It’s funny how I extrapolate car design sessions in my head based on software design sessions.
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.
My last 4 cars were BMW. I love the way they drive, but ...
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.
I was looking for this reply as well; definitely my perception that a lot of mid- to high-end cars are engineered to drive and feel great for 4-5 years, and after that it's kind of a crapshoot. You can see it as well with the various subscriptions, for app connectivity, M2M infotainment data, etc— all of it is oriented around that same time horizon.
Thats why they've been increasing the service interval to silly numbers. 3 years ago, 10k miles, now... 18k miles for the same model of car for the first service! Absolutely insane.
I never considered buying a BMW before they put out an EV (the i4, not the i3). One of the reasons is maintenance, the EV still needs some, but much less than an ICE.
I'm about to change the transmission fluid in my i3.
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 heard that the i3 has some horror stories if you got the hybrid (basically a diesel engine that can produce electricity to charge your battery) or your battery had issues out of warranty. Not really sure though, everyone I've met who owns one really likes it still in 2025.
I found the hard way that nowadays manufacturer's authorised (branded) service centres optimise for making you get rid of the car. For instance, I had something wrong with the car, they kept gaslighting me that the car is absolutely within specs and drive exactly how it should. Next appointment they admitted that maybe something indeed is wrong, but probably not. After complaint they said the car is faulty but it will be very very expensive to repair and maybe I should consider buying a new one. They they offered me part exchange for one of their approved used models framing it as a gesture of good will and that it will be cheaper than the repair. Unbelievable.
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.
I don't think it's a coincidence that an enormous number of rideshare/delivery drivers drive priuses though. Reliable, not too expensive, low maintenance, and high mpg is kind of exactly what you'd expect them to look for.
Not enough people know how cool the Prius hybrid system is. One would think having EV + gas would add complexity, but it actually allows them to delete a lot of parts. There is no clutch, no belts, no starter, there's practically nothing that can break. Not knowing how the regen affects braking I brought my Prius in for 80k service and asked for new brake pads and mechanic asked me why I want to replace them, they look good as new.
Only downside is the flimsy high efficiency tires, I've spent more money on tows and tires than I saved on gas.
You also lose the ability to pull over virtually anywhere and refill your tank in five minutes, as well as the maintenance benefits that come from a decades-old design versus whatever software horrors are lurking in your car.
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.
The only slight pain in those priuses is removing the windshield wiper assembly to get to the spark plugs closest to the firewall. It's not like they didn't have enough room in the engine bay to the left to better engineer this. But it's something that you rarely have to do. Maybe 2-3 times for the life of the car if it reaches 300k+ miles.
> 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..."
I have a 2009 Civic that has no noticeable body rust, despite being in Michigan. Two times I've had to get minor body work done (not rust-related), the bodyshop owner commented that he never sees them this clean anymore. I chalk it up to being diligent with car washes, especially in the winter. Purists will cringe at this, but I'm fine with sacrificing some surface appearance (the paint doesn't look too bad, considering how many carwashes it's seen) in exchange for longevity.
Which part of Michigan are you in? I know some people that live up in northern Michigan where they don't bother salting the roads in the winter and just put down sand instead which I would imagine contributes to better longevity
I live up North (capital N) from you, where we have ~4 months of calcium spread on our roads to manage the accumulating ice every winter. A well-maintained car has the chance to live long enough to succumb to rust from that.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's not just BMW, it's basically all car manufacturers. There are several car maintenance YouTubers who complain about it for many brands. For example "The Car Care Nut" complains about Toyotas being badly designed for maintenance, questionable material choices, etc..
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.
I watch "The Car Care Nut" sometimes, as I've got a Toyota. Nothing I've ever seen there would lead me to put Toyota into the same maintenance cost/difficulty category as BMW or Mercedes.
Consumer Reports puts them at almost opposite ends of the spectrum, as well.
I've owned a few Mercedes and didn't find them really more difficult to work on than other cars of similar age I've owned. I haven't owned any that are really new, so that may have changed. I haven't owned any BMWs but their reputation for being difficult to work on and overengineered goes back decades.
External Torx. They're not so unusual. Even General Motors has used those in some places for eons -- I still have the set of them I bought at Autozone to replace the brakes on a Saturn a couple of decades ago.
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.
BMW has been the worst of the worst for a long time though. [0] is a representative example, but pretty much any "car brands ordered by upkeep cost" list will have BMW out on their own planet.
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".
It was practically a stereotype that all of the young male H1Bs had a BMW desktop background on their work computer. I knew one guy who practically bankrupted himself by buying one the moment he thought he could afford it. The mandatory insurance got him. And then we found out he’s a terrible driver. Thing was in the shop all the time.
What you're describing is the stereotype for "rich west europe" engineering culture.
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.
Here is an American example, Fox suspensions. Fox is one of the main producers of bicycle suspensions. Great products, but check their service intervals for a fork [0], 125 hours.
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.
Ask a car guy and they’ll tell you that German car makers have been known to be be maintenance money sinks for 40 years.
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.
They also did a lot of pioneering work in DSG transmissions. I bought a Jetta when they finally moved it to VW from Audi. Great transmission and saved me a lot on brake jobs. Their DSG tune automatically engine brakes when you feather the brake pedal.
> 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.
I'm sure the money you saved on brake jobs was more than eaten up by the DSG service intervals. The interval on my Jetta Sportwagen Diesel with DSG was 40,000 miles. That required special hardware (tools and dongles, IIRC) and software if I wanted to do it myself.
My vehicle before that was the Accord that had the shit transmission that bailed out reliably at 110k miles, so I’m sure I barely noticed. My Accord shat itself at 100,300 miles, in the mountains. Luckily it was noon, a warm day, and I had cell service.
> But have you ever tried to make something you built to easy to maintain?
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.
Ford seems to regularly re-design some sometimes-major part of their vehicles every model year, for better or worse. Some model years are banger and others are just a failed experiment, but you do get newer advancements.
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.
BMWs at least up to the mid-2000s are really cheap and easy to maintain. Parts are pennies, service documentation is readily available, and they're reliable enough that they last a long time with basic maintenance.
Compared to stuff like Toyotas or Hondas, they practically cost nothing to keep on the road.
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.
Eh, I had one from the early aughts and it was pretty expensive to maintain. Simple things that have never broken on other cars I've owned, like the passenger side door lock, broke in my BMW. Headlight issues were expensive, and anything that required official parts was at least 3x as much as a Honda/Toyota/etc. repair.
Some bits can be kind of expensive unless you know a good BMW indy. The nice thing about the older ones - particularly from like maybe E30 to E39 models - is there's a lot of "hacker culture" around them and it's easy to find someone who knows the Easy Way To Do It.
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.
Management only cares about analyzing and completing the 'happy path' because customers only buy 'happy path'. Customers don't (with rare exceptions) buy 'unhappy path', even though statistically it is a near certainty that where they will find themselves at some point.
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.
>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 $7.
If the car has 10 places where the manufacturer saves 2 dollars, that is 20 dollars a car. At around 2.5 Million cars shipped each year that is 50 Million Euros each year profit for BMW.
The entire car industry is extremely cost sensitive, especially right now, with so much global competition and little consolidation.
The issue also isn't that the part is cost optimized. The issue is that it fails.
A car (especially ICE but even EVs) consists of tens of thousands of components. People like to point at things in cars and say "why did they save five cents there? And 10 cents here?", and the simple reason is if you bump all these components up one "quality level", if you will, that's thousands of bucks just in material costs. The twenty dollars of per-car savings are not profit, they're unit cost savings, which will contribute to profit, but also price. And margins in the car industry are rather tight, buyers are cost sensitive, it's not an industry where you save 10$ on parts and are able to pocket that, I don't think.
€4000 euros plus tax to replace the module that contains the fuse. Insane.
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.
Is it insane? I'm working in this field, and I know how quickly you can come up with such a number if you are BMW and you are deathly afraid that someone will get electrocuted while working on your car, driving it or rescuing someone in a crash. It's a safety and liability issue, where they go to great lengths to actually re-certify a battery after crash. The whole thing is setup so, that even the dummy electricians in an average BMW shop can safely certify that this battery is still safe. It's a lot easier to kill yourself (or someone else) when working on a EV Battery than wet belt. Also a lot harder to repair said battery than wet belt. And that goes for all EVs and manufacturers that actually care about people (Tesla, demonstrably does not).
Yes, it is insane. It's a fuse. They must have some stats on how often those things need replacing and it should have been accessible. The customer has - when they buy the car - absolutely no way of knowing what kind of surprises like this there are hidden in the vehicle and besides, it kills the second hand market so you can only trade your vehicle to a BMW dealership where they can absorb those costs for a fraction of what it will cost an end user. BMW is a crap brand in spite of their reputation, we've had one leased Mini in our company and it is the very last time we do business with BMW, that thing was more in the shop than out of it with electrical issues. A friend had pretty much every BMW ever made since he got wealthy enough to afford them (car enthusiast) and his experience is much the same, but he keeps buying them.
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.
They'll refuse warranty on the XDrive if you don't use approved brand and model of tyres so... my bet is on them wanting to extort all the precious money they can from their poor customers
They'll refuse warranty if the difference between thread is too much between front and back as that causes wear of the clutches. Just like you should have the same tire on the same axle.
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'm sure it depends on market, but I also know 100% that if they will certify the battery as safe, and then you get electrocuted when entering your car because the battery was not safe - they will be on the hook, in all developed markets. No one else, that cares about people safety, do the same thing for under $100. Even Tesla, that almost completely disregards any safety - be it "Full Self Driving" or "let's just change this, without checking if the battery is actually safe", does not do it under $100.
Depends on the brand and the model, there is a trend towards higher voltages because that implies lower currents and wiring is heavy and expensive.
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'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.
Running an EV off 48V would lead to a heavily, heavily compromised vehicle. There just aren’t components that can handle 5-10kA of current with a reasonable size.
Charging speed is directly related to the voltage of the pack. Even if your own vehicle had arm-thick cables to support high speed charging at 48v there is no quick charger in the world that could support it. You would be stuck in the bad old days of needing hours to recharge the battery on your EV.
No it's not, only in a practical sense. If you truly had 'arm thick cables', you could definitely charge a 48V battery just as fast. Practically speaking, though, you don't do this because every becomes so unmanageable that you can't build a charger, bus bars, etc, that would be able to match the charging speed.
The problem isn't the cables in your car, it is the cable between the DC fast charger's transformer and your car. They are already thermally limited, which is why you need higher voltages to support faster charging.
Like I said, this assumes you use ridiculous cabling and bus bars. You could design something that handles this, it would just be wildly impractically large and cost way too much money.
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.
What are you talking about? Yes I know how quickly I can get electrocuted when the battery pack is open. I just need to touch two exposed busbars ~30cm apart. Or my tool needs to touch them.
Exactly, you need to touch both plus and minus. You moved the goalpost from getting electrocuted driving your car due to shoddy quality remanufacturing of battery, to getting electrocuted while repairing the high voltage side of your vehicle. Remanufacturing quality does not come into play if you decide to touch plus and minus side of a HV battery.
Sorry I have no idea about this goalpost moving, maybe it's a language barrier. I'm just saying working on it is quite dangerous. But you can easily get electrocuted by shoddy remanufacturing (especially if someone drilled into the battery to replace a single cell - as EV Clinic shows in their videos), that's why there are additional safeties with regards to bad isolation. So I stand by both takes.
There's a difference between BMW ignoring their warranty and who gets found liable during the wrongful death lawsuit after the mechanic gets electrocuted due to poor/unsafe EV design.
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.
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.
> Yes, as changing a tire is completely the same tool-and-knowledge level than repairing a EV Battery.
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.
> 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.
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.
Improperly installed wheels that have fallen off of vehicles in motion have killed not only the occupants of the vehicle but pedestrians and other motorists (especially motorcyclists) in the past. We also allow people to fill vehicles with highly combustible fluids with little to no oversight, which has caused fires and deaths.
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.
I think the people that replace fuses are aware of the potential issues around them. The article - which I'm sure you've read so don't take this as commentary on your comment - details that in other electric vehicles, for instance Tesla this is handled quite differently:
"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.
This fuse blows because a crash was detected and it is to protect the people inside the car and rescuers. The article argument is that it can blow even for small crashes where no damage to the battery occurs but rehabilitating the vehicle still incurs an outrageous cost. This is not a simple over current protection fuse.
$1000 for the module with the fuse seems ok to me. Another $3000 to link the module to the vehicle is the outrageous part.
They are not only linking it to the vehicle, they are doing a LOT of other checks on the battery - that it's not damaged in non-obvious ways. For that you need trained people (it's really high voltage and amperage stuff), tooling AND you really need to be sure you guarantee everything is OK.
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.
> Fuses are not items that should be replaced normally - they are self-destroying emergency protections for the electrical system.
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.
Yep, might be there was a known issue that was addressed, at which put in a new one. But just replacing a fuse (or, simultaneously worse and better, just resetting a breaker) without further investigation is just kicking a very spicy can down the road.
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.
Fuses are necessary on any electrical system, and especially in a car, which is an electrical shitshow (floating ground, high-voltage and high-frequency interference), fuses blow all the time. Granted, usually on a well-maintained and new car it happens very rarely, but saying that it's a catastrophic and concerning event is dumb.
This is a pyrofuse, it does not blow with overcurrent as regular fuse, but blows in the same way airbags blow - when detecting a crash. We can debate if they blow too quick, but if you are designing this system - where and truly lives can be in danger, you would probably err on the side of caution too.
The problem is not that the pyrofuse blows. Safer to be paranoid when it's the the battery pack. The insanity is what it takes to replace it, including throwing away perfectly good parts because of the anti-theft protections.
Usually not by itself though, and if it does that makes it a hybrid fuse, one that has both a pyrotechnical disconnector and a thermal/overcurrent one.
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.
I'll grant you that, I had a lot of beaters. A typical thing was that a lock solenoid pulled too much current in cold weather and consistently blew the central locking fuse.
If you and BMW are correct - if we take it for a fact that a simple fender-bender can make batteries develop life-threatening faults, which absolutely require a 4k euro inspection that involves complete disassembly and specialist equipment, then that means that EVs are unsuitable for public use.
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.
We don't have the full picture. Like I mentioned too many times in this thread, I know EV Clinic head boss Vanja likes to overreact and twists stuff to fit into his narrative. Not saying this one was not a fender bender, but I take all his stuff with a grain of salt. Mostly because I worked with him AND work on the same stuff he does - and it usually doesen't match up to what I'm seeing to the degree he 'dramaticizes'.
In the article, it was mentioned that the issue can be caused by hitting the curb, there's a guy in the comments who says his VW grenaded itself this exact way just while charging (luckily his car was in warranty).
Many people drive older cars worth less than £4000.
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.
Depends on the parts situation. As someone who works on my own cars I've become increasingly distressed at the car parts industry. Even OEM parts, when they are still available, seem to have had a dramatic decrease in quality over the past couple of decades. This is even assuming the correct part is shipped in the first place, which is another problem that has become entirely too common, especially in an age where everything is computerized. So many times you get a box with the correct part number on the outside but the wrong part inside.
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.
Plastics. Those are the hard to source bits. Plastic doesn't stay plastic for ever and NOS can be dried out just as much as the bits that are in the car.
Most other things are easy to source, and anything made of steel can be fixed (zero rust, so far).
Yeah - a car hits a similar valuation around ~15 years of age, meaning a failure of this component limits the financially viable lifespan of a car to this amount - mechanics do engine rebuilds for less money.
