the product because of some hand wavey napkin math about liability.
Understand how people will interact with your product and then use that information to avoid doing things like routing power where firefighters want to cut and you'll accomplish the same thing without a stupid expensive hair trigger fuse.
The engineering praise comes from the fact that if you are taking care of it, you will probably never have to work on it until it's well into 6-digit mileage. This remains consistent through pretty much their entire line with the one exceptional black mark really being the RAV4.
Usually at that point someone puts in a new hybrid battery and sells it to someone else starting out driving Ubers.
I had a Toyota Yaris a couple of decades ago. Very reliable, very few issues. But some routine things like replacing headlights were completely bonkers. You had to wiggle your hand between some sharp metal parts to unscrew the back end of the armature. Sheesh, would it have been that prohibitive to add a few cm of extra space there?
I've heard this from mechanics already 15+ years ago. Mazda seem to still have this reputation.
I wish there were more repairability scores for cars.
In the abstract, if you have access you can look at the technicians manual, and see how many labor hours are allotted to various common repairs, you can even look at common problems and see what the common outcomes were to repair the vehicle.
Unfortunately, most people don't have access to this highly valuable resource.
Toyota hybrid powertrains are more reliable than any other company, but other than that they are no longer special.
All that to say that a wet belt should not even be used in the first place.
https://electrek.co/2025/12/03/tesla-model-y-named-worst-car...
>So much so i bought one with the intention to keep for a looooong time.
Good luck with that.
But there are two other things that make it a bit unfair for Tesla in comparison to other brands:
Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten breaks - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking instead of the real breaks. Simple solution is to force breaking from time to time (I.e. breaking in neutral). Another aspect is, that all the other brands have a mandatory inspection from the manufacturer before the cars will be tested by the independent check. This avoids that they will fail it, because the car will be repaired before it is checked by the independent inspection. This is not mandatory for Teslas.
Btw, my petrol car had ugly rusty rear brakes. No way to pass the check. The car had manual handbrake and I used in every highway exit to slow down and removed rust.
I sold my bmw after 15 years of multiple bmws because their design is so poor for maintenance. I had cooling system problems that required hours of labor to get to just to replace a plastic part that cost $5 where an aluminum one would cost $7.
It seems to me that bmw was designing for best case scenarios where everything goes perfectly. And since it’s supposed to go perfectly who cares if it’s $5000 to fix because it will “never break.”
Reminds me of Rube Goldberg software designs where 9 things have to happen in sequence for success.
The idea of rubust design that assumes everything breaks and you can still operate is one I value. I look for car companies (and everything I suppose) following this principle.
PHEVs are great, I've driven two in the past 6 years, but in most cases, you're one airbag deployment away from a very, costly repair and in 99% of cases, a totaled car.
They have over-engineered the everything, because that is what BMW does. That is what they have been about for the last thirty years.
Spare parts were small, cheap, and easily accessible too (atleast for my toyota)
I dread being forced to upgrade, not out of disdain for the environment, but the fact that I will spend more money, on a less reliable, less "mine" car, and more something big daddy government wants.
Even 25 years ago working on German vehicles compared to the Japanese counter-parts was a harrowing endeavor.
Germans are excellent at making cool flashy features...that rely on 16 moving parts that cost $700 each, and need to remove the engine exhaust manifold to access one screw to release part #15.
They get a 10 for "Wow!" factor, a 0 for "well thought out", and a 10 for "extremely over complicated". Unsurprisingly this mindset has carried over into EVs now too.
The most expensive tooling was the two floor jacks I purchased to make the process easier. The software needed was available from the manufacturer for a reasonable fee. The battery pack itself was surprisingly modular and simple to dismantle for repair.
I don't many things GM has done, but (at least back in 2010) they did a good job of letting owners do their own work.
A battery pack for a Model 3 is $10K. So even if the whole car is only worth $20K, it's still worth keeping on the road.
The Porsche Taycan battery pack is $70K. The moment you have any issue at all with it, the car will be considered totaled.
>We saw this years ago on diesel and petrol cars: DPF failures, EGR valves, high-pressure pumps, timing belts running in oil, low quality automatic transmissions, and lubrication system defects. Everyone calculates the CO₂ footprint of a moving vehicle — nobody calculates the CO₂ footprint of a vehicle that is constantly broken and creating waste.
Extremely well put.
Even if you don't work on them, grab yourself a copy. You never know when you might need to know how to rebuild a Borg Warner transfer box or ZF 4HP24 gearbox.
I get it, though. Cars are becoming like iPhones where the manufacturers are totally against you making any repairs at all. We've just grown used to cars being one of the most commonly repairable items we buy. At some point in the near future car ownership will probably diminish significantly as robotaxis flood the market and the manufacturers will become even less interested in self-repairs.
Cars of a past generation were able to be owner-maintained (or understood), and therefore the owner had some interest in knowing that it was easy to maintain and would buy (at least partly) on that premise. Something that was a nightmare to maintain would not be so easily bought because the owners would soon realize how hard they were to fix.
Now, with a car that is so complicated, the owner is far distant from being the fixer of it until years later seeing a surprise repair bill. Even the maintainers are not even directly knowledgeable about the design and how to repair. And the information about its maintainability is a low factor on the buying considerations list. But by then you've already given the company the money and incentive to keep on building this way. And rarely (or extremely/too "laggily" does that information feed back).
It seems to me enterprise software systems have this problem as well.
I get that from a safety point of view, certain things should be checked and / or replaced after a crash, especially when volatiles like batteries or fuel tanks are involved. But they shouldn't cost thousands.
Did anyone think politicians are there for a common good? They are there to turn us unto sheep to shear. Their primitive lies and propaganda and us being idiots are their main instrument
The problem is that a whole bunch of people who know the politicians are not concerned with anything in the same ballpark as the common good will lie to your face about it when the thing the politicians are pushing suits them for the next 5min even if the long term consequences are obvious.
The politicians behavior is just a symptom of the problem.
Its a DMCA DRM hellscape, full of equipment that was sold (with a state registration no less), and these car companies still maintain remote control and real ownership indefinitely.
Mercedes EQS won't "let" owners open the hood.
BMW "rented heated seats" bullshit.
GMC Hummer EV Requires dealer-level authentication to reset the 12V battery or perform certain repairs.
Tesla uses proprietary diagnostic tools and encrypted software.
Volvo has explored payment-based bricking.
Even the EFF warned about this 12 years ago in 2013 : https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-co...
