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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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).
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.
> 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.
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
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.
If you ignore cost, then Tesla's cars are probably still better at this point, but the gap doesn't seem that large.
As long as you don't compare them to BYD etc.
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
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.]
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.