I also work in this field, and I feel manufacturers like to exaggerate the dangers as a liability umbrella, aside of disassembling the battery itself it’s very hard to even access the HV components in a dangerous way, every HV connector has an interlocking line that opens the battery internal contactor so other than hacking the HV line with a saw I don’t see how you could “touch” the live wires.
I mean, I don't think my perception is warped by what I see. But by "am I willing to risk that my repair will kill someone, because they wanted cheaper repair"? Or even if not kill, maybe just burn down their car (+ house,...). "Am I willing to use cheap tools, not rated for 800V (or 400V) god knows how many Amps?". Because this is not software development - you can be killed REALLY quickly working on a HV EV battery pack. It's no joke. For sure it'll cost more than working on a regular car, where there is danger, but a lot less. And that's just the basic thinking, without going deeper into why its more expensive to repair stuff like this.
The article and comment aren't debating whether the fuse plays an essential role. There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error.
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.
> There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error.
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.
> BMW refuses to provide training access for ISTA usage
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?
I likely did not communicate clearly enough: it is tricky because of organizational reasons, not technical. There are many trade-offs that have to be made and it involves different business units with their own targets and incentives.
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.
Thanks for your comment. It looks to me that most of the people who work in engineering area express some form of understanding or give the benefit of the doubt to the situation while people from outside the field borderline call for malice in the side of BMW.
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).
You seem to be ignoring the fact that the battery pack status after a crash is essentially unknown. It should go through a thorough and competently conducted safety inspection or it may kill someone in the future. Of course, this doesn't excuse extra red tape tacked into the procedure, but the core idea of an inspection is just unavoidable.
> Of course, this doesn't excuse extra red tape tacked into the procedure
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.
I won't go into details about 'training access for ISTA usage' - cause I don't know what exactly Vanja means by this - but generally speaking in EU BMW provides the easiest access from all OEMs for aftermarket repair. Everyone has to provide it by law, but BMW has the most straightforward way of registering/paying/using it. For sure not ideal, but far from really being problematic IMHO.
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
My experience with many German mechanical and electrical engineers is that they have a tendency to think of software like a magical cheap and malleable part on a BOM that can make their arbitrary design work. Especially the mechanical engineers like a nice little black box that they screw on and wire into their machine to make it go brrr once they turn it on.
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.
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.
I am a problem, but on the other spectrum - OEMs ain't getting the repair €€€ because people like me repair stuff (but a different approach than Vanja).
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.
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.
Most people need a recommendation for something more current, from people who work on these modern cars daily. The reputation of 25+ year old models can be misleading.
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.
If you're in Europe, you can consider Dacia. A lot of their stuff is old Renault parts that they've bought a license to use/manufacture. Get a pre-2023 model with the 1.6 non-turbo non-hybrid petrol engine - it's actually a Nissan HR16DE, which has been in use since 2004. Very reliable and low complexity.
Is it using that Nissan/Renault CVT? That transmission is notorious junk.
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.
You can get them with a manual transmission, or a dual-clutch automatic, or CVT. AFAIK, the manuals are all decent, although the 6 speed manual on the 4WD models has quite low ratios (no transfer case) so it doesn't have great fuel economy at highway speeds.
At least over here where we have mandatory inspections you can find statistics on percentage of cars which fail the inspections, broken down by brand and model. Toyota seems to consistently place in the top.
Those sorts of comparisons are highly misleading because the overwhelming majority of failures for any inspection program are simple stuff that doesn't affect the operation of the vehicle in the base case. Light out, bald tires, brakes below replacement threshold, windshield crack, minor exhaust leak, etc. So what you wind up measuring by proxy is the owner behavior, since that's the dominant factor in how proactively those sorts of things get addressed.
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.
That's very interesting. I could argue that you are reading the signal wrong here. You want to go for the car that has the most failures in some cases, since it has survived long enough to fail in minor ways that leave it still able to drive.
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.
Pretty much every major safety feature is an order of magnitude less meaningful than the last.
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.
At the very least, modern cars are much heavier and ultimately mass wins. For example, a 2005 Honda CRV weights 3400 lbs while a 2025 is 3900 lbs.
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!
Crash safety has become grossly exagerrated because the standards have been sharply rising last few years. Most 15yo cars will keep you safe just fine in a median crash.
A 15 year old car currently is going for 5 figures - not a shitbox. Not unless it’s a shelll of rust held together by bondo. Then your crash standards or whatever year are meaningless as the chassis may have 25% or less of its design strength.
> 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
Toyota hybrid powertrains are more reliable than any other company, but other than that they are no longer special.
I've got a '91 Toyota Carina and can attest that it's very easy to work on, my friend and I pulled the engine and gearbox in under two hours with hand tools, but I can't really speak for anything modern.
As a lifelong Toyota fan, I agree they are miserable to work on, especially the electronics. I have a stoplight switch issue in my 86 (from being rear-ended) that I have neglected because it would require pulling out the trunk assembly to fix.
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.
> As a lifelong Toyota fan, I agree they are miserable to work on, especially the electronics.
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 occasionally like to see what the highest mileage Toyota Prius I can find for sale is. They are obviously used as taxis and it's common to find one for sale with half a million miles.
Usually at that point someone puts in a new hybrid battery and sells it to someone else starting out driving Ubers.
They reach a million miles because they're taxis, not in spite of it.
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.
I don't know if this is applicable to hybrids, but taxis attain high mileage with relatively few engine cold starts. Engine cold starts are what kills main and conrod bearings and piston walls. Taxis' bodies may be beat to garbage, the interior might be trash, but the engine and likely the transmission too will be representative of a vehicle with an order of magnitude less kilometers driven. Because they go an order of magnitude further between cold engine starts.
All this assumes proper maintenance, especially oil changes.
Oh yes, the Prius gets even better lifetime because the hardest strain on the engine components is completely negated by the electric motor. If I ever ditch the little mini sports car, I will most likely replace it with another Prius.
In fairness most cars get taken for scrap with an engine which starts and runs. Even when they are running a bit rough it's more often fueling and ignition components than a mechanical problem with the engine components.
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.
I am affacted by this as well: the rear knuckle uniball bearing was broken after 3 years (Achsschenkel). Many MY here in Europe have this issue, due to bad parts or too hard suspension.
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.
> Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten br[e]ak[e]s - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking instead of the real br[e]ak[e]s.
That's something that they should have taken into consideration when designing the car.
Service intervals. Other OEMs will prompt a service interval at X thousand miles/km to go pop in and have it looked at by a dealer, probably swap out your cabin air filter, upsell you on some new wiper blades, etc.
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).
>Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten breaks - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking
Huh? Every EV uses recuperative braking, how is this special to Tesla?
The Teslas have far stronger regen than other brands. Have you ever wondered why Tesla's Long Range models have 500 horsepower? It's not for increased acceleration power, it's for increased braking power. Far less energy is wasted on the friction brakes in a Tesla.
> Huh? Every EV uses recuperative braking, how is this special to Tesla?
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.
German TUV thinks Teslas are horrible because apparently nobody is servicing their brakes on a regular enough interval so every time Teslas get pulled in for their 2 year inspections after 3 years of ownership they keep failing out on brakes and suspension, but VWs are the pinnacle of perfection because they slam 10K service intervals in your face.
(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.)
I'm at 125000 on my Long Range Model 3. I plugged a tire last month and photographed brake caliper - like new. I could not believe it. I can upload a photo if you'd like.
.... I also didn't add the rest of my environmental conditions like the fact I'm in an absolute rust belt in the winter.
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...
I am no Tesla fanboy. But let’s face the truth. Teslas leave factory with end of line check. Then they are driven more than average cars for 3 years without any maintenance. Then go for check. And surprise surprise, the first model Ys were not well made. I bet with 1000-1500€ maintenance cost over these 3 years the TUV result would be dramatically different.
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.
Not just BMW. I've been watching (and enjoying) Mat Armstrong's youtube videos where he restores crash damaged luxury cars, one of them was a Lamborghini Revuelo. The car's battery was completely intact, but the safety fuse blew up in the BMS and despite replacing the entire module, the car wouldn't talk to the battery and wouldn't even start. Eventually he had to buy an entire 30K battery, and even then, the car wouldn't start because the car was so new Lamborghini themselves still didn't have the diagnostics tool to clear the crash code.
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.
Interestingly I’ve seen YouTubers replace the fuse in a Tesla for about £40 and a few hours of labour (it’s under the rear seats). Maybe something they’re doing right.
You can replace the fuse (not that easly) but for approximately the same price in a BMW. You do have to put in more work but the problem is with re-certifying the battery. Tesla does not care if the battery was damaged in the crash, they will (more or less) happily re-enable it. BMW decided that the only safe way is to re-certify the whole battery. I'm not saying it's the right decision, I think they over did it and VW does it better - but I do understand WHY they chose to do it so, and the WHY is not nearly as outrageous as a lot of people here think.
Yes mostly propaganda and being first/having a big driving base. They are notoriously closed/locked down from the diagnostic/reprogramming perspective.
After reading the blog post I had the same thought. Doing an oil change on my F650GS motorcycle required removing the plastics, draining the oil from both the top and bottom of the motorcycle, removing a plate on the side of the engine after install the BMW specified oil redirection funnel, extracting the filter and reinstalling. The oil funnel had a legit BMW part number. Most of us either just made a mess or used a piece of a milk jug. Probably 15 fasteners and 2 drain plugs.
Comparable process on my Sv650: drain plug out. Drain plug in. Screw off filter. Screw on filter. Fill.
That reminds me of the Popular Science garage hint from 1963, explaining how to easily dispose of used motor oil: Dig a hole in the ground and fill it with fine gravel. Pour in the oil, and it will be absorbed into the ground before your next oil change.
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.
Not too bad though all things considered, there are worse examples out there, like my old KTM adventure bike.
Interestinlgy, the BMW R1200/1250/1300GS is actually simpler due to the boxer engine design.
You win some, you lose some. Comparable process on my E46 and E39: Drain plug out (potentially flipping a little dust cover out of the way). Drain plug in. Stand up because everything else happens up top. Unscrew filter housing. Replace filter element. Replace filter housing. Fill.
Hello, fellow E39 owner. Mine is my first BMW, and for all I hear about over-engineering from them, this has been a pretty straightforward car to work on. As "complicated" as the suspension is, for example, it was pretty simple to replace everything. I suppose that reputation has been earned from their more modern cars.
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.
I won't argue with non EV engineering, but high voltage stuff in an EV is a lot harder problem to make safe in event of a crash and subsequent repair. I come out as a BMW apologist, but Vanja (evclinic Head boss) likes to be overly dramatic. BMW (and almost all other brands) are very afraid that someone will die when repairing/driving/rescuing someone from an EV and they go to great (and expensive) lengths to make sure the battery and the vehicle is as safe as possible. The fuse here is a small part, checks and certifications that go into making the battery truly safe (in scale, all edge cases ect) are a lot more than just the fuse. And that is expensive.
Thanks for pointing that out - at first I thought this was an act designed to turn cheap repairs impossible to drive new car sales, and force people into BMWs hugely expensive service network, but after learning this is for my own good, I'm relieved and happy to learn BMW is looking out for me.
I worked with Vanja before EVs were mass produced, he is very driven and smart, but also eccentric. With his previous experience with Mercedes Electric repair he figured out that, sooner or later repair/knowledge/tools will get commoditized, so push at the start and try to get a big foothold/mindshare before this happens. Very few people actually have the knowledge to judge your work early on, so you can get very far if you are intentionally promoting yourself and behaving very confident.
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.
Exactly, these are intentional decisions for German cars. They’re gorgeous, over-engineered, cutting edge pieces of machinery and the expense of being practical or repairable. The common understanding for decades has been if you’re buying a German luxury car as a daily driver and repair costs are something you even have to consider, you’re buying the wrong car.
Old BMW is nothing like new BMW - I know a few older folks who drive 20+year old BMWs and Audis with 500k+ km they drove off the salon parking lot - not because they can't afford a new one, but they like the current ones.
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.
It was not always so. The E30 I used to drive - a 1986 model 325 - was a marvelous little thing, not only a joy to drive but a pleasure to work on. Its engineers had been just as thoughtful about its maintenance as its operation.
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 have not over-engineered anything in this case - they have deliberately taken user-hostile actions, going out of the way to prevent repair, and turn cheap repairs into very expensive ones.
- 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.
Yet somehow adaptive cruise is a rarity on the BMWs out there, often requiring an option package that few dealers spec. (Though I think this may be finally starting to change with the 2025 model year).
My understanding is that the hardware is always installed but the dealer will not fill the liquid reservoirs unless the customer specifically requests (and pays) for it.
I think it's a German thing to be honest. I've wrenched on Mercedes Benz and VW personally, and I've heard horror stories from Audi as well.
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!
I love this take. Thanks for sharing it. Puts into words why sometimes I can spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve a system: trying to save future effort.
People get upset when a BMW is expensive to repair, but they're misunderstanding the sophisticated German engineering. You're not supposed to repair it. You're supposed to throw it away and buy a new one.
In Germany BMW's target market are company cars. Having the company pay for your car has tax benefits here even if you also use it outside work, so the company giving you a nice car that gets replaced by a new model every three years is a sought-after benefit. Those cars are indeed sold to the next idiot before they develop any issues
I missed the memo when putting everything together on one impossible to repair PCB and then gluing/sealing it permanently became 'sophisticated German engineering' instead of bottom-shelf junk.
The sophisticated engineering works (or worked?) mostly fine if the piece of machinery is operated in the extremely narrow "just right" operating ranges the sophisticated engineer defined. To much dust in the air? One too many potholes? Not the premium brand oil? There goes your sophisticated machinery.
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.
I don't know how "German engineering" became a badge of honor. Probably from the people who continually roll new leases every 2 years.
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.
I remember on reddit this was pointed under some article once, and there was a consensus about how West Europeans are just more productive.
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.
>>Probably from the people who continually roll new leases every 2 years.
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.
This reminded me of the video about the Tesla door handles, where its explained how they redesigned the retracting door handles of the Model S from having a bunch of switches and mechanical parts to just a motor + a position sensor:
BMW always had a reputation for frequent & expensive repairs, even as far back as the 1970s (although I guess "typical" BMW drivers aren't the most careful either, so maybe that's also relevant...).
The article misses to explain why this is an EU problem, not just a BMW problem. Is the problem described caused by a specific EU regulation (which?) or is mentioning the EU just click bait? (Honest question.)
It is a BMW problem and the rest is clickbait. If you own a BMW you know all this as it has been the case for over decades.
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.
UN Regulation No. 155, and 156, and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) are requiring car manufacturers to implement cryptographic validation that allows only authorized software from the manufacturer to be run.
What I meant more is that you need more and more specialized tools (according to the manufacturers). My previous ford needed a special (expensive!) bracket to keep the drivetrain in place if you want to do anything on the engine which makes home service less likely.
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.
This is just signing, nothing cutting edge. Verification of signatures is a fairly old tech. What is the exact problem here? Is it that manufacturers do not publish the signed binaries or is it that you want to run something on your car compiled by you?
Authorized software means authorized for that car's VIN number. Basically it's the same issue with parts in Apple products that are serial number locked.
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.
This 2022 BMW X1 my wife drives is the last BMW we will ever own. £395 for an oil change. £180 for brake fluid. £500 a year road tax.
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.
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.
They don't come with all the downsides. They externalise the reduced forward visibility for people behind you, the headlights spinning onto other users' cabins, the running over of toddlers, and, my favourite, the driving in the middle of the road rather than risk getting mud on their fucking tyres
No tax rate is too high. Rebates for agricultural workers maybe.