Will I consider an EV? Sure. Am I going to place primary buying decision on reparability and full ownership? Damn straight I will. If that means I buy hybrids and/or ICE vehicles. I want something I can maintain without running to the vendor to ask permission, or even "giving" them the ability to say no.
Owning a car (or device) you have "purchased" is getting more and more difficult to achieve. So is owning of anything at all that can or is allowed to connect online. You basically pay for it in order to rent it because you no longer control its lifetime.
I think it might be the ev equivalent of a wear item like a water pump or alternator on an ice vehicle.
Articles like this confirm my opinion on the subject. What annoys me most is that we argued in favor of electric cars because of climate protection. I am in favor of climate protection, but when I read this article, I just feel like I'm being taken for a ride. Politicians should not have simply decided to phase out combustion engines. They should have imposed further constraints on the automotive industry with regard to low purchase costs, durability, reusability, and affordable maintenance.
PHEVs are complicated tech so I figured I would choose one with a proven design (Prius -> Prius Prime -> RAV4 Prime).
I think they are optimized for the EU leasing market. 4 years, 120.000km. If you buy one for long ownership and want more out of them (they can most certainly do 400=500k km reliably), you have to take care of them from day 1. You change the maitainance schedule (which by default is set to lowering fleet lease costs and who cares beyond that), learn about and do preventive maintainance (such as replacing the entire cooling around 120k km), stricktly use BMW oil (for the additives) unless you are realy knowledgeable about it, and invest in a decent fault scanner (to lnow what is going on and not just run up expensive maintainance bills at the BMW shop).
If you think that's all too much hassle, just lease them short term or buy something else.
One would assume taxi companies etc would be willing to pay for cars that have high uptime and reliability. But I think they drive mostly the same stuff as regular people. At least one would assume they could get beefier suspension and transmission and high displacement downtuned engines.
In general new cars are still vastly better than old ones. 90:s cars rusted from everywhere after ~8 years while most cars nowadays have zinc coating and more plastic and are still mostly fine after 15 years.
In your part of the world, maybe. I live in the middle of the salt belt in the US and we get about 10 years out of most cars. That's when you start seeing rust holes in the fenders around the wheels, when most of the frame has flaked away and the floor pans become involuntary structural elements.
If you're a car nut who spends extra time and money on preventive maintenance and rustproofing, you can get a few more years. But the rust comes for your car at some point anyway.
Car manufacturers know how to make the frames and bodies last longer, this is not an unsolvable manufacturing and design challenge. It's just that nobody is getting a raise for going to their boss and saying, "I know how to make the company sell slightly fewer cars..."
Here in the UK until recently it was all Skoda Octavias, nice simple comfortable cars with a reliable diesel engine. Prior to that, it was all Citroën Xantias - again, nice simple comfortable (really comfortable with their hydraulic suspension) cars with a big reliable diesel engine.
It's not uncommon to see them hit well over half a million miles, often in less than five years.
The problem is that $2 here and there adds up, and at the level of the whole car it can add hundreds, or thousands of dollars of extra cost for reliability that the user can't experience directly. For some percentage of owners the plastic part works fine for the whole time they have the car. On the other hand sturdier parts add expense in the case of an accident or replacing parts during routine maintenance.
Consumer Reports puts them at almost opposite ends of the spectrum, as well.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cos...
Before Teslas really took over the "high income tech worker" market, in Seattle you used to be able to get a used BMW for quite cheap, because all the Microsoft and Amazon workers would lease them and then they'd go on the used market when the lease was up. I actually considered doing this, but multiple mechanics said very bluntly, "don't, this is a trap, the maintenance costs will eat you alive".
[0]: https://www.crsautomotive.com/what-are-the-total-costs-of-ve...
Edit: but at the end of the day all his own cars are Toyota/Lexus
Every now and then you see it leak out into some other environment, like Toyota and their pull-apart ball joints that "aren't an issue" because "the user will just service it on schedule" where it reliably causes problems in all sorts of dumb ways (because like anything else, designing stuff to within an inch of it's life takes practice).
Now, don't get me wrong, this European approach creates a lot of cool highly performant products, but it's stuff that tends to fall on it's face real good if you violate any of the assumptions made when designing it and the approach is naturally suited to some products more than others.
Now if you practice mountainbike you may ride your bike 1 to 5 times a week. Let's say you only ride once a week for 4 hours: 125 / 4 = 31, you would need to service your fork every 31 weeks. Add some few more rides and you have to service the fork twice a year.
Each service easily costs $150 if done by a bike shop. If you do it yourself (plenty of tutorials on youtube), you need expensive special tools, oil, special grease and spare o-rings and seals easily costs 30-40$ for every service. And you have to properly dispose the old oil.
[0] https://tech.ridefox.com/bike/owners-manuals/2979/fork--2025...
But German car makers are really quick to add new technology. They were quick to add ABS, fuel injection, complex suspensions, etc.
But have you ever tried to make something you built to easy to maintain? You have to reroute everything, redesign your layout, add access ports, switch fittings… my god it can take almost as much time as building the thing to begin with. As an engineering requirement, it’s a high impact one.
(OK most people probably don’t build physical things they design much, but I’m sure some of you play Minecraft. Especially for those contraptions, do you add access corridors, extra access entrances, plan access into the construction? No, most people just make some tiny hole somewhere to get in. You’re just happy it works.)
And at the pace some car makers add new technology, I don’t think they budget the time to go back and do that. I think with the quick pace of EV technology as well, previously more maintenance friendly car makers are in the same boat.
> But have you ever tried to make something you built to easy to maintain?
At work, all the time. The people who get it love working on or with my code. The ones who don’t look at me like I have a horn growing out of my head.
There is still a difference between e.g. Lada 2104 which, while admittedly having some strange fastening designs, was relatively straight-forward do (partially) disassemble and reassemble, and e.g. modern Fords where you can't to take the lights off of your trunk door without fully disassembling it first. Even better, the exact jigsaw puzzle of the design varies from one modification/year to another even for what is supposedly the same car model.
Compared to stuff like Toyotas or Hondas, they practically cost nothing to keep on the road.
I guarantee no engineer wanted an expensive, difficult to replace pyro fuse. Unfortunately, it doesn't particularly matter what individual engineers want, it's what the system wants, and the system wants to make money.
If the car has 10 places where the manufacturer saves 2 dollars, that is 20 dollars a car. At around 2.5 Million cars shipped each year that is 50 Million Euros each year profit for BMW.
The entire car industry is extremely cost sensitive, especially right now, with so much global competition and little consolidation.
The issue also isn't that the part is cost optimized. The issue is that it fails.
This is literally how all software works. Except it is thousands of instructions. Further, it is very often that programs don’t handle anything besides the happy path.
