The problem with the battery pack serviceability are proprietary technology and lack of standardisation, making fixing and getting replacement parts hard. Also a lot of closed source software contributes to this. This could change in the future, though.
I don’t know this is significantly different than modern engines. They require special tools and software too.
The bigger issue I think is most of the cars are teslas, which didn’t behave like a normal automaker for better or worse. For example the work done during the pandemic to avoid supply chain crunches may result in a maintenance headache a few years from now.
I encourage you to try driving one. Even if you don't care about the possibilities for improved energy efficiency and reduced pollution, or don't care for the latest technology, the driving experience is wonderful. Instant power, smooth, quiet. Up here in Canada it's even better: no spending 10 minutes for it to warm up - about 60 seconds before it's blowing hot air and otherwise no need to warm up an engine. I've driven older manual vehicles for two decades, but after two years driving an EV I never want to go back.
Even if the driving experience is better, the charging infrastructure isn’t there yet. Outside SuperChsrgers, the stations are of inconsistent quality/availability. And if you don’t own a garage/driveway, you don’t get the one big upside - topping up at home.
I completely agree, but that's something that will change over time, especially as more people have EVs. Consider what it was like when the first ICEs came out: there weren't gas stations every mile like there is today; they popped up more often as more people had more vehicles and drove them further. The same will happen with EV charging stations.
I'll be the first to admit that the infrastructure is lacking. I live in the Canadian prairies. There are only a few cities and there are towns every 10-20 minutes apart. Every town has a gas station (if they are open when you are driving through), but the same can't be said for charging stations. Thankfully there are enough stations for me to drive anywhere from Edmonton to Winnipeg without getting stranded, but only just. In two years of ownership over yet to run into a situation where the only chargers are all down, and I've only once seen a single machine that is down. Many of the stations are about 100km apart and my vehicle's range is practically 250km (from 90% to 20%), down to 200km in winter. It also doesn't help that within Saskatchewan almost all of those charges are the original 50kW, meaning it takes about an hour to charge every two hours of driving. It's definitely at the early adopter stage. But my car is capable of charging at 227kW. Stopping at a more modern 200kW charger it only takes 15 minutes - that's just enough time to use the washroom and grab a snack. Even with the 50kW charges all I end up doing is sitting down for a quick burger or sandwich. I don't mind the every two hours part at all; even with my ICE I would stop everyone two hours for washroom and a stretch and a snack, and that takes 15 minutes anyway.
Having home charging definitely makes a huge difference. I never fast charge unless traveling to see family. Within the city I plug it in at home every few days just to top it up. The efficiency really shows itself in the city. In my area the winters are cold enough that everybody plus in their cars to keep their engine block warm. Availability is universal at homes, including apartment buildings. Using even 120V charging is practical at these places and that's plenty to keep a vehicle topped up for daily city driving. Still, I won't deny that at-home level 2 driving really makes it a painless experience.
As far as practically today, I agree, it's not easy for everyone just yet. As far as the general sentiment that EVs are worse vehicles, I encourage people to try driving one. The people who think they are slow and weak couldn't be any more wrong. My lowly SUV has the power and torque of a large truck, but without the noise and smoke. I absolutely love driving it and I never want to go back.
I expect that as more people have them, infrastructure will follow and that will make them even more accessible to more people. That's just how new technologies work. EVs are just at the point of crossing the chasm as they say. It won't be long until they are commonplace. Vehicle manufacturers are already going all in.
The driving experience has some advantages - fast pickup, low center of gravity but the overall experience is far from wonderful. The build quality of a tesla specifically is horrendous - like a chevy malibu or worse. The controls are _awful_ as they lack buttons or door handles or a steering wheel. Highly unsafe to drive. Everything is enshitified to benefit the manufacturer. Nevermind the absolute lack of privacy and the redefinition of 'ownership' that seems to be bundled with 'EV', where you both purchase and subscribe to heated seats, cruise control, GPS or whatever else. The gaps between panels are not uniform or aligned. Zero consideration for repairability or replacement of body panels such that repair bills are through the roof (cybertruck not even insurable on many carriers). Endless recalls. Waiting an hour to fill your gas tank when an ICE takes 2 minutes. The list goes on. Yet the tesla envy is so strong that every other manufacturer just apes tesla such that much of the above is present on every single EV whether tesla or not. EVs at present feel like products worth $10-15k if. China seems to get this - they're inferior products but at 1/3 to 1/4 the price the value prop starts to make sense.