Hmm... I never bought a BMW, certainly because I am poor, but also because everyone around me who drives a luxury car keeps telling me how expensive yet unreliable everything is, while everyone who drives a Toyota and Honda almost never talks about their car. I took the hint and have been doing what is financially responsible.
Sounds like you're getting it serviced by a BMW dealership? I take my PHEV 3-series to a local independent mechanic, and the entire cost is usually less than you're paying for oil alone. Also, because it's a hybrid, the road tax rate is very advantageous.
I was more or less pointing to the expensive repairs needed in BMW as in you know it's locked down and you need expensive OEM stuff. Maybe that is covered under "quality is expensive" for normal people but when you buy a BMW you know the replacement parts bill is costing you an arm and a leg.
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.
This makes me feel that peak car was 2010 ish, when, when engines were powerful, cheap, and not too polluting, but also not overly complex.
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.
I would argue peak car was a little earlier, maybe the 2000-2010 decade. Fewer screens to fail, analog buttons and dials. Airbags, and ABS for safety but without the additional computers/screens.
Entirely agree, although I think it varies by make / model. Roughly look for whenever a particular car got OBDII, which makes diagnostics way easier (and was kinda the perfect level of digitization, again in my opinion), through (as you say) whenever they started digitizing the cockpit and/or (which oddly - maybe? - coincide, in my experience) manufacturers stopped considering ease of maintenance in engineering decisions. In general late-1990s through 2005-2010. Cars since that decade (or so) are more sophisticated, at the expense of far, far shorter useful lifespans.
Mid 2008s saw a lot of cost cutting after the financial crisis, and then some very weird engineering decisions to deal with increased efficiency laws that made for much more complicated engines and transmissions even in smaller cars, if the smaller cars even continued to exist.
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.
I've felt similarly recently, and I think those days are fleeting if not gone. Ford recently talked about replatforming their entire range, which would include basic trucks at more reasonable prices, but there's not really a market for work trucks in the way there used to be, and they're gone in favor of the luxury ones with small beds. It is annoying. There is an interesting startup that I can't remember the name of that touts an 8 foot bed (which is great) in the chassis footprint of a Mini Cooper. I don't think I saw pricing, but I would snatch one of those up.
> there's not really a market for work trucks in the way there used to be
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.
There's no market for new small work trucks because nobody is willing to sell them. Not because nobody is willing to buy them.
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.
Well CAFE standards say don't bother making small vehicles. And manufacturers say oh darn, we have to make the vehicles with lots of profits? Well sorry small truck buyers, we're out.
If there was a market for those vehicles, they'd exist. The folks you asked either didn't buy them when they had the chance or don't make up enough of the market to justify the truck.
> 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
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.
You might consider acquiring a used model that meets your needs, then spend $ to zero-time the important stuff. In 2023, I decided not to buy a new car, but to re-engine (and other stuff) my 1999 4Runner. Really happy I did.
I would like a pickup (spouse -> serious gardener), have decided to get something simple & used, then put another $20K into it.
Nobody is currently selling new, small pickups. Maybe if the Slate materializes, that'll prove the market and we'll see them again.
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)
CAFE standards have made that pretty hard. The trucks got bigger to hold more complex engine setups to boost mileage, coinciding with preferences shifting to super crew cabs because buying a new truck is basically the same price as buying a luxury vehicle.
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.
Frame damage apart, brake lines (in general, though I haven't worked specifically on a Dodge) are a reasonably straightforward DIY job. Not at all saying you made the wrong decision abandoning that particular car, just encouraging others reading this to evaluate the cost of a brake system replacement more, um... creatively, and least do some research. Basic car repair is an immanently nerdy pastime, and can save one an immense amount of money - especially on that particular era of automobiles, which are typically pretty satisfying to wrench on.
>Lot of vehicles designed and produced in Europe — ICE, PHEV, and EV — have effectively become a missleading ECO exercise. Vehicles marketed as “CO₂-friendly” end up producing massive CO₂ footprints through forced services, throw-away components, high failure rates and unnecessary parts manufacturing cycles, overcomplicated service procedures, far larger than what the public is told. If we are destroying our ICE automotive industry based on EURO norms, who is calculating real ECO footprint of replacement part manucfacturing, unecessary servicing and real waste cost?
>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.
More like a weird rant that reduces EVs to only existing due to the environment. But they’re just better cars lol. And the poor reliability of european cars applies regardless of propulsion type
High end ICE cars have long been treated as disposable items. 3 year lease and then resell for 1/2 of its initial price so suddenly it’s cheaper than new midrange models for good reasons.
Lower end cars on the other hand can be worth 3/4th of their initial value 5 years out, that’s a durable good.
I have no info on Tesla batteries. But, just as a point of reference, you can now buy knock-down 48V battery "kits" from China for under $90/kWh. They include everything you need: case, cells, BMS, circuit breaker/isolator, and fire suppression. Assembly takes about an hour. (The raw prismatic cells without the rest go for ~$50/kWh).
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.
This is like comparing a Casio to a Rolex. Both do roughly the same thing, but the markets are completely different. Nobody buys a high-end luxury car like a Taycan because it makes financial sense. The manufacturers know this and price everything accordingly.
That is such a terrible example. Why are you comparing Teslas to cars where the battery pack costs more than the Tesla, instead of the myriad of competitively priced models?
There are currently 17 total carreras for sale with over 100k miles, none of them are less than 8 years old. The average taycan buyer isn’t going to own the car long enough to exceed the warranty.
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.
It's like the S60, VW W12, old V12 Continentals, etc. If it's expensive to maintain no one wants to buy it off you so you get hit with massive depreciation costs. You can get a 20y/o 'no issues' 500+hp V12 Continental for 10k where I'm at. They've had a brutal cost/year and cost/mile.
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?
This is exactly why I’m so uninterested in driving en EV. I usually word it as “I don’t want to drive a computer”, but the reality is that I don’t want to be on the wrong end of the power imbalance that comes from this amount of complexity.
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.
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.
> They said they don't want an EV. The things that modern carmakers make complicated.
It's probably more of a sign of what's coming in the future. There is no need to make EVs difficult/expensive to repair. The change in technology is just an excuse to lock everything down and rake in more money for repairs/new vehicles. They could do the same for ICE vehicles too.
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.
EV is indeed easy. Safe and reliable EV is hard. Vehicle environment is hostile to electric components, where they are exposed to vibration, dirt, and moisture. Even if you get "safe" chemistry in the battery cells of an Alibaba e-bike, it only means the cells themselves are less likely to explode in a chemical fire. It still has enough current to melt metall and set off a regular fire. And in the best case it will just stop working and good luck repairing some random components, which might have been from a short production run and there are no spares in the existence.
Many modern ford cars have 6 CAN buses. ICE cars are not simpler.
The tech _has_ been beaten with the hammer of incremental improvement for a long time, but ICE cars are not less computer controlled. If anything ice engines require many more "computers" and sensors to be efficient
My Hybrid F-150 is so freaking complex. They basically seem to have swapped many components over to electrical drive (like the F-150 Lightning), but they still have to slap all of the ICE components in there as well.
Yeah, modern ICE is a massively complex control system problem, requiring so much more compute than EV, just to meet regulations.
Here's a funny example: the fuel vapor recovery system. It stores fuel vapors from the gas tank, that otherwise would have leaked into the air, in a canister of activated carbon. When under appropriate driving/environmental conditions, it opens valves and feeds the vapor into the intake stream, so it's burned.
Teslas are dead simple, to the point where people are putting Tesla anything in virtually anything you can think of - classic cars, random sedans, you name it.
There’s also that guy on YouTube who updated the electricals in his original Model S with electricals from a 10 years later Model 3 Highland just by buying spare parts, and it was pretty doable with fairly basic and limited tools/public information.
So the complexity in this article is just a BMW/PHEV thing, not an EV thing.
As they point out, the Tesla pyro fuse (at least on a Model S) is a cheap part. However, in some model years it's on top of the pack, which means you have to drop the pack to get to it. And, from memory, it's a 10 year lifespan part. However, on other Model S cars, it's easily accessible from the bottom.
I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars. Obviously, right-to-repair and allowing access to documentation and tools for independent shops is a a necessary but not sufficient step.
I shudder to think at some of the other possibilities -- heavy-handed attempts to regulate how much specific repairs can cost.
Maybe mandating the sale of manufacturer-provided extended warranties for no more than x% the cost of the vehicle purchase price would be an incentive to keep repair cost in check?
The majority of their cars (Y/3 models) have the penthouse (top) of battery pack super easily accessible from under the back seat, no need to drop a pack.
Not to mention Tesla has the best service mode system in their computer of any brand of all time. They also have the best free to owners assembly/disassembly manuals in the service portal https://service.tesla.com/. 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.
+1 for the Tesla service manuals. My wife’s was making a clunk from front suspension. Before my assistant (my kid) had finished taking off the wheel, I found the up-to-date official torque specs on service site. Usually it takes me a while to find torque values and cross check with another source. It was beyond refreshing to see Tesla buck the trend of selling service-manuals-as-a-service.
Service documentation / manufacturer software required for cars I currently wrench:
- Early 20’s: Bookmarked URL to the official online documentation (Tesla). With that said, I haven’t had need beyond checking mechanical connections, flushing brakes, and replacing filters.
- Early 10’s: VM containing a mid-00’s version of windows that runs a cracked copy of the long defunct manufacturer software service manual. Also runs software to interface with car, but simply painful to use. Beginning of era where tasks like replacing the 12v battery require manufacturer software to interface (though simple things still had undocumented secret Contra-like button sequences to do so).
- Early 10’s car: folders of screenshots and pdf exports collected over a decade for various procedures I needed to do. OBD-2 dongle + generic app handled basic things. Not much different than decade prior vehicle.
- Early 00’s: PDF of a seemingly printed-and-scanned copy of a digital version of the service manual. Off by a model year, surprising number of inconsistencies given its German. Computer and K+DCAN connection required for re-coding new parts, flashing, etc. Some fancier OBD-2 scanners could do majority of service related functions (cycle abs, reset airbag light, etc).
- Late 80’s: PDF scans of the dozen+ service books (still trying to luck into a physical copy of the set without paying an absurd sum). Most mechanically complex vehicle I own. No computer necessary, but soldering required.
> I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars.
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.
On the Model 3, you have to drop the HV battery pack to replace the brake lines that prematurely rust in wintery climates, so Tesla is not fully immune either.
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.
EVs are not intrinsically complicated as some sibling commenters say, but the issue is that EVs are new and mostly made after the point when automakers started building cars as computers. And it's also a good excuse to put even more computers inside because an EV has to look modern with big screens and cool chimes right?
I think this genuinely hampers EV adoption and governments should take some sort of action if they want to transition the market to EVs. Not that the average consumer chooses cars based on how many computers are inside it, but this builds a general impression of fragility and creates such negative stories. We need simple, reliable, serviceable EVs, but the incumbents are not going to build it on their own. (Government excessive regulations for safety, backup cameras, speed limiters, etc arguably created this problem in the first place)
None of the issues in the article are specific to electric cars. This isn't even one, it's a plug-in hybrid. A modern ICE car will have the same issues of having too much electronics inside.
One would expect a plug in hybrid to be the most complex of all the vehicle types. It has all of the complexity of an EV combined with all of the complexity of a gas burner.
Probably the one type of PHEV that should survive is basically a BEV with builtin backup generator. One that's not necessarily powerful enough to drive you directly at full speed, but enough to basically eliminate range limitation of a (cheaper and smaller) battery by continuously charging it when needed. Maybe this 'backup generator' can even be made as a removable option.
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.
Your phrasing implies this causes extra weight gain - just to illustrate, the new Prius is about 1.4t (while having decent PHEV range), while the ID4 (a similar sized EV) is 2t.
Plus more. My Volt had a component fail that was responsible for switching the cabin heater between the battery and the motor, so if I placed the vehicle in pure EV mode then I couldn't heat the cabin, oops!
PHEV means a lot of things. Toyota PHEVs with e-CVT are simpler than a normal ICE. VW PHEVs where there’s an electric motor tucked into their DSG gearbox - not so much.
And then the kicker. VW doesn’t allow the dsg with electric motor to be repaired by dealers. If something is wrong it needs to be replaced completely. At the cost of €15k (NL, 2021). The only serviceable thing is the clutch and the mechatronic.
IMHO this is something that should be regulated away as consumer unfriendly and environment unfriendly. (Not to say hostile.)
In the end I got a DSG specialist fix the problem in two hours by replacing two simple components physically. The car then spend an hour retraining the dsg.
Does that make a difference in this regard? If so, how, and is it an unavoidable penalty for PHEVs? I can see PHEVs having a complexity penalty from having an IC engine over and above the EV components, but that does not seem to be the source of the problems here.
Well designed PHEVs can actually be simpler than pure ICs (at least on the hardware side. To build a combustion only car well, you need to balance efficiency, power, and responsiveness. This means you need all sorts of complicated tech, like correctly sized turbos, variable valve lift, variable valve duration, etc. In a PHEV, otoh, you have an electric engine (which can also steal power from the driveshaft), which means you don't need to worry about responsiveness of the combustion engine. You can fill half a second of turbo lag with the motor, and optimize for narrower RPM ranges since you can charge/discharge the battery to keep the engine running in its happy place. You also no longer need fancy and complicated brakes because you can do 99% of your braking with regen.
All of this does come with more complex software, but the hardware can end up with significant simplification.
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
The problem of repairability and independent garages to have access to the tools, software and training to repair cars is not specific to electric cars.
The level of electronic and automation is related to safety norms which applies to any car.
The article points out that it’s specificity BMW making this hard and expensive.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone.
If you own a BMW you’ll be dropping $5k on a repair someday. It’s a matter of when not if. That’s why most people lease them and move on to the next one.
You're blaming the wrong thing. EVs are ultimately much, much simpler than ICE cars, it's just that certain manufacturers are taking this opportunity to turn their cars into elaborate scams.
Everything is a computer these days, but that doesn't mean that they have to be needlessly complicated. I think EVs are great, but I won't be buying one until they start selling cheap, simple ones.
This seems like more of a BMW issue than EV. On my E46 and E39 there's a pyrotechnic fuse on the negative battery terminal. It's somewhere around $400 in parts to replace. It's only gotten more expensive and more complex with their newer ICE cars.
Back in the 80s and 90s Ford's solution was a reusable inertia switch.
PHEVs are particularly complicated because they have to support two drive trains. Just EV’s are very simple outside of the battery management. It’s power from the battery going to a motor.
Absolutely, also I'm not stupid rich and most are not but I witness how much they spend more on services and repair that I can very very easily do on my "stupid" gasoline car myself. I buy my used cars for 5k and a used ev is like 20k-25k where I live so I on purchase save the first 20k. The gas cost I save with lower insurance and service/repair costs easily. So it's juat a waste of money in my opinion and a bit of an itelligence test.
The complexity here is partially a consequence of the energy storage mechanism and may be essential.
It is not possible for an entire tank of gasoline to spontaneously detonate in the same way that an EV battery can. If a mechanic fucks up a procedure and drills a hole through fuel tank, it's not fantastic but you can usually detect and recover from this before it gets to be catastrophic. If you accidentally puncture an EV battery or drop something across the terminals it can instantly kill everyone working on the car. These are not the same kind of risk profile.
I would not want work on anything with a high voltage system. Especially if it had been involved in an accident or was poorly maintained. These fuses and interlocks can only help up to a certain point. Energy is energy and it's in there somewhere. You can have 40kW for an entire hour or 100MW for 2 seconds. Gasoline cars usually throw a rod or something before getting much beyond 2x their rated power output.
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.
It seems to me an analogy that as a product is increasingly complex, the ultimate consumer/demander of it becomes more and more disconnected from maintenance, operations, etc. considerations and whether that system is well designed and serviceable.