Comparable process on my Sv650: drain plug out. Drain plug in. Screw off filter. Screw on filter. Fill.
I assumed this was satire. It is not. :|
These old cars were engineered to a high standard, and designed to be maintained - while maintenance isn't cheap, with proper servicing and car, they could last forever.
This is entirely different - in the past few years BMW has become infamous for using low quality plastic fasteners that become brittle and break eventually, and all around penny-pinching everywhere.
It seems they even took the logical next step and installed draconian repair and service prevention measures.
They took the stance that once the car is out of the warranty period and isn't brough to an official service center, they stand to make no profit on it, so it should end up in the scrapyard in the shortest time possible.
This proves to me they don't understand their own market - people who buy expensive (70k+ish EUR) BMWs are all financial wizards who lease their cars, tax optimize them to the gills through legally grey methods and other schemes, and then resell them at the end of the lease.
This means they're able to drive them for like 300-400 euro a month cost - but only because of resale value. If they kill resale, then people won't buy them.
The amount of people who will put down 70k+ in cash at the salon is exceedingly small.
The car was 20 years old when I had it, but still ran like a top. I'm sure I'd have been driving it for many more years had my ex not run it into the back of a tow truck.
- They welded the case: even the engine block that experiences combustion pressures and temps is just bolted together - why?
- They even outdid (pre-R2R) Apple in every aspect - proprietary components, everything put together on the same PCB, with third party replacements impossible, replacement parts locked out cryptographically, and 'anti-theft' (anti-repair) systems installed so even authorized dealers are at a risk of bricking the vehicle - and third party shops can't even repair it.
- They are German so in the EU they are above the law (or more accurately they write the law) - but it'd be nice if us Europeans had their own Louis Rossmans and actionable right to repair laws, and the EU did something beyond bullying foreign tech companies, and applied the same level of scrutiny to domestic ones as well.
This is a comical level of evil - they know that due to the proprietary components (that you can't get at an auto parts store), when these vehicles become 10-15 years old, they will be either uneconomical to repair, with repair costs exceeding the value of the vehicle, no third party parts, no possibility of third-party service - people will resort to stealing these cars to source replacement parts.
So they installed a system that bricks the vehicle should it detect tampering - which might happen if somebody tries to fix their own vehicles.
And let me reiterate, Germans are above the law in the EU - the only reason Dieselgate became a huge scandal is that the US found out about it - please, American friends, could you do another 'gate' about this - its for the good of all.
My merc exposure is both on very old (70s) and modern. So I would actually argue that over engineering shit is in their DNA, they don't know how not to do it.
My brother had an old W123 body Merc for a while. It had fucking vacuum lines running to all the doors for central locking. I had a SsangYong with an old-school Merc OM617 diesel engine in it. Great engine, and it was relatively easy to work on, but the oil filter was positioned such that you can't replace it without spilling oil all over the engine bay. Infuriating!
Times have changed and now the fuse replacement is not just a mater of over engineering, something someone put together thinking it's a technically perfect process. It became a revenue stream. Car designed also by accountants.
It's also not a eu thing as all manufacturers are locking things up, Ford and other US brands are trying as much as all other manufacturers. They just haven't reached BMW levels yet.
Meanwhile my 2011 Prius continues to pass its MOT without fail, needs just the usual very affordable consumables, gets 50% higher MPG and actually has a larger cargo capacity than the X1.
1. The EU de facto mandates the car manufacturers have to develop and sell cars that produce less CO2 (mostly by the way of fines for higher polluting vehicles). This led to the development of hybrid ('mild-hybrid', 'full-hybrid', and PHEV) and EV vehicles.
2. The manufacturers tend to both complicate the technology and lock the stuff down, so it's not easily repairable. This has its own enviromental price, and EV Clinic says this is not accounted for. That's not completely fair as on one hand there are EU repairability directives that address this but on the other we still want to have some degreee of market competition and in the end the market should punish those manufacturers (as it is already doing, I think).
One thing I want to add is that the EU also mandates real-world-fuel-consumption-measurement (OBFCM) devices in new cars and if that is followed to its logical conclusion and the manufacturers pressure is resisted, this will mean the end of hybrids as the real-world data is horrible for them.
https://zecar.com/reviews/plug-in-hybrid%27s-real-emissions-...
Though I'd say this is 80% of the problem, the safety fuse thing is needed but it probably takes a while for companies to get it right
In the meantime, 200x Ford Ranger or 200x Chevy S-10 are the last of the small pickups where you can get a 6 foot bed and a single row of seats. (Afaik)
I sold my small white pickup once, and ended up with a different small white pickup a few years later. I do enough (small) truck things that having a truck on hand just in case is worth it for me; but even with minimal miles per year there's certainly added expense from maintenance some of which ends up being time based, registration fees, and incremental costs for liability insurance on another vehicle. For quite a while, my family vehicles were a 4-door car/wagon and a small pickup, but that doesn't work for everyone; I feel better served with a minivan, a 4-door phev, and a pickup (and a silly old rear engined vw van with only the front seats, mostly for midlife crisis, but also handy for picking up large items that don't want to be inside for transport)
I did own a 1994 Dodge ram up until a few years ago, but it needed new brake lines and there was so much rust coming off the frame I honestly wasn't sure I trusted it anymore, and the cost of the brake lines was probably more than it was worth at that point.
A new 1980's mini truck would be awesome. If only...
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.
> 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.
In the well established auto context we're talking about in this thread they are.
> Go look at small-scale PEV
Not relevant to the discussion at hand.
You're right that they shouldn't be, and don't have to be. That doesn't mean that the ones that actually exist in the automotive world actually are, and it's rather egregious to claim that they aren't. Doubly so when you try to substantiate that with devices that regardless of propulsion are drastically simpler, cheaper, and different devices. It's like trying to claim airplanes aren't complicated because a gliders are simple.
Not all of them are as bad as the BMW in the OP, but very few (if any) road legal mass produced EV's are truly simple.
So simple that it’s usually called electric propulsion.
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?
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...
Article: https://www.motor.com/magazine-summary/vapor-tales-understan...
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.
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?
And check some videos of what you have to do to swap the door-actuating motor (which gets guaranteed water ingress) in the front doors (yes, not the gullwings) of a Model X.
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)
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.
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.
Title of the clip: Why does it cost over $4K to replace a simple $50 gasket?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJMWvyDP3j8
It's not an EV issue. It's a modern car issue.
Back in the 80s and 90s Ford's solution was a reusable inertia switch.