Agreed. Tesla makes the worst EVs out there, which really sullies the perception of EVs. I've test driven both a Model 3 and a Model S and I've never had such a bad driving experience. Everything is hidden: How do you unlock the doors? How do you turn it on? How do you put it in drive? Everything is hidden behind a terrible UI on a glorified tablet. There were no backup cameras - instead, it showed some wiggly outline of the curb that would come and go at random. Once on the road, the accelerator felt like jelly - slow to respond, required a lot of travel, and had a strangely nonlinear curve. The blind spots were unbelievable. The "yoke" was even worse - I couldn't access the turn signal while turning! I couldn't imagine a worse driving experience and I've driven some absolute breakers over the years.
I have owned two EVs: a 2020 Hyundai Kona and a 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5. I only switched because I had my heart set on the Ioniq 5 and only bought the Kona because the Ioniq 5 was really hard to find.
My Kona was exactly the same as the ICE version, just with an EV conversion. The interior and controls were identical. All of the EV specific stuff just replaced the ICE equivalent in the instrument cluster. Yes, it had an infotainment system and you could control a bunch more stuff from there, but that's true of all new vehicles. That Kona was the perfect example of how EVs don't have to be any different than the familiar ICE. Anyone could just get in and drive without even knowing it was an SUV.
My IONIQ 5 is certainly different - that's part of the appeal - but that's largely only in the exterior aesthetics. The controls and driving are still exactly like a regular ICE. They have adopted the full LCD panel instrument cluster, but again, many new ICEs have. Steering wheel, stalks, accelerator and brakes - they are all designed to feel just like the familiar automatic transmission. The only difference in controls is that the "transmission" control is now also on a stalk, since there's no need for it to be down on the center console. The default drive mode is set to feel just like driving an automatic with the same amount of delay and ramp up in power and the slight engine braking. Press a button and now it's full EV - instant response, no engine braking - it's the ideal race car that does exactly what you ask without imposing mechanical restrictions. It's truly a unique experience in a good way.
Elon Musk certainly doesn't help. His push for different for different's sake, trying to convince everyone that EVs will change the world, pressuring governments to let him bypass regulations and workers' rights, and his quickly declining sanity really hurt the image of EVs, since he is the image of Tesla and Tesla is the image of EVs.
I sincerely look forward to a future where the traditional automotive manufacturers become a large part of the EV market and some semblance of standardization and normalcy returns to the automotive world.
Very core parts of modern cars are essentially single use. Older engines could have the cylinders resurfaced or bored and sleeved. Newer engines have coatings and construction methods that disallow this. One scratched cylinder is now the end of a whole engine given the various matched parts that can’t be swapped block to block.
In the standard case this doesn’t matter as things last a long time inside an engine. The same is probably true for EVs.
When things go wrong all the repairability issues mean you’re out a car unless you’re willing to invest in repair. Is a 30K car worth a 20K repair bill? The Audi service department is happy to walk you to the sales department if not.
You can rebuild modern engines by boring out the block and installing a sleeve of the same block material and coating material, it’s just a lot more expensive. For a valuable car like a Porsche 911 this is typically done- the sleeves alone will cost 5-10k: https://lnengineering.com/porsche-996-997-987-3-4-or-3-6-96m...
Alusil sleeve job ~$4K for 6 cylinder, BUT you can go ~$1500 cast iron sleeves.
Mahle manufactures those sleeves in Poland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GgPPIZHl-c always surprising to see how they "season" new parts by letting them rust in open air to relieve casting stresses. There is a good story about BMW racing engines being build from selected used blocks just sitting rusting away behind factory building for years.
Thank you! My daily driver is an early Boxster and this is great info on the Alusil. However, general advice I’ve seen on forums is that the iron sleeves don’t last in Porsche engines. The idea of sleeving with dissimilar metals sounds like a bad engineering idea as there will be constant relative motion with heating and cooling, and a galvinic cell near coolant passages.