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.
If you love cars or Top Gear, watch Mat Armstrong on YouTube. Mat restores crash damaged cars. The BS he has to go through because car manufacturers either won't sell him parts, won't sell him repair manuals, and unnecessarily cryptographically lock parts to the VIN is sometime heartbreaking. He has run across this pyro fuse issue many times. Sometimes he has even has to buy two cars just to repair one because of this nonsense. Like the article points out it just leads to more waste and it has to contribute to higher insurance rates for us all.
Bumping this. Mat went through the exact same crazy process with the Revuelto. Audi/Lamborghini overengineers the heck out of these cars its really absurd.
100%. I watch him literally just to see how much bullshit he has to go through to get modern cars running again against the wishes of the manufacturers.
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.
The funny one is the Ferrari he is working on now where not even the Ferrari techs could figure out why the car wouldn't start, as they couldn't get the car to spit out codes and they didn't know why it didn't do that.
Meanwhile, if you work on old Landrovers from the Defender 90/110 to early RR L322, you need this: https://rangerovers.pub/downloads/rave.zip (500MB zip, PDFs of all service and user manuals).
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 was getting the 12v battery in my car replaced the other day, and my mechanic told me I'm lucky not to have a BMW, which apparently uses lithium ion batteries that cost $1,200 to replace. I assume they last much longer than lead acid batteries, but I do wonder what the value is to the driver. Is this just a way to juice the maintenance bills, to keep dealers happy?
Right to repair laws should cover this, and / or have a very clear procedure for e.g. consumers and mechanics to report these anti-repairability practices. Even if they're not on purpose (which I doubt, but have no evidence of), the author of this post clearly explains what the problem and what the various hurdles are.
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.
Compare this car to the Toyota RAV4 PHEV which in some ways is simpler than a gas powered RAV4 (no alternator, no transmission) but maintains the same ease of maintainability and cheap parts availability as the base RAV4 (makes sense, they sold >4M of them).
PHEVs are complicated tech so I figured I would choose one with a proven design (Prius -> Prius Prime -> RAV4 Prime).
The goal is to eliminate outright vehicle sales, and move everyone to leases and rentals? Just like in software? Safety is important, too (nudge nudge wink wink).
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.
I wouldn't mind if cars were so expensive only the top 2-5% of earners could afford them, but we need viable alternatives to driving. We have dismantled our transportation infrastructure at the pleasure of car companies. Now you have drivers that cannot afford their cars but must drive anyways. You also have people who are unfit to drive that are forced to do so.
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.
Yeah just don’t go to a BMW dealer, and save 50+% of the cost. I recently had numerous repairs done for €2k on my 2er, and the dealer had quoted me €5k. 1k for a part isn’t that outlandish, you just can’t go to a dealer that bills you €300 per hour.
I am in Germany. I will keep my 14-year-old Renault gasoline car roadworthy and use it for as long as possible. When it is no longer economically viable to drive a gasoline-powered car, I expect there to be electric cars that cost a four-figure sum in euros when new, are virtually maintenance-free, and come with a guarantee that a replacement battery will be available at a reasonable price (preferably from third-party suppliers) that I can replace myself without having to go to a specialist workshop. I hope that there will be manufacturers who recognize the need for such vehicles and will meet that demand. I will definitely not pay 20,000 or 50,000 euros or whatever for a skateboard with a battery and car bodywork.
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.
There are tons of used BMWs on the used market here in the states. They don't hold their value because everyone knows that some stupid thing is wrong with them that either can't be fixed or is so ludicrously costly to fix that it would be more than the whole entire car is worth. BMW is a shit company, doesn't matter if it is ICE or EV or whatever it is, they're intentionally made to be impossible to repair cheaply. It would be so easy to build "open" hardware and have onboard diagnostics built into the cars, but no.
my VW Multivan's gearbox needed a replacement. 17000 CHF, I kid you not. Luckily VW Germany paid for the whole ordeal, but I wouldn't have been happy to pay that...
You'll most likely be overpaying for overall package, not get the advanced software and will be forced to pay insane yearly service fee.
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.
I cannot find any explanation for that this is the result of EU regulation. Tesla should also adhere to the same EU regulation and they manage to do this without the "extra CO2" costs as the article states itself. This article smells like FUD to get attention.
>"Everyone calculates the CO₂ footprint of a moving vehicle — nobody calculates the CO₂ footprint of a vehicle that is constantly broken and creating waste."
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
>Did anyone think politicians are there for a common good?
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.
At this point, when I look at ANY electric vehicle, I'm seeing basically what Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow warned about.
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.
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.
This is absolutely not limited to EVs, the same enshittification is in a lot of ICEs and hybrids as well. Today's cars won't be driving in 2040 when a student could buy it for a grand wit 300 000 miles on the clock, and keep fixing it himself in order to save money.b
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 continues to be under-appreciated how much of a lead Tesla still has in EVs. Even BMW can't make something that is practical.
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.
I think Nissan is a bit underrated here. I’m leasing an Ariya which has been great (including its charging curve, which is better than much of the competition) and feels more premium than you’d expect from the brand (to the point that the top trim is sometimes referred to as a “baby Infiniti”) with things like dual pane windows to cut down on road noise, as well as a proper heat pump where many still only have resistive heaters.
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.
> 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.
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.
I’d love to see a ~$20k EV too, but it’s gonna be tough to pull that off without China’s cheap labor and materials, at least until EVs start moving at the kind of volumes that traditional ICE and hybrid vehicles sell at.
We're never going to see a $20k car in the US again. Why would they sell any car for $20k, when they could sell it for $30k like they are doing now? They make more money selling fewer cars at higher prices, so no manufacturers are interested.
Prices are always set in a manner in order to optimize for margins.
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.
Household incomes are also much lower in China compared to Western countries. The kind of upper line BYD EV model that would appear to be a discount to a Western buyer is fairly unaffordable in a country where the median household incomes are around Yuan 2-3k (US$300-500) a month.
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.
Lots of the traditional car manufacturers now have good options: Renault, Nissan, Kia, and Hyundai's EVs seem to be particularly well regarded. I'd definitely opt for any of those over a Tesla given Tesla's reputation with regard to quality and repair costs.
If you ignore cost, then Tesla's cars are probably still better at this point, but the gap doesn't seem that large.
Even BMW has a few electrical cars that aren't half bad. The main problem is that they are compromise cars that can be sold as ICE, PHEV, or full EV.
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's reputation with regard to quality and repair costs.
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.
as long as you don’t compare them to any car. teslas in 2025 belong in a museum lol
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.
2025 S is the same as your 2014 S? That’s some hilarious cope. Stop lying. You know it’s completely different. Yes, a model S is still a model S. And the F150 is still a pickup truck. Surprise!
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.
just asked my wife and she said the first thing she looks when she is deciding to buy a car are giga castings and facia and door handles - boom - tesla s ftw ;)
When I bought my S in 2014 people were breaking their necks checking it out, it was the shit - now this car is soooo dated there is no reason to buy 2026 vs. my 2014 (I got new DU, new battery…)
Tesla entire lineup is old outdated cars. Ford has F-150 and then another 50 models to choose from…
If all you care about is looks, that is. Get out of any other car and you forget you can't just walk away from it and it'll shut itself off and lock the doors. I've had my Tesla driving friends drive my ICE car, and then not even turn off the engine when they go into the store because you don't need to do that with a Tesla.
> Get out of any other car and you forget you can't just walk away from it and it'll shut itself off and lock the doors.
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.
I have a theory about EVs - they don't allow much engineering range.
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.
Seeing the BYD trucks and other BYD vehicles around where I live in Australia, as well as the other Chinese and Korean brands, they outnumber the Teslas on the street now.
BYD targets a different market. Tesla should compete with the likes of Polestar, Rivian, maybe Porsche if they dare but I'd take any of those before a Tesla any day of the week.
I wouldn't understate BYD, but Tesla did play a massive role in helping build China's domestic EV ecosystem because Tesla also worked on building a supplier ecosystem in China, which also helped incubate much of the Chinese ecosystem.
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]).
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)
From what I can tell the Chinese are targeting the bottom of the market with cars that are essentially disposable. The ones to watch, IMO, are Hyundai/Kia. If they can sort out the reliability issues there's a lot of potential there.
Honestly I'm cautiously optimistic about VW, especially after they've started backing away from those awful capacitive buttons.
Sure - you start on a segment. Tesla started at the top of the market and got stuck trying to work down. BYD is starting at the bottom but they are making it pretty clear that’s a choice not a constraint.
Disposable as in unrepairable or difficult to repair, not disposable as in slow. Honestly, aside from people making bad faith arguments who would use disposable to imply slow?
Do me a favor and stop responding to my comments. Thanks.
I have a BMW PHEV. There's a 3 cyl turbo engine with an auto box at the front and a 90hp electric motor and 7.6kwh battery at the back. Most of the new ones just have a more traditional layout with an electric motor built into the autobox.
You get more elec range than a hybrid but less than a full EV.
Now that it's cold I start my commute on engine to get the car warmed up with 'free' heat then switch to EV later. If I want to beat someone off the lights I use both together.
Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle. It's the most complex drivetrain you can possibly buy with a full gas engine and transmission mated to a full EV with external charging support.
I can't speak for other PHEV drivetrains but the Toyota PHEV design isn't that complex. It uses an ingenious planetary CVT with a small gas engine instead of a full gas engine and regular transmission.
Also, because the gas engine mostly runs at its most efficient RPM, there is little stress on it so it runs very reliably.
Manufacturer locked crash resets for BMS are a common theme amongst EVs, especially European ones. Exclusive to neither this model year nor BMW, although some other makes have less arcane procedures than the ISTA one.
I keep mulling over decisions like this, and I think the fundamental clash between the hacker ethos of repairability and the corporate ethos of products with well-defined failure modes comes down to a clash of innate human values with capitalism.
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.
And this is one of the reasons I won't be replacing my gas-powered Lexus any time soon. Then there is the spyware issue: most modern cars (and especially Tesla-like electric cars) are a privacy nightmare.
None of the issues in the article are specific to electric cars. This isn't even one, it's a plug-in hybrid. A modern ICE car will have the same issues of having too much electronics inside.
It’s funny how I extrapolate car design sessions in my head based on software design sessions.
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.
My last 4 cars were BMW. I love the way they drive, but ...
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.
I was looking for this reply as well; definitely my perception that a lot of mid- to high-end cars are engineered to drive and feel great for 4-5 years, and after that it's kind of a crapshoot. You can see it as well with the various subscriptions, for app connectivity, M2M infotainment data, etc— all of it is oriented around that same time horizon.
Thats why they've been increasing the service interval to silly numbers. 3 years ago, 10k miles, now... 18k miles for the same model of car for the first service! Absolutely insane.
Yep, and remember, "lifetime" in BMW speak is 120k.km/4y, not "forever".
I never considered buying a BMW before they put out an EV (the i4, not the i3). One of the reasons is maintenance, the EV still needs some, but much less than an ICE.
I'm about to change the transmission fluid in my i3.
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 heard that the i3 has some horror stories if you got the hybrid (basically a diesel engine that can produce electricity to charge your battery) or your battery had issues out of warranty. Not really sure though, everyone I've met who owns one really likes it still in 2025.
I found the hard way that nowadays manufacturer's authorised (branded) service centres optimise for making you get rid of the car. For instance, I had something wrong with the car, they kept gaslighting me that the car is absolutely within specs and drive exactly how it should. Next appointment they admitted that maybe something indeed is wrong, but probably not. After complaint they said the car is faulty but it will be very very expensive to repair and maybe I should consider buying a new one. They they offered me part exchange for one of their approved used models framing it as a gesture of good will and that it will be cheaper than the repair. Unbelievable.
Porsche had a research program about a very reliable car in the 70s. It has some odd technical choices from today's perspective. https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/when-porsch...
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.
I don't think it's a coincidence that an enormous number of rideshare/delivery drivers drive priuses though. Reliable, not too expensive, low maintenance, and high mpg is kind of exactly what you'd expect them to look for.
Not enough people know how cool the Prius hybrid system is. One would think having EV + gas would add complexity, but it actually allows them to delete a lot of parts. There is no clutch, no belts, no starter, there's practically nothing that can break. Not knowing how the regen affects braking I brought my Prius in for 80k service and asked for new brake pads and mechanic asked me why I want to replace them, they look good as new.
Only downside is the flimsy high efficiency tires, I've spent more money on tows and tires than I saved on gas.
Isn't there even less in a proper BEV? You lose the benefit of being able to pay the gas tax though.
You also lose the ability to pull over virtually anywhere and refill your tank in five minutes, as well as the maintenance benefits that come from a decades-old design versus whatever software horrors are lurking in your car.
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.
> To top that all off, in parts of CA electricity is now 50c/kWh
It's trending up to $0.90-1.00/kWh in places now.
The only slight pain in those priuses is removing the windshield wiper assembly to get to the spark plugs closest to the firewall. It's not like they didn't have enough room in the engine bay to the left to better engineer this. But it's something that you rarely have to do. Maybe 2-3 times for the life of the car if it reaches 300k+ miles.
Engineers hate mechanics. How can they feel your wrath unless you specifically design a giant “fuck you” into every vehicle shipped?
Not to mention still roomy!
> 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..."
I have a 2009 Civic that has no noticeable body rust, despite being in Michigan. Two times I've had to get minor body work done (not rust-related), the bodyshop owner commented that he never sees them this clean anymore. I chalk it up to being diligent with car washes, especially in the winter. Purists will cringe at this, but I'm fine with sacrificing some surface appearance (the paint doesn't look too bad, considering how many carwashes it's seen) in exchange for longevity.
Which part of Michigan are you in? I know some people that live up in northern Michigan where they don't bother salting the roads in the winter and just put down sand instead which I would imagine contributes to better longevity
I'm in Grand Rapids. We use tons of salt here.
I live up North (capital N) from you, where we have ~4 months of calcium spread on our roads to manage the accumulating ice every winter. A well-maintained car has the chance to live long enough to succumb to rust from that.
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.
Just look at what's on the road today, there are many more older cars still running than in the past. Even in the salt belt.
Galvanised bodyshells and panels has been a thing since the 80s, or indeed the 70s for Volvo and Saab.
> 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.
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.
It's not just BMW, it's basically all car manufacturers. There are several car maintenance YouTubers who complain about it for many brands. For example "The Car Care Nut" complains about Toyotas being badly designed for maintenance, questionable material choices, etc..
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.
I watch "The Car Care Nut" sometimes, as I've got a Toyota. Nothing I've ever seen there would lead me to put Toyota into the same maintenance cost/difficulty category as BMW or Mercedes.
Consumer Reports puts them at almost opposite ends of the spectrum, as well.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cos...
I've owned a few Mercedes and didn't find them really more difficult to work on than other cars of similar age I've owned. I haven't owned any that are really new, so that may have changed. I haven't owned any BMWs but their reputation for being difficult to work on and overengineered goes back decades.
There was an era where Mercedes were insanely easy to work on, with the detail you’d expect from unleashed German engineers.
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...
BMW uses bolts that require people to buy a special set of drivers to work on them, don’t they? Like giant inverted torx bolts.
External Torx. They're not so unusual. Even General Motors has used those in some places for eons -- I still have the set of them I bought at Autozone to replace the brakes on a Saturn a couple of decades ago.
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.
Anyone can build a car that will never fall apart. It takes a great deal of engineering to build a car that just barely doesn't fall apart.
BMW has been the worst of the worst for a long time though. [0] is a representative example, but pretty much any "car brands ordered by upkeep cost" list will have BMW out on their own planet.