Look what happened in Russia:
https://www.autoblog.com/news/all-of-russias-porsches-were-b...
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.
100% this. BMW's own stats say that something like 90% of buyers of new BMWs keep them for 3 years or less. The fact that parts like oil pans are made out of plastic or that lately all their gearboxes have the oil drain port completely removed is just irrelevant to the buyers because none of them care about keeping the car for a decade like people used to. And the collapse of second hand prices due to these catastrophic repair costs is not really a problem for them either.
>>Germans are excellent at making cool flashy features...that rely on 16 moving parts that cost $700 each
To be completely fair - Mercedes used to do this in their S Class and also it would work for decades despite the complexity. That's German Engineering. But that quality has been missing across all German brands for a good while, it pops up every and now then in specific components that are still extremely well designed and reliable, but it's not standard across the entire vehicle.
The extreme depreciation of BMWs and Germany's loss to the Allies in WWII are both aspects of the same phenomenon; that fact is very funny to me.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/new-battery-cost-for...
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/183if34/what_i...
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/1blczt1/what_a...
https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/tesla-battery-replace...
https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/tesla-model-3-battery-re...
Shipping from China to the west coast runs an additional $30/kWh due to the weight of the cells and volume of the box (shipped in several boxes to reduce cost). So you can have a 300 lbs, 15 kWh 48V battery shipped to your door for about $120/kWh).
High voltage EV batteries need additional components (like HV contractors) due to stacking so many cells in series, but it seems entirely plausible that Tesla's economies of scale allow them to offer a 75 kWh battery for $10k (~$133/kWh) plus installation.
Huh? The taycan has an 8-year/100k mile battery warranty. How many 100k+ mile carreras do you see for sale on eBay?
Then, almost no manufacturer that sells in the EU knows how to do this (Renault is almost the only one that doesen't have pyrofuses in the battery, almost everyone else has). The catch is, the routed power is not problematic, the problem is when something gets squished and redirects that routed power to somewhere else. Which tends to happen in a metal tincan.
Who thought that was appropriate?
That's one more car they will happily milk for a subscription. Also, safety laws in the US are way more lax than Europe.
Lower end cars on the other hand can be worth 3/4th of their initial value 5 years out, that’s a durable good.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-leads-vehicle-longevity-mile...
What kills the hybrids is that the kind of people who buy these sorts of "peak appliance" cars tend to be the same kind of people who'll obliviously let some critical fluid run too low. You get orders of magnitude less of that sort of behavior in taxi fleets.
All this assumes proper maintenance, especially oil changes.
That said, the synergy drive is by design a very robust mechanical system. It has no dog gears, clutch or torque converter. I'm sure this contributes a lot to their long life.
Why not? If you pay the suppliers 20 dollars less for those parts for each car, that is pure profit.
Keep in mind that cars are priced and developed for specific market segments. Cars aren't developed and then a price is decided based on what the components cost. Also keep in mind that some of the most exclusive and luxurious cars in the world (Lamborghini and Bugatti) share parts with some of the most mundane mass produced cars from VW.
I like the top mount oil filters, less mess.
If you have the parts and the will it's possible to keep any car running close to forever. That said if you've gotten to the point where the frame is totally rusted out then maybe it's time to consider moving on.
Most other things are easy to source, and anything made of steel can be fixed (zero rust, so far).
Another source of good recommendations could be insurance companies. Cars with low reliability or very expensive fixes probably need more expensive insurance. But I don't know if this data is public or if you can tell apart the reliability from the repair cost.
I must say that I've been impressed with Dacia. Even the build quality is excellent - on par or beating VW. I've driven on Romanian roads so I can see why they would prioritize such high build quality.
Bless them, I would rather buy 10 shitboxes than one modern car (and that cost is about the same).
And it ought to surprise nobody that trophy wives in 4runners show up with their vehicle in a statistically different state of repair than single moms in Altimas.
The big failures that you really want to avoid almost never show up on safety inspection data because they typically render the car much less drivable so they either get fixed promptly or the car stops coming around for it's inspection.
If you have car brand A that has a reputation for having catastrophically expensive failures in major components, and car brand B which just keep chugging along for decades, you will probably see an elevated failure rate for brand B since it is still driving, while brand A will not be failing since it has already failed so badly it has been scrapped.
Yes there is. Either nobody is engineering towards that aspect or it is a conscious decision, deliberating between two different buckets: bill-of-material cost per unit and estimated impact on your warranty & goodwill budget. Whatever is deemed to be cheaper will win.
Source: I work at an automotive OEM and one of my first projects almost two decades ago was how to anchor after-sales requirements into the engineering process. For example, we did things like introducing special geometry into the CAD models representing the space that needs to be left free so a mechanic can fit his hands with a tool inside. These would then be considered in the packaging process. If you consider these are two completely different organizations, it becomes a very tricky problem to solve.
Refusing access to training isn't a BoM issue by any means. Neither is a repair process that's so error prone that it can do even more damage to the car. We are surrounded by evidence that manufacturers in every field are taking decisions that are hostile towards their customers in the chase for profits. With the rise of EVs with far fewer moving parts needing constant maintenance, the manufacturers had to shift to different revenue streams, like killing repairability and locking everything behind manufacturer approval.
This is a professional shop voicing the complaints, not a random guy trying to do a fix on the side of the road.
Imagine someone told you they work for Apple and the reason everything is soldered, glued, stacked in a way it will never survive disassembly, and every bit of software and hardware in the device needs the manufacturer's blessing to be replaced or just keep running is because it was cheaper and safer this way.
> it becomes a very tricky problem to solve.
It was a solved problem for everything mechanical where locking it down or preventing people from learning wasn't really an option. How did it become tricky again just now when we deal with far more flexible software and possibility to lockdown?
To take a few examples from the article with likely causes (note I don't work for BMW, so this is pure speculation based on my own experience):
> BMW has over-engineered the diagnostic procedure to such a level that even their own technicians often do not know the correct replacement process.
The ECU, diagnostic procedures and service methods are being developed by a different org-units. One is engineering, which works towards their own development use cases. They might develop the on-board diagnostic interfaces. The service unit develops their own tester and have to develop their own procedures.
Engineering is usually late with providing real hardware & software samples, let alone a fully integrated car. The service unit might only get a working test car very late in the process and discover that the procedure is super complicated. By that point the car development is already too far along for major changes. Remember that most components have been specified and awarded to suppliers years ago by this point.
> And it gets worse: the original iBMUCP module, which integrates the pyrofuse, contactors, BMS and internal copper-bonded circuitry, is fully welded shut. There are no screws, no service openings, and it is not designed to be opened, even though the pyrofuse and contactors are technically replaceable components.