This particular job from video was 996. In another video shop owner mentioned Alusil goes on most of them over >$100K range and iron sleeves will last at least that long. With iron sleeves you need different pistons/rings to match expansion rate.
It's a very controversial topic in the Porsche community, but overall it seems like the people that really know what they are doing and build reliable good running engines avoid the iron sleeves (e.g. https://flat6innovations.com/cylinder-bore-scoring/). Like you said- it requires using loose clearances which makes for a noisy, oil burning, short lived, and low performance engine... not what you want in a Porsche.
The factory coatings do fail in some cases- usually in specific engine configurations with issues, but very often last 300k+ miles... on the smaller bore M96 engines cylinder/coating failures are almost unheard of, even with very high mileage and lots of hard track use. Personally, I'll just stick with the smaller bore engines, and in the unlikely event it fails get a good used block where the factory coating is still intact. There's tons of the 2.7 and 3.2 M96 Boxster engines out there still running great with 300k+ miles, and you can buy a good used one for a few grand.
>Like you said- it requires using loose clearances which makes for a noisy, oil burning, short lived, and low performance engine... not what you want in a Porsche.
Thats opposite of what I said :) Only the startup noise applies, but lets not pretend M96 sound great :)
When something becomes veblen good logic goes out the window. >$100K 30 year old car restorations arent meant to make them peak performers, it becomes matched numbers everything as factory wankfest for cars sitting in a collection or driven only occasionally on the weekends. There is very little incentive doing cheap repair when everyone believes in expensive ones.
>There's tons of the 2.7 and 3.2 M96 Boxster engines out there still running great with 300k+ miles, and you can buy a good used one for a few grand.
Wanna bet they all have scored cylinders? :) Same goes for BMW Nikasil, no such thing as cheap used block with intact coating.
An electric motor is dirt cheap compared to the ingenuity of an ICE. The battery is expensive because it’s a lot of mass of peculiar rare earths, but motors aren’t.
> The battery is expensive because it’s a lot of mass of peculiar rare earths, but motors aren’t.
It's the other way about. Batteries in Chinese cars are mostly lithium iron phosphate. Not a lot of rare earths there. The motors are mostly permanent magnet motors and they definitely do have rare earths.
But anyway the name rare earths is mostly a misnomer, they aren't especially rare, less so than gold, copper, etc. They are just not conveniently located for extraction.
The batteries are expensive simply because the replacement battery market is not yet a large low risk mature market. This is in part because the batteries are lasting longer than most people, the manufacturers included, expected.
In the context of the motor alone, those don't fail.
The circuits driving it probably have a higher failure rate, but we've gotten so good at manufacturing electrical circuits it still seems much easier and cheaper than a mechanical engine.
In theory yes, but electric motors can be very complex in much the same way that ICE engines can be. Batteries of the kind used in modern EVs are single-use and far too expensive and dangerous to service. The level of effort required to maintain an EV past 20 years will be way higher than that required to maintain an ICE car that long. Very few ICE parts have a limited shelf life, and the ones that do are either consumable or else easily substituted such as rubber seals and belts.
This analysis is really just relevant for cars that someone would want to keep well-maintained for 20+ years at significant expense. Most EVs are boring so I don't expect them to be in that category either. But if you did really get attached to one, you might have to rebuild it from scratch with totally different internals to keep it going, and it would only look like the original on the outside.
I’ve replaced three engines in the past ~15 years. The first was caused by a head bolt over-torqued from the factory, which led to a non-visible gasket failure and ultimately coolant making its way into the cylinders and destroying the block. The second was a failed pistol skirt. The third seized due to a manufacturing defect in a cam bearing.
All of those problems would have been cheaper and easier to fix in a 1980s-era vehicle. The oldest of these was a 2000, though, and it was cheaper to replace the entire engine than it would have been to buy the parts to repair them.
That doesn’t even include labor - and the labor required for many things these days is much higher than it once was.
Yup, this exactly. I don’t think engine failures are particularly common but I have had a few friends quoted roughly what their cars are worth to rebuild the engine from a new block or about 1/3 to replace the engine with a manufactured unit. Mostly Japanese and Korean cars.