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...
It was practically a stereotype that all of the young male H1Bs had a BMW desktop background on their work computer. I knew one guy who practically bankrupted himself by buying one the moment he thought he could afford it. The mandatory insurance got him. And then we found out he’s a terrible driver. Thing was in the shop all the time.
To be fair the "The Car Care Nut" while clearly very knowledgeable and extremely good at his job, all he does is complain in his videos.
Edit: but at the end of the day all his own cars are Toyota/Lexus
What you're describing is the stereotype for "rich west europe" engineering culture.
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.
Here is an American example, Fox suspensions. Fox is one of the main producers of bicycle suspensions. Great products, but check their service intervals for a fork [0], 125 hours.
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...
That service interval is pretty common across all bike suspension forks (and dropper posts are usually only around 50 hours).
A SR Suntour fork has a 100 hour maintenance interval, for example.
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/3730626/Sr-Suntour-Durolux...
Ask a car guy and they’ll tell you that German car makers have been known to be be maintenance money sinks for 40 years.
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.
They also did a lot of pioneering work in DSG transmissions. I bought a Jetta when they finally moved it to VW from Audi. Great transmission and saved me a lot on brake jobs. Their DSG tune automatically engine brakes when you feather the brake pedal.
> 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.
I'm sure the money you saved on brake jobs was more than eaten up by the DSG service intervals. The interval on my Jetta Sportwagen Diesel with DSG was 40,000 miles. That required special hardware (tools and dongles, IIRC) and software if I wanted to do it myself.
My vehicle before that was the Accord that had the shit transmission that bailed out reliably at 110k miles, so I’m sure I barely noticed. My Accord shat itself at 100,300 miles, in the mountains. Luckily it was noon, a warm day, and I had cell service.
> But have you ever tried to make something you built to easy to maintain?
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.
Ford seems to regularly re-design some sometimes-major part of their vehicles every model year, for better or worse. Some model years are banger and others are just a failed experiment, but you do get newer advancements.
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.
> reuse parts down to the ancillary components of a vehicle, from the battery packs to the heat pumps and motors inside the car seats
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-byd-jon-mcneill-chines...
BMWs at least up to the mid-2000s are really cheap and easy to maintain. Parts are pennies, service documentation is readily available, and they're reliable enough that they last a long time with basic maintenance.
Compared to stuff like Toyotas or Hondas, they practically cost nothing to keep on the road.
> Compared to stuff like Toyotas or Hondas
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.
You must live somewhere absolutely bone dry where it never gets cold enough to salt the road.
We were putting Toyota Hiluxes back to the leasing company at three years and they were going straight in the crusher.
Eh, I had one from the early aughts and it was pretty expensive to maintain. Simple things that have never broken on other cars I've owned, like the passenger side door lock, broke in my BMW. Headlight issues were expensive, and anything that required official parts was at least 3x as much as a Honda/Toyota/etc. repair.
Some bits can be kind of expensive unless you know a good BMW indy. The nice thing about the older ones - particularly from like maybe E30 to E39 models - is there's a lot of "hacker culture" around them and it's easy to find someone who knows the Easy Way To Do It.
> 9 things have to happen in sequence
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.
Management only cares about analyzing and completing the 'happy path' because customers only buy 'happy path'. Customers don't (with rare exceptions) buy 'unhappy path', even though statistically it is a near certainty that where they will find themselves at some point.
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.
>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 $7.
If the car has 10 places where the manufacturer saves 2 dollars, that is 20 dollars a car. At around 2.5 Million cars shipped each year that is 50 Million Euros each year profit for BMW.
The entire car industry is extremely cost sensitive, especially right now, with so much global competition and little consolidation.
The issue also isn't that the part is cost optimized. The issue is that it fails.
A car (especially ICE but even EVs) consists of tens of thousands of components. People like to point at things in cars and say "why did they save five cents there? And 10 cents here?", and the simple reason is if you bump all these components up one "quality level", if you will, that's thousands of bucks just in material costs. The twenty dollars of per-car savings are not profit, they're unit cost savings, which will contribute to profit, but also price. And margins in the car industry are rather tight, buyers are cost sensitive, it's not an industry where you save 10$ on parts and are able to pocket that, I don't think.
€4000 euros plus tax to replace the module that contains the fuse. Insane.
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.
Is it insane? I'm working in this field, and I know how quickly you can come up with such a number if you are BMW and you are deathly afraid that someone will get electrocuted while working on your car, driving it or rescuing someone in a crash. It's a safety and liability issue, where they go to great lengths to actually re-certify a battery after crash. The whole thing is setup so, that even the dummy electricians in an average BMW shop can safely certify that this battery is still safe. It's a lot easier to kill yourself (or someone else) when working on a EV Battery than wet belt. Also a lot harder to repair said battery than wet belt. And that goes for all EVs and manufacturers that actually care about people (Tesla, demonstrably does not).
Yes, it is insane. It's a fuse. They must have some stats on how often those things need replacing and it should have been accessible. The customer has - when they buy the car - absolutely no way of knowing what kind of surprises like this there are hidden in the vehicle and besides, it kills the second hand market so you can only trade your vehicle to a BMW dealership where they can absorb those costs for a fraction of what it will cost an end user. BMW is a crap brand in spite of their reputation, we've had one leased Mini in our company and it is the very last time we do business with BMW, that thing was more in the shop than out of it with electrical issues. A friend had pretty much every BMW ever made since he got wealthy enough to afford them (car enthusiast) and his experience is much the same, but he keeps buying them.
They have no stats because the entire platform is new and different. I would guess they have a very poor prediction model.
It’s not a fuse. It’s a fuse plus guarantee plus liability.
> It’s a fuse plus guarantee plus liability.
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.
They'll refuse warranty on the XDrive if you don't use approved brand and model of tyres so... my bet is on them wanting to extort all the precious money they can from their poor customers
They'll refuse warranty if the difference between thread is too much between front and back as that causes wear of the clutches. Just like you should have the same tire on the same axle.
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'm sure it depends on market, but I also know 100% that if they will certify the battery as safe, and then you get electrocuted when entering your car because the battery was not safe - they will be on the hook, in all developed markets. No one else, that cares about people safety, do the same thing for under $100. Even Tesla, that almost completely disregards any safety - be it "Full Self Driving" or "let's just change this, without checking if the battery is actually safe", does not do it under $100.
Do you realise how difficult it is to get "electrocuted" in a battery powered vehicle ? I suggest you document yourself on the matter.
The only real issue in reality is thermal runaway
Yeah, what is the max voltage of these batteries?
Depends on the brand and the model, there is a trend towards higher voltages because that implies lower currents and wiring is heavy and expensive.
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.
Yikes, that sounds dangerous.
I'd personally prefer e.g. 48V even if that meant some more losses and/or thicker cables.
> Yikes, that sounds dangerous.
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.
Running an EV off 48V would lead to a heavily, heavily compromised vehicle. There just aren’t components that can handle 5-10kA of current with a reasonable size.
What parts of the car need that amount of current?
Are you talking about the charging circuitry?
What are the requirements for the motor(s)?
Both as you mentioned. Charge circuitry for DCFC can be >200kW.
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.
Charging speed is directly related to the voltage of the pack. Even if your own vehicle had arm-thick cables to support high speed charging at 48v there is no quick charger in the world that could support it. You would be stuck in the bad old days of needing hours to recharge the battery on your EV.
No it's not, only in a practical sense. If you truly had 'arm thick cables', you could definitely charge a 48V battery just as fast. Practically speaking, though, you don't do this because every becomes so unmanageable that you can't build a charger, bus bars, etc, that would be able to match the charging speed.
The problem isn't the cables in your car, it is the cable between the DC fast charger's transformer and your car. They are already thermally limited, which is why you need higher voltages to support faster charging.
Like I said, this assumes you use ridiculous cabling and bus bars. You could design something that handles this, it would just be wildly impractically large and cost way too much money.
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.
I wouldn't see why not. A battery is internally a series-connection of lower voltage batteries.
What are you talking about? Yes I know how quickly I can get electrocuted when the battery pack is open. I just need to touch two exposed busbars ~30cm apart. Or my tool needs to touch them.
Exactly, you need to touch both plus and minus. You moved the goalpost from getting electrocuted driving your car due to shoddy quality remanufacturing of battery, to getting electrocuted while repairing the high voltage side of your vehicle. Remanufacturing quality does not come into play if you decide to touch plus and minus side of a HV battery.
Sorry I have no idea about this goalpost moving, maybe it's a language barrier. I'm just saying working on it is quite dangerous. But you can easily get electrocuted by shoddy remanufacturing (especially if someone drilled into the battery to replace a single cell - as EV Clinic shows in their videos), that's why there are additional safeties with regards to bad isolation. So I stand by both takes.
I disagree with your other takes in this thread, but you are 100% right here. This is dangerous stuff that needs to be treated with respect.
I don't think it should be locked away to just the MFG, but it does need to be respected.
They mention in the article that replacing the same fuse on a Tesla cost €11.
Given that I've tried to hold BMW to their warranty and was shafted I would not bet on that.
There's a difference between BMW ignoring their warranty and who gets found liable during the wrongful death lawsuit after the mechanic gets electrocuted due to poor/unsafe EV design.
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.
> It’s a fuse plus guarantee plus liability.
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.
Yes, as changing a tire is completely the same tool-and-knowledge level than repairing a EV Battery.
If you would see how EV Clinic "repairs" Tesla batteries, you would not say they have any concern for liability.
> Yes, as changing a tire is completely the same tool-and-knowledge level than repairing a EV Battery.
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...
> 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.
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.
Improperly installed wheels that have fallen off of vehicles in motion have killed not only the occupants of the vehicle but pedestrians and other motorists (especially motorcyclists) in the past. We also allow people to fill vehicles with highly combustible fluids with little to no oversight, which has caused fires and deaths.
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.
Fuses are not items that should be replaced normally - they are self-destroying emergency protections for the electrical system.
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.
I think the people that replace fuses are aware of the potential issues around them. The article - which I'm sure you've read so don't take this as commentary on your comment - details that in other electric vehicles, for instance Tesla this is handled quite differently:
"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.
This fuse blows because a crash was detected and it is to protect the people inside the car and rescuers. The article argument is that it can blow even for small crashes where no damage to the battery occurs but rehabilitating the vehicle still incurs an outrageous cost. This is not a simple over current protection fuse.
$1000 for the module with the fuse seems ok to me. Another $3000 to link the module to the vehicle is the outrageous part.
They are not only linking it to the vehicle, they are doing a LOT of other checks on the battery - that it's not damaged in non-obvious ways. For that you need trained people (it's really high voltage and amperage stuff), tooling AND you really need to be sure you guarantee everything is OK.
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.
> Fuses are not items that should be replaced normally - they are self-destroying emergency protections for the electrical system.
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.
That is literally exactly what I’m saying.
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.
Ladies and gentlemen - behold the perfect consumer
The article gave examples for why the fuse blows - it falsely thinks the vehicle was in an accident and trips. Hitting a pothole or a rabbit.
It is unlikely to blow again under normal use.
Then why name it a goddamn fuse then?
Yep, might be there was a known issue that was addressed, at which put in a new one. But just replacing a fuse (or, simultaneously worse and better, just resetting a breaker) without further investigation is just kicking a very spicy can down the road.
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.
Fuses are necessary on any electrical system, and especially in a car, which is an electrical shitshow (floating ground, high-voltage and high-frequency interference), fuses blow all the time. Granted, usually on a well-maintained and new car it happens very rarely, but saying that it's a catastrophic and concerning event is dumb.
This is a pyrofuse, it does not blow with overcurrent as regular fuse, but blows in the same way airbags blow - when detecting a crash. We can debate if they blow too quick, but if you are designing this system - where and truly lives can be in danger, you would probably err on the side of caution too.
The problem is not that the pyrofuse blows. Safer to be paranoid when it's the the battery pack. The insanity is what it takes to replace it, including throwing away perfectly good parts because of the anti-theft protections.
Pyrofuse will definitely blow on overcurrent.
Usually not by itself though, and if it does that makes it a hybrid fuse, one that has both a pyrotechnical disconnector and a thermal/overcurrent one.
What sort of cars do you drive?
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.
I'll grant you that, I had a lot of beaters. A typical thing was that a lock solenoid pulled too much current in cold weather and consistently blew the central locking fuse.
If you and BMW are correct - if we take it for a fact that a simple fender-bender can make batteries develop life-threatening faults, which absolutely require a 4k euro inspection that involves complete disassembly and specialist equipment, then that means that EVs are unsuitable for public use.
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.
No, from my experience, a simple fender-bender does not cause this.
Yeah, that's OP's point then, that a fender bender causing this is an overreaction from BMW
We don't have the full picture. Like I mentioned too many times in this thread, I know EV Clinic head boss Vanja likes to overreact and twists stuff to fit into his narrative. Not saying this one was not a fender bender, but I take all his stuff with a grain of salt. Mostly because I worked with him AND work on the same stuff he does - and it usually doesen't match up to what I'm seeing to the degree he 'dramaticizes'.
In the article, it was mentioned that the issue can be caused by hitting the curb, there's a guy in the comments who says his VW grenaded itself this exact way just while charging (luckily his car was in warranty).
Many people drive older cars worth less than £4000.
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.
My current car is my last. It's a 1997 and it runs pretty much as good as new and I expect the thing to outlive me.
Depends on the parts situation. As someone who works on my own cars I've become increasingly distressed at the car parts industry. Even OEM parts, when they are still available, seem to have had a dramatic decrease in quality over the past couple of decades. This is even assuming the correct part is shipped in the first place, which is another problem that has become entirely too common, especially in an age where everything is computerized. So many times you get a box with the correct part number on the outside but the wrong part inside.
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.
Plastics. Those are the hard to source bits. Plastic doesn't stay plastic for ever and NOS can be dried out just as much as the bits that are in the car.
Most other things are easy to source, and anything made of steel can be fixed (zero rust, so far).
1997 car with no rust? I'm guessing you don't live in an area that knows snow.
Yeah - a car hits a similar valuation around ~15 years of age, meaning a failure of this component limits the financially viable lifespan of a car to this amount - mechanics do engine rebuilds for less money.
ICE bans are going to cause the value of old cars to skyrocket
I also work in this field, and I feel manufacturers like to exaggerate the dangers as a liability umbrella, aside of disassembling the battery itself it’s very hard to even access the HV components in a dangerous way, every HV connector has an interlocking line that opens the battery internal contactor so other than hacking the HV line with a saw I don’t see how you could “touch” the live wires.
Yes, it's insane. People working in the field have their perception warped by what they see around them.
I mean, I don't think my perception is warped by what I see. But by "am I willing to risk that my repair will kill someone, because they wanted cheaper repair"? Or even if not kill, maybe just burn down their car (+ house,...). "Am I willing to use cheap tools, not rated for 800V (or 400V) god knows how many Amps?". Because this is not software development - you can be killed REALLY quickly working on a HV EV battery pack. It's no joke. For sure it'll cost more than working on a regular car, where there is danger, but a lot less. And that's just the basic thinking, without going deeper into why its more expensive to repair stuff like this.
The article and comment aren't debating whether the fuse plays an essential role. There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error.
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.
> There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error.
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.
It's like the manufacturer discovering to their complete surprise they are building a car. :-D
> BMW refuses to provide training access for ISTA usage
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?
I likely did not communicate clearly enough: it is tricky because of organizational reasons, not technical. There are many trade-offs that have to be made and it involves different business units with their own targets and incentives.
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.