Engineering is not concerned with these issues, it's usually the service unit which needs to bring in maintenance requirements. A judgement call is being made whether an assembly that you source as a single part needs to be split up further. For example, if you split it up further, you now have more parts to manage. You need to provide logistics and must allocate space in your spare parts warehouses for these new parts.
That usually makes sense for expensive components. Here's another fact: the manufacturer allocates a warranty & goodwill budget for each car line, because the manufacturer has to pay dealers for these repairs if it falls into the warranty period or is judged to fall under good will. It's usually not in the interest of the manufacturer to have expensive repairs because of that.
It might also be that the repair is being deemed to dangerous, because it is a high-voltage component. Opening it up and tinkering with it might increase the risk of an electrical fire in the battery. It might be that this risk was judged to be higher than the repair cost.
> Additionally, the procedure requires flashing the entire vehicle both before and after the replacement, which adds several hours to the process and increases risk of bricked components which can increase the recovery cost by factor 10x.
No service unit wants these long flashing times, because it blocks a repair bay in the workshop. But it's usually because the EE integration has been developed in this way. It might need coding, calibration or just bringing up everything to the latest release.
Vehicle SW is super regulated, you need to fulfill a staggering amount of regulations. Look up UNECE-R156 SUMS as an example. It might be that the new parts comes with a newer SW version, which has only been verified and approved in combination with newer SW in the other components. This would require flashing ancillary ECUs as well even if they have not been changed to ensure release compliance.
> Even after we managed to open the unit and access everything inside, we discovered that the Infineon TC375 MCU is fully locked.
Look up UNECE-R155. Things like these are mandated, if not directly in the regulation then indirectly by making the manufacturer liable for any modification that somebody did to their car. It is practically required to lock it down.
Just a few points off the top of my head, the comment got too long anyway.
That's exactly it. I understand the importance of safety but reading the list of complaints I just cannot believe that safety is the key driver for the design decisions.
> ISTA’s official iBMUCP replacement procedure is so risky that if you miss one single step — poorly explained within ISTA — the system triggers ANTITHEFT LOCK.
> Meaning: even in an authorised service centre, system can accidentally delete the configuration and end up needing not only a new iBMUCP, but also all new battery modules.
> BMW refuses to provide training access for ISTA usage
Everything about this screams greed driven over-engineering. Since when are error prone processes and lack of access to information better for safety?
We live in a world where everyone justifies taking user hostile actions with some variation of "safety". Software and hardware are locked down, backdoored, need manufacturer approval to operate even when original parts are used, etc.
But other than that I mostly agree, I don't think that the over-engineering is greed driven - but the EU Manufacturers (but honestly, even other ones) have a really hard time with anything software based. Be it in car or outside of it. But BMW is far from the worst on that front.
P.S: VW ODIS original diagnostic is based on Eclipse :D
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.
All of this does come with more complex software, but the hardware can end up with significant simplification.
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
Then 2 weeks later there was an article about how much money do Americans make per hours worked, and everyone was falling over each other pointing out how flawed the methodology was.
His Tesla Battery cell repair stuff, anyone that was near a open battery knows it's fucking dangerous thing that has VERY low chance of actually working in medium term - but it gets him a lot of respect by clueless people. But he also does good stuff, but his image and reality are VERY different things.
Compare that with Toyota’s approach and it’s just small tweaks. It’s reliable, parts are standard, and they’ve had the chance to really dial things in but altogether it feels dated in some ways.
And of course German automakers have some of the latest stuff but a lot of it feels like version 1 stuff. It works and sometimes is really cool but just isn’t dialed in enough to be reliable.
It’s really interesting the different engineering cultures between different car companies.
I wonder where the new Chinese automakers stand.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-byd-jon-mcneill-chines...
A SR Suntour fork has a 100 hour maintenance interval, for example.
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/3730626/Sr-Suntour-Durolux...
And just like you, I mirrored your comments format with my own when I led with a counterpoint, and then immediately followed it up with the concession that in the context you're describing, they don't have to be.
> have a much harder time imagining how a modern ICE works as reliably as it does
Lube is magic.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
The theory that Greeks work more hours because less of them work in total doesn't line up with the numbers.
But if we pick Poles instead of Greeks, they have a similar level of employment to Germany while working just as many hours as the Greeks
The head of the product disagrees with you. No offense but I think he has a slightly better idea of their target buyer than you.
>AW: How much was Tesla on Porsche’s mind when the Taycan was produced? It seems like you’re going right after Model S with this car.
>SW: The first target for ourselves was to make sure that the Taycan becomes a Porsche. We needed to make it as close to the 911, our icon, as possible. Obviously, we had a look at the competition, we had a look at BMW, Mercedes, Tesla.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/people/a2157176/talking-taycan...
Early 2000s JDM coupes will always hold a soft spot in my heart, even though they've mostly rotted away at this point. I used to say I was into cars but these days there's nothing that inspires me at all, I'd be happy just to have a reliable electric box with 4 wheels.
No question, though, my next utility-car will be electric, and (though you'll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers) I expect my Miata to be the last ICE car I'll ever own.
These regulations do not mean you need 25k in tooling, but that is what it has come to. And thus there is a blooming (mostly Chinese/Russian) aftermarket tooling business with sketchy software you want to run in a VM.
If for instance if you damaged a headlamp, and then went to an authorized BMW dealer, bought the correct brand new OEM BMW head lamp assembly from the parts department of an authorized BMW dealer, and followed the replacement procedure to the letter in the BMW service website... it won't work. The headlamp assembly is not authorized to talk to the rest of the car even though it's OEM, untampered, with stock firmware.
The headlamp has to be reprogrammed with the correct VIN number in order for the rest of the ECU's in that particular car to recognize it as authorized.
That's something that they should have taken into consideration when designing the car.
I'm in Europe. Never heard of mandatory inspection before independent checks. How would that even work, or be enforced.
ICE vehicles would normally catch these issues sooner because you'd be pulling in a lot more often for oil changes (and a quick mechanical inspection is typically a courtesy at that time).
Huh? Every EV uses recuperative braking, how is this special to Tesla?
(Of note: I drive a hybrid vehicle, and over 125,000+ miles of ownership I have replaced my front brakes once and my rear brakes three times now in five years.)
It‘s not. But there are some newer EVs (e.g. Mercedes and VW) that track brake usage and will periodically switch to using the disk brakes when there‘s danger of corrosion.
I think both are right. Engineering a modern car is really complex as you pointed out but the customer also has the right to say, "well that is what you are paid for". In the end the customer can just go to the next car brand.