I guess the $10k service bill for just changing a water pump in an Audi won’t impress you. Mercifully for me this 40K Mile time bomb went off under warranty. In a sibling comment they’re talking about getting a deal on cylinder sleeves for $6,000. In 2005 I had a top end rebuild done for $1200. I am 100% not spouting BS, times have just changed.
Shop fees and hours are very expensive for repair. When basic repairs involve disassembling the entire front of the car they add up. This is why YouTube mechanics often just drop an engine subframe and get an alignment after.
Third party mechanics don’t get access to all the tools and software anymore. VAG decided to increase the pain by requiring a license fee to access alignment information from next year onward for Audi, Porsche, and other brands.
Normally for anything I won’t wrench myself I’m happy enough with Pepboys service but increasingly they have to turn me away because they lack the tooling, software, or expertise for a job, and we’re no where near talking about machining an engine.
Rebuilding that damaged engine needs a specialty shop. They’re not just spinning a bore hone on a drill anymore. Coupled with overall improved designs and there just isn’t the same market for the work that there used to be.
The difference is, ICE car parts don't generally require replacement of everything at once. They can be made by 3rd parties, and defective parts usually break in boring ways. Batteries have none of these nice properties. You have to change the whole thing at once, it requires proprietary high tech to make a compatible battery, and any defect could burn down your house or a parking garage with unextinguishable metal fires. Yikes!
It is possible for an EV to be serviced and remain operable for long enough to become an antique, but no modern EVs are built that way. Most modern ICE cars aren't built that way either but they have a much better chance at longevity because their parts don't really have a limited shelf life, and there is a large aftermarket for many of them.
All three of those properties do apply to a Nissan Leaf. There are third party batteries and you can replace individual cells. But the lack of integrated cooling that enables this means the battery doesn't last. Better to get a car where the battery lasts the life of the vehicle.
> defective parts usually break in boring ways
I think this is far more true on an EV than an ICE. Batteries generally fail very predictably and are generally still usable even when degraded.
>There are third party batteries and you can replace individual cells.
I think one could argue this but the fact is that any one of those cells can destroy the battery, giving you thousands of little time bombs stacked on top of each other. The labor to change one cell is also approximately as much as to change the entire battery on any EV, and labor is a huge part of the cost of replacement. Nobody is going to take an EV apart to just change one cell. On the other hand, people do often take whole engines apart to change seals that cost $20.
>But the lack of integrated cooling that enables this means the battery doesn't last. Better to get a car where the battery lasts the life of the vehicle.
Better to not get an EV if you want it to last or even be a collector's item. "Life of the vehicle" can mean "practically as long as you feel like fixing it" if the design is good.
> Batteries generally fail very predictably and are generally still usable even when degraded.
We don't know how unstable these EV batteries will become in 10, 20, or 50 years. An ICE car would not explode or burn down after such a long period, even with the heaviest use and abuse. But an EV can easily do so. Then there are the flooding and accident risks. I am seriously nervous having old lithium batteries in my house inside of old consumer gadgets, and those are tiny. EV batteries magnify that problem 1000x.
> Nobody is going to take an EV apart to just change one cell. On the other hand, people do often take whole engines apart to change seals that cost $20.
Hobbyists regularly do both. Professionals charge thousands to do either.
> Better to not get an EV if you want it to last or even be a collector's item. "Life of the vehicle" can mean "practically as long as you feel like fixing it" if the design is good.
Neither are going to be a straightforward to keep running 50 years from now as a car from the seventies, but a Tesla is going to be far easier to keep running for 50 years than a modern gasoline car. 1/10th the number of moving parts, far less wiring, far fewer computers, far fewer part count, et cetera, far less regular maintenance, et cetera.
> We don't know how unstable these EV batteries will become in 10, 20, or 50 years
Yes we do.
> An ICE car would not explode or burn down after such a long period, even with the heaviest use and abuse.
Yes they do, and at a higher frequency than electric cars do.
> I am seriously nervous having old lithium batteries in my house inside of old consumer gadgets, and those are tiny. EV batteries magnify that problem 1000x.
No they're not. EV batteries are properly managed, unlike random gadgets. They're safer, not more dangerous.