Thanks for your comment. It looks to me that most of the people who work in engineering area express some form of understanding or give the benefit of the doubt to the situation while people from outside the field borderline call for malice in the side of BMW.
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).
You seem to be ignoring the fact that the battery pack status after a crash is essentially unknown. It should go through a thorough and competently conducted safety inspection or it may kill someone in the future. Of course, this doesn't excuse extra red tape tacked into the procedure, but the core idea of an inspection is just unavoidable.
> Of course, this doesn't excuse extra red tape tacked into the procedure
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.
I won't go into details about 'training access for ISTA usage' - cause I don't know what exactly Vanja means by this - but generally speaking in EU BMW provides the easiest access from all OEMs for aftermarket repair. Everyone has to provide it by law, but BMW has the most straightforward way of registering/paying/using it. For sure not ideal, but far from really being problematic IMHO.
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
My experience with many German mechanical and electrical engineers is that they have a tendency to think of software like a magical cheap and malleable part on a BOM that can make their arbitrary design work. Especially the mechanical engineers like a nice little black box that they screw on and wire into their machine to make it go brrr once they turn it on.
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.
You, you are the problem.
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.
I am a problem, but on the other spectrum - OEMs ain't getting the repair €€€ because people like me repair stuff (but a different approach than Vanja).
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.
> So far my favourite brand to work on has been Mazda, the engineering is very thoughtfully done with consideration for repairs
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.
> more repairability scores
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.
I traded from Mazda to Merc. There's definitely big difference in cost to repair and probably difficulty.
Talk to car guys who are into ~2000s era or before cars. They usually have pretty solid recommendations.
Most people need a recommendation for something more current, from people who work on these modern cars daily. The reputation of 25+ year old models can be misleading.
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.
If you're in Europe, you can consider Dacia. A lot of their stuff is old Renault parts that they've bought a license to use/manufacture. Get a pre-2023 model with the 1.6 non-turbo non-hybrid petrol engine - it's actually a Nissan HR16DE, which has been in use since 2004. Very reliable and low complexity.
Is it using that Nissan/Renault CVT? That transmission is notorious junk.
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.
You can get them with a manual transmission, or a dual-clutch automatic, or CVT. AFAIK, the manuals are all decent, although the 6 speed manual on the 4WD models has quite low ratios (no transfer case) so it doesn't have great fuel economy at highway speeds.
Makes sense. In their home market, Romania, highway speed hardly ever exceeds 90 kph.
And parts are ridiculously cheap and widely junkyard-available.
At least over here where we have mandatory inspections you can find statistics on percentage of cars which fail the inspections, broken down by brand and model. Toyota seems to consistently place in the top.
Those sorts of comparisons are highly misleading because the overwhelming majority of failures for any inspection program are simple stuff that doesn't affect the operation of the vehicle in the base case. Light out, bald tires, brakes below replacement threshold, windshield crack, minor exhaust leak, etc. So what you wind up measuring by proxy is the owner behavior, since that's the dominant factor in how proactively those sorts of things get addressed.
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.
That's very interesting. I could argue that you are reading the signal wrong here. You want to go for the car that has the most failures in some cases, since it has survived long enough to fail in minor ways that leave it still able to drive.
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.
> Most people need a recommendation for something more current
Bless them, I would rather buy 10 shitboxes than one modern car (and that cost is about the same).
I’d rather not die in a very survivable crash.
Pretty much every major safety feature is an order of magnitude less meaningful than the last.
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.
At the very least, modern cars are much heavier and ultimately mass wins. For example, a 2005 Honda CRV weights 3400 lbs while a 2025 is 3900 lbs.
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!
I wouldn't buy a car without ESC, that's just batshit crazy, esp. if you live where there's a chance of icy roads.
Heck, even vanilla ABS wasn't required in the US market until 2012.
Crash safety has become grossly exagerrated because the standards have been sharply rising last few years. Most 15yo cars will keep you safe just fine in a median crash.
A 15 year old car currently is going for 5 figures - not a shitbox. Not unless it’s a shelll of rust held together by bondo. Then your crash standards or whatever year are meaningless as the chassis may have 25% or less of its design strength.
Sorry for asking, are you in the USA? That might explain the 5 figures thing.
> A 15 year old car currently is going for 5 figures
some are, sure - but most aren’t. Plenty of well maintained clean 2010 model cars on marketplace and Craigslist for well under 10k.
> 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
Toyota hybrid powertrains are more reliable than any other company, but other than that they are no longer special.
>i've done the wet belt
All that to say that a wet belt should not even be used in the first place.
I've got a '91 Toyota Carina and can attest that it's very easy to work on, my friend and I pulled the engine and gearbox in under two hours with hand tools, but I can't really speak for anything modern.
As a lifelong Toyota fan, I agree they are miserable to work on, especially the electronics. I have a stoplight switch issue in my 86 (from being rear-ended) that I have neglected because it would require pulling out the trunk assembly to fix.
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.
> As a lifelong Toyota fan, I agree they are miserable to work on, especially the electronics.
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?
The headlights are a sore point for me as well. I have to remove the entire front bumper piece to replace them on the 86.
Who thought that was appropriate?
I occasionally like to see what the highest mileage Toyota Prius I can find for sale is. They are obviously used as taxis and it's common to find one for sale with half a million miles.
Usually at that point someone puts in a new hybrid battery and sells it to someone else starting out driving Ubers.
They reach a million miles because they're taxis, not in spite of it.
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.
I don't know if this is applicable to hybrids, but taxis attain high mileage with relatively few engine cold starts. Engine cold starts are what kills main and conrod bearings and piston walls. Taxis' bodies may be beat to garbage, the interior might be trash, but the engine and likely the transmission too will be representative of a vehicle with an order of magnitude less kilometers driven. Because they go an order of magnitude further between cold engine starts.
All this assumes proper maintenance, especially oil changes.
Oh yes, the Prius gets even better lifetime because the hardest strain on the engine components is completely negated by the electric motor. If I ever ditch the little mini sports car, I will most likely replace it with another Prius.
In fairness most cars get taken for scrap with an engine which starts and runs. Even when they are running a bit rough it's more often fueling and ignition components than a mechanical problem with the engine components.
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.
>Tesla is remarkably well done. Simplicity is under rated.
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.
I am affacted by this as well: the rear knuckle uniball bearing was broken after 3 years (Achsschenkel). Many MY here in Europe have this issue, due to bad parts or too hard suspension.
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.
> Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten br[e]ak[e]s - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking instead of the real br[e]ak[e]s.
That's something that they should have taken into consideration when designing the car.
It is not a big deal. Just burnish it once every few months when it makes high pitched sound during low speed braking. https://service.tesla.com/docs/Public/diy/model3/en_us/GUID-...
> that all the other brands have a mandatory inspection from the manufacturer before the cars will be tested by the independent check.
I'm in Europe. Never heard of mandatory inspection before independent checks. How would that even work, or be enforced.
Service intervals. Other OEMs will prompt a service interval at X thousand miles/km to go pop in and have it looked at by a dealer, probably swap out your cabin air filter, upsell you on some new wiper blades, etc.
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).
I think the break rusting issue can be fixed in software.
>Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten breaks - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking
Huh? Every EV uses recuperative braking, how is this special to Tesla?
The Teslas have far stronger regen than other brands. Have you ever wondered why Tesla's Long Range models have 500 horsepower? It's not for increased acceleration power, it's for increased braking power. Far less energy is wasted on the friction brakes in a Tesla.
> Huh? Every EV uses recuperative braking, how is this special to Tesla?
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.
German TUV thinks Teslas are horrible because apparently nobody is servicing their brakes on a regular enough interval so every time Teslas get pulled in for their 2 year inspections after 3 years of ownership they keep failing out on brakes and suspension, but VWs are the pinnacle of perfection because they slam 10K service intervals in your face.
(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.)
I'm at 125000 on my Long Range Model 3. I plugged a tire last month and photographed brake caliper - like new. I could not believe it. I can upload a photo if you'd like.
.... I also didn't add the rest of my environmental conditions like the fact I'm in an absolute rust belt in the winter.
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...
I am no Tesla fanboy. But let’s face the truth. Teslas leave factory with end of line check. Then they are driven more than average cars for 3 years without any maintenance. Then go for check. And surprise surprise, the first model Ys were not well made. I bet with 1000-1500€ maintenance cost over these 3 years the TUV result would be dramatically different.
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.
Not just BMW. I've been watching (and enjoying) Mat Armstrong's youtube videos where he restores crash damaged luxury cars, one of them was a Lamborghini Revuelo. The car's battery was completely intact, but the safety fuse blew up in the BMS and despite replacing the entire module, the car wouldn't talk to the battery and wouldn't even start. Eventually he had to buy an entire 30K battery, and even then, the car wouldn't start because the car was so new Lamborghini themselves still didn't have the diagnostics tool to clear the crash code.
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.
Interestingly I’ve seen YouTubers replace the fuse in a Tesla for about £40 and a few hours of labour (it’s under the rear seats). Maybe something they’re doing right.
You can replace the fuse (not that easly) but for approximately the same price in a BMW. You do have to put in more work but the problem is with re-certifying the battery. Tesla does not care if the battery was damaged in the crash, they will (more or less) happily re-enable it. BMW decided that the only safe way is to re-certify the whole battery. I'm not saying it's the right decision, I think they over did it and VW does it better - but I do understand WHY they chose to do it so, and the WHY is not nearly as outrageous as a lot of people here think.
> they will (more or less) happily re-enable it.
That's one more car they will happily milk for a subscription. Also, safety laws in the US are way more lax than Europe.
Tesla is the DIY's EV enthusiast car for a reason.
Yes mostly propaganda and being first/having a big driving base. They are notoriously closed/locked down from the diagnostic/reprogramming perspective.
What car isn't these days?
> BMW has over-engineered the
They have over-engineered the everything, because that is what BMW does. That is what they have been about for the last thirty years.
After reading the blog post I had the same thought. Doing an oil change on my F650GS motorcycle required removing the plastics, draining the oil from both the top and bottom of the motorcycle, removing a plate on the side of the engine after install the BMW specified oil redirection funnel, extracting the filter and reinstalling. The oil funnel had a legit BMW part number. Most of us either just made a mess or used a piece of a milk jug. Probably 15 fasteners and 2 drain plugs.
Comparable process on my Sv650: drain plug out. Drain plug in. Screw off filter. Screw on filter. Fill.
It's basically the plot of the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Back then they should just let the oil go on the side of road. No need to capture it
That reminds me of the Popular Science garage hint from 1963, explaining how to easily dispose of used motor oil: Dig a hole in the ground and fill it with fine gravel. Pour in the oil, and it will be absorbed into the ground before your next oil change.
https://books.google.com/books?id=myADAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA166#v=on...
Different times indeed.
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.
People were doing it, at least make sure they do a good job.
You can also see in the video how much clearer the water was then. Very sad.
> install the BMW specified oil redirection funnel
I assumed this was satire. It is not. :|
Not too bad though all things considered, there are worse examples out there, like my old KTM adventure bike. Interestinlgy, the BMW R1200/1250/1300GS is actually simpler due to the boxer engine design.
The proper BMW oil change procedure is to remove the engine and flip it upside down.
You win some, you lose some. Comparable process on my E46 and E39: Drain plug out (potentially flipping a little dust cover out of the way). Drain plug in. Stand up because everything else happens up top. Unscrew filter housing. Replace filter element. Replace filter housing. Fill.
E90 is the same but you’re supposed to loosen the filter because otherwise some vacuum holds in an extra 0.5L of oil.
I like the top mount oil filters, less mess.
Hello, fellow E39 owner. Mine is my first BMW, and for all I hear about over-engineering from them, this has been a pretty straightforward car to work on. As "complicated" as the suspension is, for example, it was pretty simple to replace everything. I suppose that reputation has been earned from their more modern cars.
Wait until you see a picture of a clutch replacement on an R1200... this should probably have a NSFW tag attached: https://www.reddit.com/r/motorcycle/comments/1he20rk/r_1200_...
Oh, my god.
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.
Thanks for curing me of my desire to get one of these.
You're welcome.
I won't argue with non EV engineering, but high voltage stuff in an EV is a lot harder problem to make safe in event of a crash and subsequent repair. I come out as a BMW apologist, but Vanja (evclinic Head boss) likes to be overly dramatic. BMW (and almost all other brands) are very afraid that someone will die when repairing/driving/rescuing someone from an EV and they go to great (and expensive) lengths to make sure the battery and the vehicle is as safe as possible. The fuse here is a small part, checks and certifications that go into making the battery truly safe (in scale, all edge cases ect) are a lot more than just the fuse. And that is expensive.
Thanks for pointing that out - at first I thought this was an act designed to turn cheap repairs impossible to drive new car sales, and force people into BMWs hugely expensive service network, but after learning this is for my own good, I'm relieved and happy to learn BMW is looking out for me.
evclinic overly relies on drama for their content
I worked with Vanja before EVs were mass produced, he is very driven and smart, but also eccentric. With his previous experience with Mercedes Electric repair he figured out that, sooner or later repair/knowledge/tools will get commoditized, so push at the start and try to get a big foothold/mindshare before this happens. Very few people actually have the knowledge to judge your work early on, so you can get very far if you are intentionally promoting yourself and behaving very confident.
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.
Exactly, these are intentional decisions for German cars. They’re gorgeous, over-engineered, cutting edge pieces of machinery and the expense of being practical or repairable. The common understanding for decades has been if you’re buying a German luxury car as a daily driver and repair costs are something you even have to consider, you’re buying the wrong car.
Old BMW is nothing like new BMW - I know a few older folks who drive 20+year old BMWs and Audis with 500k+ km they drove off the salon parking lot - not because they can't afford a new one, but they like the current ones.
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.
It was not always so. The E30 I used to drive - a 1986 model 325 - was a marvelous little thing, not only a joy to drive but a pleasure to work on. Its engineers had been just as thoughtful about its maintenance as its operation.
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 have not over-engineered anything in this case - they have deliberately taken user-hostile actions, going out of the way to prevent repair, and turn cheap repairs into very expensive ones.
- 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.
It's also how they got a lot of things very early in the game like radars. They had adaptive cruise control in 1999 (similar to Mercedes).
Yet somehow adaptive cruise is a rarity on the BMWs out there, often requiring an option package that few dealers spec. (Though I think this may be finally starting to change with the 2025 model year).
That's just because literally everything is an optional add-on on a BMW.
So many BMWs out there on the road without the indicators package because the owner cheaped out when buying it.
I didn't even know that was an option, never seen one that had it fitted.
My understanding is that the hardware is always installed but the dealer will not fill the liquid reservoirs unless the customer specifically requests (and pays) for it.
These days it's a software unlock.
Sadly, they’re close to 100% caught up to automatic transmissions in North America.
Are you advocating for manual transmissions?
In european cars for sure. They don'tilike autos there so they are an afterthought.
though it also means nobody will steal my truck in the us as who can drive it?
Are they switching to monthly subscriptions?
I think it's a German thing to be honest. I've wrenched on Mercedes Benz and VW personally, and I've heard horror stories from Audi as well.
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!
Hard to maintain systems, whether it's hardware or software, are underengineered if anything.
I love this take. Thanks for sharing it. Puts into words why sometimes I can spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve a system: trying to save future effort.
People get upset when a BMW is expensive to repair, but they're misunderstanding the sophisticated German engineering. You're not supposed to repair it. You're supposed to throw it away and buy a new one.
In Germany BMW's target market are company cars. Having the company pay for your car has tax benefits here even if you also use it outside work, so the company giving you a nice car that gets replaced by a new model every three years is a sought-after benefit. Those cars are indeed sold to the next idiot before they develop any issues
/s or /$ What's the best tag for your post?