I own a relatively recent BMW but it is only a mild hybrid diesel (4 year old M340D) and before I even received the car, they changed the whole engine and did not release the car until that was executed. That was done by the dealer, and i never knew what was the reason.
On the flip side of modern car engineering I once had a check engine light called the dealer and with authorization prompts on my side they were able to tell me some gas exhaust sensor was malfunctioning and I would be able to go there at my leisure, as it was not urgent. That was nice. When i bought the car I had 5 years of maintenance included and this is one of the nicest things about owning a car in modern times. They even call me when it is about time to do the maintenance asking for when I am available. I never owned top brand cars before but this is for me worth the premium so far as it is one less thing to organize.
Apart from the normal maintenance and the above I never had any issue with the car, and it is a very big difference between a 2001 Passat TDI(my youth car) or a Ford Torneo Connect(the car i am aiming to exchange for due to family reasons).
When a system “malfunctions” only to the benefit of one side it’s not “an issue” as much as design.
Why don’t you run the same careful reasoning against any hostile action from any big tech company and see how it sounds? All the actions of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon are just the result of unfortunate misalignment between teams.
If a flipped coin always lands how the person flipping wants it to land, it’s loaded, not misalignment between hand and coin.
I’ve seen how the sausage is made in corporations with more money and higher stakes than BMW. Once you get off the ground and see more of the bigger picture, you can’t unsee the hostile decisions that are compartmentalized from the people who just see the tiny bit in front of them and it’s easier to sell them that they aren’t doing anything wrong and it’s not a problem.
That kind of thinking along with some calcification of organizational structures in/around R&D teams seems to be the cause for the rather dysfunctional software development at the German car companies. Software dev doesn't thrive in this environment.
Volkswagen probably had the right idea on paper when they created Cariad as a subsidiary software development company to isolate the devs, but then they ruined it by importing their own culture into it again.
I've driven a 2003 Volvo S60 (plain 5 cylinder, no turbo), which matches your 20 years - and most diy repairs were quite straightforward. I suppose you're talking about some Mercedes or other brand I'm less familiar with?
It's at 100k miles and there's no user-facing documentation for the procedure, as the oil lasts "for the lifetime of the vehicle".
Turns out, this particular procedure is simple.
(Other common wear items, like the suspension damper boots, or the engine mount, or the AC compressor, or a set of tires every 12000 miles ... it adds up.
The i3 was a cheap acquisition. Doesn't drive like a BMW, but apparently it wears like one.)
I decided to wait and see if I could find some other way, and in the meantime the car got hit while I was driving in a round-about. Moved the car several meters, but hardly any visible marks. The repair company wanted to fix the paint and get a new rim for the rear tire, but when I told them the car had been thrown a few meters they had a closer look and found a crack in the carbon fiber frame. And with that the car was totalled.
On the bright side, glad I hadn't just forked out the $1200 or so for a new headlight unit...
The REx models use an engine design based on one of BMW's motorcycle engines; as such, I'm pretty sure that it's not a diesel. The gas tank is only about two gallons; to qualify for EV tax credits in some markets, the battery capacity needed to exceed the energy available from fossil fuel.
That battery capacity for initial models is woeful by today's standards. The design started with 17 kWh, upgraded batteries in later model years doubled that figure. Mine is a degraded original with about 12 kWh available. Freezing temperatures can cut that by half.
I drive it like grandma and get more than 4 miles per kWh. But it was less $$ than a golf cart. (I learned about EV tire expenses after purchase.)
Rustproofing is still a good treatment to get done to delay and minimize damage, but it's a thorough and slightly expensive job.
People who have a hobby car usually retire it in a garage from November to April-May instead.
I didn’t know the 123 hood folded all the way back until near the end of having one!
https://www.classiccarstodayonline.com/2022/04/22/mercedes-1...
The real fucker in automotive fasteners is XZN, aka Triple Square. These are all over VW products.
As fasteners go, they're fine. They work well.
The interface has 12 points, and it looks like something from the toolkit like an Allen key or a Torx bit might be the right choice, but it isn't that way at all: The angles are wrong (XZN angles are based on squares, not hexagons).
But that's OK: They make XZN socketry in factories every day that does have the correct angles. They're easy-enough to buy and to use.
The fuckery aspect is a human factor: Because it looks like it "should work" with a Torx driver or an Allen key, people dive in with the wrong tools and fuck it up for the next guy.
Don't get this. I had a CR-V from 1996 (over 300k), sold it a few years ago, and can still see it cruising around the town. My previous Toyota Yaris was pretty much unkillable, just like a RAV 4 or a 1998 TLC.
We were putting Toyota Hiluxes back to the leasing company at three years and they were going straight in the crusher.
For anyone that's not familiar, replacing a clutch is usually on the same order of difficulty as an oil change. Unbolt a place, extract the clutch pack, pop in a new one, cover goes back on.
https://books.google.com/books?id=myADAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA166#v=on...
The Swedish government created this informational video in 1964 on how to properly dispose of your trash when at sea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t03saJVFkv4. Apparently the trick is to make the trash sink rather than float.
You have just discovered that SUVs are large because some people want their cars to be large. They come with all the downsides of that and not much of the upsides.
No tax rate is too high. Rebates for agricultural workers maybe.
A very temporary phenomenon in the evolution from ICE to EV.
I'm thinking of a semi-rural use case, when your typical daily trip is 20-50 km, but the charging infrastructure is poor and occasionally you do need to drive 200-300 km in winter.
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.
NYS DOT does some good work with the salt and sand up here, heavy on the salt. Mother Earth has some high blood pressure up here as she turns rotors to rust.
My calipers (all around) are also in excellent condition after 150k and I've been told that it's an absolute surprise I didn't destroy them with how low the pads went on the last change...
Only downside is the flimsy high efficiency tires, I've spent more money on tows and tires than I saved on gas.
To top that all off, in parts of CA electricity is now 50c/kWh, which makes it roughly equally expensive to charge an EV as it is to buy a tank of gas.
I love electric cars, but there is a gap between what they COULD be and what they are.
Also, I no longer consider any EU car brands at all. I think they wasted all their prior brand value and now buying them is simply not a smart decision.
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/. 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.
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.
New mandatory test suite: Have executives/leading personnel do common repairs and time it. Publish min/max/avg time next to fuel efficiency and safety rating.
Repairability would be top priority overnight.
This is what insurance companies are supposed to do if they price things properly.
No, mandating / regulations are not the answer, unless you're looking to artificially enforce something that the consumer doesn't want.