I wish I had put this in my other reply. Here is a guy trying to fix used Teslas that are only a couple of years old: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5rwEIo-PWP0 If it's that difficult and expensive now, how much more so will it be in 50 years? Even the door locks are overcomplicated. When that central computer or display goes out and the only ones available are from wrecks, and you don't have the software to install them, good luck with all that. So much for "less moving parts" lol
>Hobbyists regularly do both. Professionals charge thousands to do either.
Hobbyists are also building cars that run on steam power. I did not mean literally nobody is taking EV cars apart to change one cell. But it is actually very dumb to do so, and it makes zero sense to do professionally given the tremendous liability and expense involved. Taking an ICE apart to change rubber seals might cost a few thousand. And the car cannot really explode if you do that wrong, like an EV battery mistake can. Changing an EV battery costs tens of thousands. One of those things is more economical and reasonable than the other.
>Neither are going to be a straightforward to keep running 50 years from now as a car from the seventies, but a Tesla is going to be far easier to keep running for 50 years than a modern gasoline car. 1/10th the number of moving parts, far less wiring, far fewer computers, far fewer part count, et cetera, far less regular maintenance, et cetera.
Hahaha you've got no idea. Tesla is probably the worst example. Everything is proprietary, they don't sell parts or software to consumers. Other cars don't require a mechanic to also be a reverse engineer. You can whine about moving parts all you want but there are many ICE's still in service a hundred years after they were manufactured.
>>We don't know how unstable these EV batteries will become in 10, 20, or 50 years
>Yes we do.
I didn't realize I would have the honor of meeting a time traveller today.
>>An ICE car would not explode or burn down after such a long period, even with the heaviest use and abuse.
>Yes they do, and at a higher frequency than electric cars do.
They DON'T. And even when they do somehow catch fire, usually due to some external factor, they can easily be extinguished with WATER. EVs cannot be extinguished and all the water sprayed on them becomes heavily polluted.
>No they're not. EV batteries are properly managed, unlike random gadgets. They're safer, not more dangerous.
Again you prove that you don't know what you're talking about. Random gadgets have charge and thermal regulators for their batteries, so they are much like EVs in that regard. Furthermore, any one of the thousands of cells inside an EV can ignite the rest. That has happened many times, for example in the case of an Australian cement truck EV. The manufacturer discovered the problem, after the truck burned to the ground in a huge disaster.
No ICE car has ever caught fire from being splashed with water. EVs do this all the time! But sure, we're supposed to believe that they will be maintainable and economical to fix 50 years from now. Give me a break and gtfo with that nonsense.
New cars definitely have the same problem, they're computers on wheels with sensors every where. You can bring a 1980s shit box anywhere and unless it's totalled they'll get it running. For anything build after 2010: good luck. Let's see what happens when you bring your vintage 2012 tesla to a garage in the 2050s
I still dream of the US/EU coming up with a standardized set of chassis/engines instead of having dozens of companies independently spending millions trying to solve the same problems
Deep down I know all this complexity is needed because it generates a shit ton of money from fake competition, maintenance schedules, parts price gouging, &c. The inefficiency and waste is a feature
> I still dream of the US/EU coming up with a standardized set of chassis/engines instead of having dozens of companies independently spending millions trying to solve the same problems
BYD has done that, with their E-Axle. The E-Axle has the axle, wheels, and motor. It goes with a BYD "8 in one" electronics power box and a battery. Here is their pitch to Japanese carmakers.[1] Google translated version follows. (Google Translate has become much better at Japanese lately.)
The automaker buys the E-axle, power box, and battery, plugs them together, and hooks it to the driver interface with CANbus. This approach seems to have cut the cost of BYD's cars.
Other companies are now marketing E-axles for trucks.[2] Trucking has a lot of builders who start with a bare chassis and add industry-specific bodies and equipment - ambulance, tow truck, etc.
BYD itself sells light truck sized versions, and Dana sells heavy truck dual axle versions.
It's quite possible that a mounting point standard will emerge for this, like NEMA motor mounts
or jet engine pylons. Then you can use different E-axle vendors.
Nothing wrong with the E-Axle concept, but why would I buy any EV based on the E-Axle, when I can get the exact same thing buying the BYD vehicle for less.