I missed the memo when putting everything together on one impossible to repair PCB and then gluing/sealing it permanently became 'sophisticated German engineering' instead of bottom-shelf junk.
The sophisticated engineering works (or worked?) mostly fine if the piece of machinery is operated in the extremely narrow "just right" operating ranges the sophisticated engineer defined. To much dust in the air? One too many potholes? Not the premium brand oil? There goes your sophisticated machinery.
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.
I have a BMW G20 3-series. So far I've counted 31 electric motors in the car for various things. I keep discovering more.
I don't know how "German engineering" became a badge of honor. Probably from the people who continually roll new leases every 2 years.
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.
Germans are also famous for how hard they work, working a grueling 1350 hours per year, compared to freeloading lazy Greeks, who merely work 2000.
That's not even 26h /week. All this stat show is that there are probably more jobs in Germany. Need more data to draw any conclusions.
Not according to eurostat:
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
thanks. very interesting links. overall it seems the job market in europe keeps improving.
It’s about productivity, not about the raw amount of hours.
Germany has a stagnant economy, on the edge of shrinking. It's projected to only have 0.2% growth this year.
I remember on reddit this was pointed under some article once, and there was a consensus about how West Europeans are just more productive.
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.
Nowadays, when I hear "German Engineering", I internally translate it to "German love of complexity and bespoke/manual manufacturing".
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.
>>Probably from the people who continually roll new leases every 2 years.
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.
This reminded me of the video about the Tesla door handles, where its explained how they redesigned the retracting door handles of the Model S from having a bunch of switches and mechanical parts to just a motor + a position sensor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bea4FS-zDzc
BMW always had a reputation for frequent & expensive repairs, even as far back as the 1970s (although I guess "typical" BMW drivers aren't the most careful either, so maybe that's also relevant...).
Everything is branded for what it is not. Quality Inns, etc...
The article misses to explain why this is an EU problem, not just a BMW problem. Is the problem described caused by a specific EU regulation (which?) or is mentioning the EU just click bait? (Honest question.)
It is a BMW problem and the rest is clickbait. If you own a BMW you know all this as it has been the case for over decades.
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.
UN Regulation No. 155, and 156, and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) are requiring car manufacturers to implement cryptographic validation that allows only authorized software from the manufacturer to be run.
What I meant more is that you need more and more specialized tools (according to the manufacturers). My previous ford needed a special (expensive!) bracket to keep the drivetrain in place if you want to do anything on the engine which makes home service less likely.
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.
This is just signing, nothing cutting edge. Verification of signatures is a fairly old tech. What is the exact problem here? Is it that manufacturers do not publish the signed binaries or is it that you want to run something on your car compiled by you?
Authorized software means authorized for that car's VIN number. Basically it's the same issue with parts in Apple products that are serial number locked.
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.
You're going to have to explain dragging the UN in here.
This 2022 BMW X1 my wife drives is the last BMW we will ever own. £395 for an oil change. £180 for brake fluid. £500 a year road tax.
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.
>actually has a larger cargo capacity than the X1
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.
They don't come with all the downsides. They externalise the reduced forward visibility for people behind you, the headlights spinning onto other users' cabins, the running over of toddlers, and, my favourite, the driving in the middle of the road rather than risk getting mud on their fucking tyres
No tax rate is too high. Rebates for agricultural workers maybe.
In our defence we didn’t buy the car, it was inherited. I’d have sold the thing the day it arrived if it was mine.
Hmm... I never bought a BMW, certainly because I am poor, but also because everyone around me who drives a luxury car keeps telling me how expensive yet unreliable everything is, while everyone who drives a Toyota and Honda almost never talks about their car. I took the hint and have been doing what is financially responsible.
Sounds like you're getting it serviced by a BMW dealership? I take my PHEV 3-series to a local independent mechanic, and the entire cost is usually less than you're paying for oil alone. Also, because it's a hybrid, the road tax rate is very advantageous.
Lol no way do BMW owners commonly know this. Most buy the car because it says BMW on it and they think that means quality.
I was more or less pointing to the expensive repairs needed in BMW as in you know it's locked down and you need expensive OEM stuff. Maybe that is covered under "quality is expensive" for normal people but when you buy a BMW you know the replacement parts bill is costing you an arm and a leg.
Yeah but they will wrongly justify for themselves that because BMW is quality, the repairs will not be so frequent.
What they mean by the EU-bashing is two things:
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-...
It's clickbait, but at the very least it's not LLM slop, considering how they spelled the word "theoretically".
Who dictates the EU regulation? Hello?
Correct, it isn't it's more a "German Boomer Engineering problem"
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
This makes me feel that peak car was 2010 ish, when, when engines were powerful, cheap, and not too polluting, but also not overly complex.
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.
I would argue peak car was a little earlier, maybe the 2000-2010 decade. Fewer screens to fail, analog buttons and dials. Airbags, and ABS for safety but without the additional computers/screens.
Entirely agree, although I think it varies by make / model. Roughly look for whenever a particular car got OBDII, which makes diagnostics way easier (and was kinda the perfect level of digitization, again in my opinion), through (as you say) whenever they started digitizing the cockpit and/or (which oddly - maybe? - coincide, in my experience) manufacturers stopped considering ease of maintenance in engineering decisions. In general late-1990s through 2005-2010. Cars since that decade (or so) are more sophisticated, at the expense of far, far shorter useful lifespans.
Mid 2008s saw a lot of cost cutting after the financial crisis, and then some very weird engineering decisions to deal with increased efficiency laws that made for much more complicated engines and transmissions even in smaller cars, if the smaller cars even continued to exist.
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.
Depending on the make, rust-protection wasn’t quite there yet.
4th gen 4Runner w/ a 2UZ-FE
Still got my E46!
I have never owned or wanted a pickup, but now I'm wondering about getting a basic one (if that's still an option.) It is annoying and depressing.
I've felt similarly recently, and I think those days are fleeting if not gone. Ford recently talked about replatforming their entire range, which would include basic trucks at more reasonable prices, but there's not really a market for work trucks in the way there used to be, and they're gone in favor of the luxury ones with small beds. It is annoying. There is an interesting startup that I can't remember the name of that touts an 8 foot bed (which is great) in the chassis footprint of a Mini Cooper. I don't think I saw pricing, but I would snatch one of those up.
> there's not really a market for work trucks in the way there used to be
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.
There's no market for new small work trucks because nobody is willing to sell them. Not because nobody is willing to buy them.
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.
That must be the invisible hand of the free market at work. ;)
Well CAFE standards say don't bother making small vehicles. And manufacturers say oh darn, we have to make the vehicles with lots of profits? Well sorry small truck buyers, we're out.
If there was a market for those vehicles, they'd exist. The folks you asked either didn't buy them when they had the chance or don't make up enough of the market to justify the truck.
> 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
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.
You might consider acquiring a used model that meets your needs, then spend $ to zero-time the important stuff. In 2023, I decided not to buy a new car, but to re-engine (and other stuff) my 1999 4Runner. Really happy I did.
I would like a pickup (spouse -> serious gardener), have decided to get something simple & used, then put another $20K into it.
Slate?
They're talking about this I'm pretty sure!
https://www.telotrucks.com/
Yes, those. Thank you!
Nobody is currently selling new, small pickups. Maybe if the Slate materializes, that'll prove the market and we'll see them again.
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)
CAFE standards have made that pretty hard. The trucks got bigger to hold more complex engine setups to boost mileage, coinciding with preferences shifting to super crew cabs because buying a new truck is basically the same price as buying a luxury vehicle.
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.
Frame damage apart, brake lines (in general, though I haven't worked specifically on a Dodge) are a reasonably straightforward DIY job. Not at all saying you made the wrong decision abandoning that particular car, just encouraging others reading this to evaluate the cost of a brake system replacement more, um... creatively, and least do some research. Basic car repair is an immanently nerdy pastime, and can save one an immense amount of money - especially on that particular era of automobiles, which are typically pretty satisfying to wrench on.
Maybe Slate? https://www.slate.auto/
A new 1980's mini truck would be awesome. If only...
The sad part is that the plastics from around that time are starting to fail.
That E92 M3 LCI is now a 14 year old car.
I've got a supercharged E92 M3. I'll own that thing till I die, funnest car ever.
>Lot of vehicles designed and produced in Europe — ICE, PHEV, and EV — have effectively become a missleading ECO exercise. Vehicles marketed as “CO₂-friendly” end up producing massive CO₂ footprints through forced services, throw-away components, high failure rates and unnecessary parts manufacturing cycles, overcomplicated service procedures, far larger than what the public is told. If we are destroying our ICE automotive industry based on EURO norms, who is calculating real ECO footprint of replacement part manucfacturing, unecessary servicing and real waste cost?
>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.
More like a weird rant that reduces EVs to only existing due to the environment. But they’re just better cars lol. And the poor reliability of european cars applies regardless of propulsion type
They aren’t better cars if they are disposal items like phones and most electronic devices.
They last longer than ICE cars.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-leads-vehicle-longevity-mile...
High end ICE cars have long been treated as disposable items. 3 year lease and then resell for 1/2 of its initial price so suddenly it’s cheaper than new midrange models for good reasons.
Lower end cars on the other hand can be worth 3/4th of their initial value 5 years out, that’s a durable good.
This is what makes Teslas sustainable and other car cos, like Porsche, not.
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.
Is that $10k the list price, or have you actually seen a recent invoice from a mechanic for a Model 3 battery swap?
I've searched the internet and I found some articles and people talking about prices around $11-16k, most of the times including labor.
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...
I have no info on Tesla batteries. But, just as a point of reference, you can now buy knock-down 48V battery "kits" from China for under $90/kWh. They include everything you need: case, cells, BMS, circuit breaker/isolator, and fire suppression. Assembly takes about an hour. (The raw prismatic cells without the rest go for ~$50/kWh).
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.
Automotive grade cells are a bit more expensive (generally higher C rates, dunno if they have other specs)
I was quoted $15k in a Tesla service center for a Model 3 battery replacement, with parts and labor.
Wait another year. CATL is destroying the battery market with their new LFP and sodium batteries. Prices are collapsing.
Doesn't sound like a market being "destroyed" to me, it sounds like a market being a market.
Maybe that would have been a better way to phrase it. I meant it in a positive way.
Sodium will take 15 years to catch up to LFP prices. Stop consuming hype.
wasn't CATL blacklisted by the US govt?
Anything good for the EV market will be blacklisted by the US govt
It’s an urban legend.
This is like comparing a Casio to a Rolex. Both do roughly the same thing, but the markets are completely different. Nobody buys a high-end luxury car like a Taycan because it makes financial sense. The manufacturers know this and price everything accordingly.
You realize that most Ferraris don't decrease, but increase in value over time?
Only if you baby it
Like a G-Shock to a Seiko.
EV Clinic identified some issues in Teslas too, for example this one: https://x.com/evclinic/status/1994876173277335745
That is such a terrible example. Why are you comparing Teslas to cars where the battery pack costs more than the Tesla, instead of the myriad of competitively priced models?
> The moment you have any issue at all with it, the car will be considered totaled.
Huh? The taycan has an 8-year/100k mile battery warranty. How many 100k+ mile carreras do you see for sale on eBay?
Quite a few actually, regular 911s often end up being daily drivers and given Porsche build them to last there's plenty of high milers out there.
There are currently 17 total carreras for sale with over 100k miles, none of them are less than 8 years old. The average taycan buyer isn’t going to own the car long enough to exceed the warranty.
Carrera is not Taycan. Why would you equate both? Different cars with different targets.
> Different cars with different targets.
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...
It's like the S60, VW W12, old V12 Continentals, etc. If it's expensive to maintain no one wants to buy it off you so you get hit with massive depreciation costs. You can get a 20y/o 'no issues' 500+hp V12 Continental for 10k where I'm at. They've had a brutal cost/year and cost/mile.
Huh? S60? Can you clarify?
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?
The warranty isn't going to cover underside damages caused by going over a shallow bump
No, your insurance is going to cover damages caused by hitting road debris whether you’re driving an EV or an ICE vehicle.
This is exactly why I’m so uninterested in driving en EV. I usually word it as “I don’t want to drive a computer”, but the reality is that I don’t want to be on the wrong end of the power imbalance that comes from this amount of complexity.
EVs are not complicated.
Modern carmakers might make them complicated, and you're well within your right to avoid those, but in general electronic propulsion is pretty simple. The problem is car manufacturing is a very expensive industry that's extremely difficult to disrupt, so incumbents aren't really worried about staying ahead of hungry competitors.
Go look at small-scale PEVs - ebikes, scooters, unicycles, etc. A huge, huge range of players making every possible variation under the sun, with simple designs and extremely low costs. This is what the car space is missing out on, because of regulations etc owing to their larger size and much higher danger levels that entails. I suspect many places have regulations that largely exclude smaller, simpler cars from being viable as well.
> EVs are not complicated.
> Modern carmakers might make them complicated
OP did not say they would not travel on electric trains or unicycles or elevators or electric forklifts or electric container ships. They said they don't want an EV. The things that modern carmakers make complicated.
> They said they don't want an EV. The things that modern carmakers make complicated.
It's probably more of a sign of what's coming in the future. There is no need to make EVs difficult/expensive to repair. The change in technology is just an excuse to lock everything down and rake in more money for repairs/new vehicles. They could do the same for ICE vehicles too.
> EVs are not 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.
EV is indeed easy. Safe and reliable EV is hard. Vehicle environment is hostile to electric components, where they are exposed to vibration, dirt, and moisture. Even if you get "safe" chemistry in the battery cells of an Alibaba e-bike, it only means the cells themselves are less likely to explode in a chemical fire. It still has enough current to melt metall and set off a regular fire. And in the best case it will just stop working and good luck repairing some random components, which might have been from a short production run and there are no spares in the existence.
> electronic propulsion is pretty simple
So simple that it’s usually called electric propulsion.
Many modern ford cars have 6 CAN buses. ICE cars are not simpler. The tech _has_ been beaten with the hammer of incremental improvement for a long time, but ICE cars are not less computer controlled. If anything ice engines require many more "computers" and sensors to be efficient
My Hybrid F-150 is so freaking complex. They basically seem to have swapped many components over to electrical drive (like the F-150 Lightning), but they still have to slap all of the ICE components in there as well.
EV and "driving a computer" are orthogonal
chances are that you are driving an ICE computer, with all the problems driving a computer comes with.
the EV itself is simpler than ICE is. fewer moving parts, and short supply chains once you actually have the thing.
how much complexity goes into making and supplying your gas?
Yeah, modern ICE is a massively complex control system problem, requiring so much more compute than EV, just to meet regulations.
Here's a funny example: the fuel vapor recovery system. It stores fuel vapors from the gas tank, that otherwise would have leaked into the air, in a canister of activated carbon. When under appropriate driving/environmental conditions, it opens valves and feeds the vapor into the intake stream, so it's burned.
[1] https://www.motor.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Evap_0319-1...
Article: https://www.motor.com/magazine-summary/vapor-tales-understan...
However when you advertise your car as eco friendly, you should be forbidden to create a non-repairable apple phone on wheels
Teslas are dead simple, to the point where people are putting Tesla anything in virtually anything you can think of - classic cars, random sedans, you name it.
There’s also that guy on YouTube who updated the electricals in his original Model S with electricals from a 10 years later Model 3 Highland just by buying spare parts, and it was pretty doable with fairly basic and limited tools/public information.
So the complexity in this article is just a BMW/PHEV thing, not an EV thing.