Mandate longer warranty durations?
I mean, may not help with damage due to collisions, but there are plenty of other reasons why a car may need reparing..
I find this to be a strange assertion. I’ve only asked a small number of contractors, but every one I’ve asked wished they could buy a smaller, lower, practical work truck with decent capacity.
People who need work trucks end up getting f-150 or similar, work vans, or buying used. There was a used car lot in my old neighborhood that specialized in work trucks. It would be 75% white single cab trucks, 20% white panel vans, and then 5% work trucks and vans in colors.
And if you ask Reddit, everyone says they want to buy a brown NA station wagon with a manual... yet nobody actually buys those cars when dealers stock them. This is what economists call "stated" vs. "revealed" preference.
Nissan discontinued the last small long bed, small-cab compact pickup last year. Now you can only get it as a two row. They had a monopoly on this supposedly lucrative market segment that contractors claim to want... yet it was discontinued because nobody was actually purchasing that configuration.
Even for full-size pickups, GM revealed less than 10% of the product mix is single-row long bed.
It's not some conspiracy. People. Aren't. Buying. Them.
I would like a pickup (spouse -> serious gardener), have decided to get something simple & used, then put another $20K into it.
So many BMWs out there on the road without the indicators package because the owner cheaped out when buying it.
It's trending up to $0.90-1.00/kWh in places now.
If you wear a seatbelt and eschew the most risky driving behaviors your chances of getting in a crash where the difference between 2005 and 2025 matters are very, very, very, small.
Plus they have tons more auxiliary safety features like lane departure warning, forward collision warning, blind spot detection, better visibility, etc. And they are roomier, have more power, get better gas mileage, and have backup cameras and Apple CarPlay!
None of these technologies prevent you from coming into a turn or stop or other situation too hot which is far and away the biggest problem in snow and is easily doable independent of vehicle equipment.
some are, sure - but most aren’t. Plenty of well maintained clean 2010 model cars on marketplace and Craigslist for well under 10k.
Drive a bit faster on gravel road and FAFO. Puddle on a highway - hope you can brake quick enough to trigger ABS and save your ass. Taking a bend with a bit more speed than you should and there's some dirt - RIP. There's some snow and you drive Smart - you'll be spinning even with the best of tires.
Sure it can be avoided. It saved my ass about 5 times. 4 of which I was simply going too fast, but once it wasn't my fault.
I'd suggest getting car with one and try to spin it out of control either on gravel or snow. Pretty sobering.
Otherwise, they make some very questionable engineering decisions for sure. On their motorbikes, you often have to disassemble half the bodywork just to change the battery; that's just beyond stupid. But like Apple, their products are kind of unique, so people deal with it.
But often you have to deal with those weird engineering decisions that make repairs annoying. My local garage is a BMW car specialist, and it appears that it's basically the same deal.
Funnily enough, in my youth I visited the BMW factory in Munich, and I was amazed back then. But the maintenance fails to amaze as much, haha.
If it is protecting that end users can plug arbitrary loads into, that is one thing - but this doesn’t sound like that?
Why did that fuse blow? Because if that is not addressed, it’s likely to just blow again.
"While Tesla’s pyrofuse costs €11 and the BMS reset is around 50€, allowing the car to be safely restored, BMW’s approach borders on illogical engineering, with no benefit to safety, no benefit to anti-theft protection — the only outcome is the generation of billable labour hours and massive amounts of needless electronic/lithium waste."
It's not a choice between 'ridiculously inaccessible with the potential to create more damage than your car is worth' and 'push to reset'. There are many options in between, some of which would be a happy medium between the two that protect both safety, the environment and the customers' wallet. Which BMW's solution clearly isn't.
$1000 for the module with the fuse seems ok to me. Another $3000 to link the module to the vehicle is the outrageous part.
Even the basic mechanical disconnect and lowering of the battery is far from simple (and requires A LOT more expensive tools than changing a wet belt - not because they are greedy, but because a lift that can lower such hevy battery costs a lot of money, mostly in materials), and that's not even opening it, making sure you don't get electrocuted when you work on it ect.
I had a doozy of a trip issue on one project, a motor would occasionally (not always, no real pattern, hot/cold/etc. didn’t matter) trip the breaker, requiring a sparky to come out and open up the panel to reset it. We tried a bunch of things, megger-ing the motor, testing peak startup current on each phase with a fancy meter, checking phase-to-neutral current (Larger than you’d think! But this was normal, apparently.)
Everything was normal. In the end all we could think something was weird about the contactor. They took it out (I was off site at the time) and took it down to the substation to test it out.
With three phases connected to the contactor (and nothing connected on the other side) they energised the coil, and with an almighty bang it tripped the main incomer and took the entire sub offline.
Turns out there was a manufacturing defect in the contactor and sometimes for a millisecond, if the phase of the moon was right, it dead shorted two phases.
So there, even when you know everything, you don’t know everything.
Next time when the fuse switch in my home I'll buy new home. I shouldn't normally switch on auto-fuse again!
Fuse blows, so you know something went wrong, you check corresponding part, fix it, and enable/change fuse. Nothing special. In home perspective - it could be plugging too many energy needy receivers into one outlet.
In that situation, if you bypassed the fuse, or just kept replacing them without figuring out why it blew (too much load on a specific circuit), you very well might burn your house down by catching the wiring inside your walls on fire.
If it’s something that it is easy to connect loads too, then that is probably not super unusual and easy to fix, because people do that all the time, and you know what is happening and how to fix it. But you do need to fix it.
If it isn’t, then that is very concerning, because something caused that overload, and without that fuse your wires would have caught on fire instead of the fuse blowing. Inside your walls.
Either way, fuses are an emergency measure to stop the wires from destroying themselves from overload. They are destroyed in the process of saving your wires.
And if you are doing this all the time? You’ve got a very big problem brewing.
It is unlikely to blow again under normal use.
I’ve never had a fuse blow on a car less than 20 years old, and then it was due to shorts due to damaged insulation and bad grounds due to corrosion, which are legit problems that need to be corrected.
Also, unlike breakers, fuses are generally immune to issues with HF interference and the like - they work through basic thermoelectric effects which iron out all but the most extreme issues. If you’re moving multiple amps in a situation described as ‘RF’, or ‘high frequency’ in a DC system that’s not just noise!
That’s a real problem that needs fixing!
Not fixing the underlying problem behind a blown fuse (or constantly tripping breaker) is how your car (or house or whatever) burns to the ground.
Or you have a Lucas, in which case my condolences.