It makes sense for brands that are not big enough to develop their own power train.
For example, whoever buys the Jeep brand next might put a Wrangler body on a BYD powertrain.
(This would be an improvement over the present Stellantis product. Stellantis, the parent of Jeep, Chrysler, Fiat, Peugeot, etc. got a Boeing-type financial CEO, who ran the business into the ground while being paid a record salary.[1])
At what point would you have standardized this rapidly improving category of product? Would you have frozen the interfaces around the time of the Dodge Intrepid[1]? Perhaps after considering that example you start to see the problem with standardization.
You hear the same think about electric bikes, and the argument has the same fatal flaws. Current e-bikes are massively better than what was on the market 3, 5, and 10 years ago. Standardizing them at any point would have been catastrophic, and we must assume that standardization now would also be catastrophic.
[1: That said, all cars are converging on the exterior shape of the Intrepid, in a process similar to carcinization among animals. Weird!]
I can't imagine what experience could have possibly led you to that conclusion. Current generation custom bottom bracket motors from Trek from Specialized and from Bosch and from Yamaha are all radically different and some of them are way better than others and none of them are interchangeable.
After that, you'll start losing out on lost innovation that wasn't allowed to happen.
"Dozens of companies independently spending millions solving the same problems" only seems wasteful if you don't think about this in terms of at least a couple of steps of game theory. Competing co's come up with a variety of different solutions, leaving us in a more robust state with lots of different options.
Also, good luck getting a standard that the US and EU agrees on - look at how differently the free market solved the car problem in both of those places. Europeans and Americans want different things from their vehicles.
why is that insane? Some have liquid cooling in between cells and high levels of integration. I'm guessing heat transfer compounds may be in there as well. Given the scale of what re-celling a whole automotive pack would entail, this strikes me as way out of scope for an average consumer, though I appreciate the DIY attitude and wish more products were made to be consumer repairable!
Since cars are all more or less solving the same problem, hopefully it will standardize on a set of parts and procedures. I meant trivial for a mechanic- on the order of swapping out an engine. It would still be work for a professional mechanic or a skilled DIY person not your average consumer. You’d still be dealing with big voltages, toxic chemicals, and major chances of fire or overheating if done wrong.
You can still swap out a battery just like swapping out an engine. Both require extensive knowledge, specialized tools, and a lot of time, but it's definitely possible.
Yeah but usually you have to get an identical pack- which is expensive for common EVs and nearly impossible for older ones. My point is these parts could be standardized with a simplified process to more easily recell any car. Batteries don’t need to be as unique to a car as engines do. Eventually I think EVs will last nearly forever, with the only major wear items being suspension and battery- both easy to replace.
You want to share the road with a hillbilly driving at 80 mph who just hand soldered his battery pack together with the cheapest cells he could find on ebay?
Yes- I’m already sharing the road with people that DIY repair their cars. I’m an ex pro mechanic, most mechanics shops are in such a hurry they are not doing better work than DIY repairs. Your average hillbilly has been repairing things their whole life and knows what they’re doing.
You're alredy sharing the road with people who don't maintain their cars, don't have insurance, and people who could intentionally crash into you at any time, yet you still drive. This type of scaremongering is nonsense and does nothing except make corporate executives smile.
I'm pretty glad that maintenance and insurance are mandatory, and that most alterations to a vehicle require passing a special inspection.
And it would be great if batteries, including their mounting frame and cooling system, were standardized in such a way that one would not only be able to let a shop replace the battery, but also have the option to buy a car without a battery and either reuse the old one or buy a new one from a better brand.
ICE engines and transmissions are the same way. And batteries are proving to last way longer on average with no regular maintenance needed. In Norway there are already many dedicated EV repair shops and more and more are popping up in the US.
Some of them are pretty serviceable at the module level. Ford has done a good job here. Of course, it won't be economical to service them unless someone starts mass-producing aftermarket modules.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someone will start making solid state replacements at some point. That could be a nice business if the costs ever get down low enough.
The point of the original article is that the battery pack may outlast the rest of the vehicle. Eventually it needs to be recycled, but not repaired while in service.