This is BMW we're talking about. Their guarantees are worth absolutely nothing if my experience is anything to go by and them accepting liability is not something you should have to pay 4K for if other brands can do the same thing under $100.
If that was the issue you wouldn't be allowed to change your wheels on the side of the road. They'd be locked down to the car and require a complex software procedure to guarantee they were swapped correctly and won't endanger lives.
This is a professional shop raising the issues. They are liable for how the repair is done. BMW is just liable to lose money if people can easily fix their car at some other, cheaper, professional garage.
If you would see how EV Clinic "repairs" Tesla batteries, you would not say they have any concern for liability.
> Romanian drivers do >90 kph on normal roads as well. Romania and Bulgaria have the highest road fatalities per capita in the EU.
Or if the tires are not the right size, especially in staggered setups.
If you come from a car that is FWD with AWD capabilities, it doesn't matter as much.
But BMW (at least the ones with the engine mounted longitudinally) which have xDrive are permanent AWD.
I think you are intentionally misrepresenting this and moving the goalposts to make your point. GP blamed safety and liability for the way the process looks like, not the complexity of the task. When it comes to safety you bet that an improperly installed or inspected wheel or tire can be dangerous.
A short internet search tells me [1][2] that some sort of tire malfunction causes tens of thousands of accidents and kills hundreds of people every year in the US alone. That doesn't include wheel malfunctions (e.g. wheel coming off). Yet this isn't locked behind some manufacturer approval and proprietary tools.
How BMW chose to approach this is profit driven. The old money printing machine from ICE maintenance, repairs, and spare parts is slowing down so they come up with new ways of extracting money. Like making the lives harder and more expensive for any non-BMW shop to do repairs. They're not alone in this, other brands do the same.
> If you would see how EV Clinic "repairs" Tesla batteries, you would not say they have any concern for liability.
More moving of goalposts mixed with not understanding what liability is, and where it belongs. So you tell me what's Tesla's liability when EV Clinic "repairs" a battery.
[1] https://www.smithlawcenter.com/practice-areas/defective-tire...
[2] https://www.safetyresearch.net/nhtsa-gets-real-on-tire-fatal...
Sorry that you feel that way, it was not my intention. But improperly installed or inspected wheel or tire is A LOT less dangerous than crashed EV Battery. And in EU you have a lot of effort going even into this, Police can inspect (and does) the tire from the outside (+ regular mostly yearly MOTs). All new cars have to have pressure sensors in the tire. So I would say EU (where EV Clinic is present) is making a lot of the same strides to make everything around tires safer. And believe it or not, if you go buy any new car in EU, drive it 5 minutes and swap the wheels yourself, it'll flag an error! As the wheels need to have appropriate pressure sensors - that also need to be programmed into the vehicle for a lot of makes.
You think it's profit driven, I don't. Agree to disagree.
> More moving of goalposts mixed with not understanding what liability is, and where it belongs. So you tell me what's Tesla's liability when EV Clinic "repairs" a battery.
I was aiming at EV Clinics liability, not Teslas. And I can guarantee you that both Tesla and BMW take into consideration the bad press if someone, even non official mechanic, repairs their cars and then they kill someone/catch fire. Of course Tesla a lot less than BMW, I even have a feeling that this contributed more to how BMW does things, than profit.
BMW has manufactured engines and cars for over a century and historically they were relatively easy to fix by anyone. Their image in the press never suffered because of bad unofficial repairs.
All of this is trying to find a retroactive explanation that fits the result when the real reason is staring you in the face: they make money by making the owner entirely dependent on BMW as much as possible.
Your explanations are flimsy and disproven by data or history.
There is a certain level of risk that is inevitable with moving multi-ton machines at lethal speeds, and deciding that this particular issue is where we are going to draw the line is dubious.
The point that "allowing this fuse to be replaced affordably is too much of a safety issue" is a cop out is valid.
The only real issue in reality is thermal runaway
It started out with (nominally, voltage can rise and fall based on charge levels) (30S) 144V packs, (96S) 352V is very common and there are (192S) packs that do 704V (but that are marketed as 400V and 800V respectively).
You don't want to get zapped by any of these, it's middle voltage DC which is quite dangerous, so the fuses definitely have a safety aspect in case of a crash, they are to protect emergency personnel from touching the frame and exposed wiring. But that's in case of a very serious crash, your average encounter with a rabbit might set off the crash detector (which can't really know ahead of time how bad a crash will be) but has extremely little chance of resulting in exposed wiring. In the case of BMW that rabbit could end up being pretty expensive.
I don't think it should be locked away to just the MFG, but it does need to be respected.
I'm sure BMW would love to not be liable in those cases if they could just decide not to be liable, but inspections and fuses presumably turn out to be cheaper than the settlements they'd otherwise be paying.
I'd personally prefer e.g. 48V even if that meant some more losses and/or thicker cables.
It is.
> I'd personally prefer e.g. 48V even if that meant some more losses and/or thicker cables.
That's unfortunately not an option. The problem with the 600 to 1000 V domain is that it is able to creep where lower voltage would stay constrained and high enough that it can jump small gaps and start arcing spontaneously. The fact that it is DC makes it more dangerous still. But from an economy and practical engineering perspective it makes perfect sense. Keep in mind that these cars are often built using Lithium-Ion packs (though fortunately we are finally seeing a change here towards safer options, even if they are slightly less dense and more expensive), so the electrocution risks are small compared to the thermal runaway risks.
Are you talking about the charging circuitry?
What are the requirements for the motor(s)?
You’d need to use silver plated copper buss bar as conductors, 150kW @ 48VDC is 3125 Amps. I’m not familiar with DC ampacity tables, but you’d need (9) 3” conduits each containing (3) #500 MCM conductors for a three-phase 3125A alternating current circuit. One foot of #500MCM copper weighs 1.5 lbs, so each foot would have 27 times 1.5 lbs or 40.5 lbs per foot.
150kW @ 400V is 375A, a single set of #500MCM can carry the current, 4.5 lbs per foot.
The risk of being shocked by 400VDC while using the car is essentially 0, so they use higher voltage to save on conductor material.
There’s no way in hell I’d ever open up an EV battery myself and I know enough to do it safely. DC is incredibly scary, make sure to discharge your start/run caps if you replace them yourself!
Motors, for instantaneous current, can easily exceed 100kW, some much much more than that.
Even assuming limitations to 100kW (which, would be very low for motor current), that's still 2000 amps at 48V. Remember, 100kW is ~134 hp.
Also, the problem is definitely also the cables in your car. Moving to 48V would mean amperage would increase by 10-20x, which would mean cabling thickness would have to increase substantially.