As they point out, the Tesla pyro fuse (at least on a Model S) is a cheap part. However, in some model years it's on top of the pack, which means you have to drop the pack to get to it. And, from memory, it's a 10 year lifespan part. However, on other Model S cars, it's easily accessible from the bottom.
I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars. Obviously, right-to-repair and allowing access to documentation and tools for independent shops is a a necessary but not sufficient step.
I shudder to think at some of the other possibilities -- heavy-handed attempts to regulate how much specific repairs can cost.
Maybe mandating the sale of manufacturer-provided extended warranties for no more than x% the cost of the vehicle purchase price would be an incentive to keep repair cost in check?
The majority of their cars (Y/3 models) have the penthouse (top) of battery pack super easily accessible from under the back seat, no need to drop a pack.
Not to mention Tesla has the best service mode system in their computer of any brand of all time. They also have the best free to owners assembly/disassembly manuals in the service portal https://service.tesla.com/. 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.
+1 for the Tesla service manuals. My wife’s was making a clunk from front suspension. Before my assistant (my kid) had finished taking off the wheel, I found the up-to-date official torque specs on service site. Usually it takes me a while to find torque values and cross check with another source. It was beyond refreshing to see Tesla buck the trend of selling service-manuals-as-a-service.
Service documentation / manufacturer software required for cars I currently wrench:
- Early 20’s: Bookmarked URL to the official online documentation (Tesla). With that said, I haven’t had need beyond checking mechanical connections, flushing brakes, and replacing filters.
- Early 10’s: VM containing a mid-00’s version of windows that runs a cracked copy of the long defunct manufacturer software service manual. Also runs software to interface with car, but simply painful to use. Beginning of era where tasks like replacing the 12v battery require manufacturer software to interface (though simple things still had undocumented secret Contra-like button sequences to do so).
- Early 10’s car: folders of screenshots and pdf exports collected over a decade for various procedures I needed to do. OBD-2 dongle + generic app handled basic things. Not much different than decade prior vehicle.
- Early 00’s: PDF of a seemingly printed-and-scanned copy of a digital version of the service manual. Off by a model year, surprising number of inconsistencies given its German. Computer and K+DCAN connection required for re-coding new parts, flashing, etc. Some fancier OBD-2 scanners could do majority of service related functions (cycle abs, reset airbag light, etc).
- Late 80’s: PDF scans of the dozen+ service books (still trying to luck into a physical copy of the set without paying an absurd sum). Most mechanically complex vehicle I own. No computer necessary, but soldering required.
Early 70s: Haynes hardcopy with oil stains, "... Reassembly is the reverse procedure thereof."
Reading in reverse is surprisingly hard
Thanks for the detail -- mine comment was just lazy, from memory, from a friend's car and videos I've seen online.
> I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars...Maybe mandating...
No, mandating / regulations are not the answer, unless you're looking to artificially enforce something that the consumer doesn't want.
> I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars.
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.
> I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars
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 wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars.”
This is what insurance companies are supposed to do if they price things properly.
On the Model 3, you have to drop the HV battery pack to replace the brake lines that prematurely rust in wintery climates, so Tesla is not fully immune either.
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.
Battery drop in Tesla is 30 min job tho.
EVs are not intrinsically complicated as some sibling commenters say, but the issue is that EVs are new and mostly made after the point when automakers started building cars as computers. And it's also a good excuse to put even more computers inside because an EV has to look modern with big screens and cool chimes right?
I think this genuinely hampers EV adoption and governments should take some sort of action if they want to transition the market to EVs. Not that the average consumer chooses cars based on how many computers are inside it, but this builds a general impression of fragility and creates such negative stories. We need simple, reliable, serviceable EVs, but the incumbents are not going to build it on their own. (Government excessive regulations for safety, backup cameras, speed limiters, etc arguably created this problem in the first place)
None of the issues in the article are specific to electric cars. This isn't even one, it's a plug-in hybrid. A modern ICE car will have the same issues of having too much electronics inside.
One would expect a plug in hybrid to be the most complex of all the vehicle types. It has all of the complexity of an EV combined with all of the complexity of a gas burner.
PHEV in the title is plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. Different from a pure EV.
This is true. EVs are much simpler than ICE, and PHEV basically have all the complexity of EV+ICE.
PHEVs mean that half the time your using your battery to drag around an ICE, the other half the ICE is dragging around a battery.
A very temporary phenomenon in the evolution from ICE to EV.
Probably the one type of PHEV that should survive is basically a BEV with builtin backup generator. One that's not necessarily powerful enough to drive you directly at full speed, but enough to basically eliminate range limitation of a (cheaper and smaller) battery by continuously charging it when needed. Maybe this 'backup generator' can even be made as a removable option.
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.
Your phrasing implies this causes extra weight gain - just to illustrate, the new Prius is about 1.4t (while having decent PHEV range), while the ID4 (a similar sized EV) is 2t.
Plus more. My Volt had a component fail that was responsible for switching the cabin heater between the battery and the motor, so if I placed the vehicle in pure EV mode then I couldn't heat the cabin, oops!
PHEV means a lot of things. Toyota PHEVs with e-CVT are simpler than a normal ICE. VW PHEVs where there’s an electric motor tucked into their DSG gearbox - not so much.
And then the kicker. VW doesn’t allow the dsg with electric motor to be repaired by dealers. If something is wrong it needs to be replaced completely. At the cost of €15k (NL, 2021). The only serviceable thing is the clutch and the mechatronic.
IMHO this is something that should be regulated away as consumer unfriendly and environment unfriendly. (Not to say hostile.)
In the end I got a DSG specialist fix the problem in two hours by replacing two simple components physically. The car then spend an hour retraining the dsg.
Does that make a difference in this regard? If so, how, and is it an unavoidable penalty for PHEVs? I can see PHEVs having a complexity penalty from having an IC engine over and above the EV components, but that does not seem to be the source of the problems here.
Well designed PHEVs can actually be simpler than pure ICs (at least on the hardware side. To build a combustion only car well, you need to balance efficiency, power, and responsiveness. This means you need all sorts of complicated tech, like correctly sized turbos, variable valve lift, variable valve duration, etc. In a PHEV, otoh, you have an electric engine (which can also steal power from the driveshaft), which means you don't need to worry about responsiveness of the combustion engine. You can fill half a second of turbo lag with the motor, and optimize for narrower RPM ranges since you can charge/discharge the battery to keep the engine running in its happy place. You also no longer need fancy and complicated brakes because you can do 99% of your braking with regen.
All of this does come with more complex software, but the hardware can end up with significant simplification.
I would say so for this particular failure.
The issue in this case has everything to do with the electronics design and close to nothing to do with propulsion.
The issue described is happening because German car makers love to put generic parts inside proprietary modules that cannot be repaired, and require extensive OEM tooling to replace. This kind of dumb shit happens on ICE cars and EVs that follow this design paradigm.
As described int the article the actual failed piece is ~$50 if you can replace just that pyrofuse. BMW doesn’t allow tha though. So you have to replace the entire module
In principle and EV car should be much simpler than an ICE car. It seems they are adding a lot of extra stuff that's not really necessary.
I think you are referring to BEV cars. The definition of EV includes hybrid and plug-hybrid (which the fine article is about, by the way).
" power imbalance that comes from this amount of complexity."
Look what happened in Russia:
https://www.autoblog.com/news/all-of-russias-porsches-were-b...
In terms of (unnecessary) complexity of modern ICE cars the Car Wizard has a few words that might interest you:
Title of the clip: Why does it cost over $4K to replace a simple $50 gasket?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJMWvyDP3j8
It's not an EV issue. It's a modern car issue.
The problem of repairability and independent garages to have access to the tools, software and training to repair cars is not specific to electric cars. The level of electronic and automation is related to safety norms which applies to any car.
I am, perhaps naively, hoping the Slate pickup can be better about this.
The article points out that it’s specificity BMW making this hard and expensive.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone.
If you own a BMW you’ll be dropping $5k on a repair someday. It’s a matter of when not if. That’s why most people lease them and move on to the next one.
Are ICE cars really any better with BMW? The used values indicate they are very expensive to maintain.
You're blaming the wrong thing. EVs are ultimately much, much simpler than ICE cars, it's just that certain manufacturers are taking this opportunity to turn their cars into elaborate scams.
Everything is a computer these days, but that doesn't mean that they have to be needlessly complicated. I think EVs are great, but I won't be buying one until they start selling cheap, simple ones.
What are the biggest overcomplicating issues with something like the Nissan Leaf? Especially on something like a 2018-2025 S trim?
This seems like more of a BMW issue than EV. On my E46 and E39 there's a pyrotechnic fuse on the negative battery terminal. It's somewhere around $400 in parts to replace. It's only gotten more expensive and more complex with their newer ICE cars.
Back in the 80s and 90s Ford's solution was a reusable inertia switch.
PHEVs are particularly complicated because they have to support two drive trains. Just EV’s are very simple outside of the battery management. It’s power from the battery going to a motor.
Absolutely, also I'm not stupid rich and most are not but I witness how much they spend more on services and repair that I can very very easily do on my "stupid" gasoline car myself. I buy my used cars for 5k and a used ev is like 20k-25k where I live so I on purchase save the first 20k. The gas cost I save with lower insurance and service/repair costs easily. So it's juat a waste of money in my opinion and a bit of an itelligence test.
The complexity here is partially a consequence of the energy storage mechanism and may be essential.
It is not possible for an entire tank of gasoline to spontaneously detonate in the same way that an EV battery can. If a mechanic fucks up a procedure and drills a hole through fuel tank, it's not fantastic but you can usually detect and recover from this before it gets to be catastrophic. If you accidentally puncture an EV battery or drop something across the terminals it can instantly kill everyone working on the car. These are not the same kind of risk profile.
I would not want work on anything with a high voltage system. Especially if it had been involved in an accident or was poorly maintained. These fuses and interlocks can only help up to a certain point. Energy is energy and it's in there somewhere. You can have 40kW for an entire hour or 100MW for 2 seconds. Gasoline cars usually throw a rod or something before getting much beyond 2x their rated power output.
Last week, I replaced a faulty cell in my PHEV.
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.
PHEV is plug-in hybrid, for those not familiar with terminology.
It seems to me an analogy that as a product is increasingly complex, the ultimate consumer/demander of it becomes more and more disconnected from maintenance, operations, etc. considerations and whether that system is well designed and serviceable.
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.
If you love cars or Top Gear, watch Mat Armstrong on YouTube. Mat restores crash damaged cars. The BS he has to go through because car manufacturers either won't sell him parts, won't sell him repair manuals, and unnecessarily cryptographically lock parts to the VIN is sometime heartbreaking. He has run across this pyro fuse issue many times. Sometimes he has even has to buy two cars just to repair one because of this nonsense. Like the article points out it just leads to more waste and it has to contribute to higher insurance rates for us all.
Bumping this. Mat went through the exact same crazy process with the Revuelto. Audi/Lamborghini overengineers the heck out of these cars its really absurd.
https://youtu.be/m37tN54FdQE?si=zXCnQTCOou13l10O
To be fair it's a lambo, not the pinnacle of maintainability or self repairable
100%. I watch him literally just to see how much bullshit he has to go through to get modern cars running again against the wishes of the manufacturers.
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.
The funny one is the Ferrari he is working on now where not even the Ferrari techs could figure out why the car wouldn't start, as they couldn't get the car to spit out codes and they didn't know why it didn't do that.
Meanwhile, if you work on old Landrovers from the Defender 90/110 to early RR L322, you need this: https://rangerovers.pub/downloads/rave.zip (500MB zip, PDFs of all service and user manuals).
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 was getting the 12v battery in my car replaced the other day, and my mechanic told me I'm lucky not to have a BMW, which apparently uses lithium ion batteries that cost $1,200 to replace. I assume they last much longer than lead acid batteries, but I do wonder what the value is to the driver. Is this just a way to juice the maintenance bills, to keep dealers happy?
Right to repair laws should cover this, and / or have a very clear procedure for e.g. consumers and mechanics to report these anti-repairability practices. Even if they're not on purpose (which I doubt, but have no evidence of), the author of this post clearly explains what the problem and what the various hurdles are.
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.
This behavior of locking down everything needs to be regulated, not only for car manufacturers but also for everything else
Let's start with smartphones.
You can make a law that encompasses all
Compare this car to the Toyota RAV4 PHEV which in some ways is simpler than a gas powered RAV4 (no alternator, no transmission) but maintains the same ease of maintainability and cheap parts availability as the base RAV4 (makes sense, they sold >4M of them).
PHEVs are complicated tech so I figured I would choose one with a proven design (Prius -> Prius Prime -> RAV4 Prime).
replacing a tesla pyro fuse is about $500, and it has a lifetime.
I think it might be the ev equivalent of a wear item like a water pump or alternator on an ice vehicle.
This only applies to pre-2020 Tesla's and it was around 8-10 years. The more recent ones are designed to last the vehicles lifetime.
BMW PHEV? That’s a funny way to spell the word “lease.”
The goal is to eliminate outright vehicle sales, and move everyone to leases and rentals? Just like in software? Safety is important, too (nudge nudge wink wink).
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!
I wouldn't mind if cars were so expensive only the top 2-5% of earners could afford them, but we need viable alternatives to driving. We have dismantled our transportation infrastructure at the pleasure of car companies. Now you have drivers that cannot afford their cars but must drive anyways. You also have people who are unfit to drive that are forced to do so.
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.
Yeah just don’t go to a BMW dealer, and save 50+% of the cost. I recently had numerous repairs done for €2k on my 2er, and the dealer had quoted me €5k. 1k for a part isn’t that outlandish, you just can’t go to a dealer that bills you €300 per hour.
I am in Germany. I will keep my 14-year-old Renault gasoline car roadworthy and use it for as long as possible. When it is no longer economically viable to drive a gasoline-powered car, I expect there to be electric cars that cost a four-figure sum in euros when new, are virtually maintenance-free, and come with a guarantee that a replacement battery will be available at a reasonable price (preferably from third-party suppliers) that I can replace myself without having to go to a specialist workshop. I hope that there will be manufacturers who recognize the need for such vehicles and will meet that demand. I will definitely not pay 20,000 or 50,000 euros or whatever for a skateboard with a battery and car bodywork.
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.
There are tons of used BMWs on the used market here in the states. They don't hold their value because everyone knows that some stupid thing is wrong with them that either can't be fixed or is so ludicrously costly to fix that it would be more than the whole entire car is worth. BMW is a shit company, doesn't matter if it is ICE or EV or whatever it is, they're intentionally made to be impossible to repair cheaply. It would be so easy to build "open" hardware and have onboard diagnostics built into the cars, but no.
The Ultimate Leasing Machine, as it were
my VW Multivan's gearbox needed a replacement. 17000 CHF, I kid you not. Luckily VW Germany paid for the whole ordeal, but I wouldn't have been happy to pay that...
Buying non Tesla EVs doesn’t make any practical sense.
Why?
You'll most likely be overpaying for overall package, not get the advanced software and will be forced to pay insane yearly service fee.
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.
BYD?
Hyundai unreliable?
I cannot find any explanation for that this is the result of EU regulation. Tesla should also adhere to the same EU regulation and they manage to do this without the "extra CO2" costs as the article states itself. This article smells like FUD to get attention.
>"Everyone calculates the CO₂ footprint of a moving vehicle — nobody calculates the CO₂ footprint of a vehicle that is constantly broken and creating waste."
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
>Did anyone think politicians are there for a common good?
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.
At this point, when I look at ANY electric vehicle, I'm seeing basically what Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow warned about.
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.
This is absolutely not limited to EVs, the same enshittification is in a lot of ICEs and hybrids as well. Today's cars won't be driving in 2040 when a student could buy it for a grand wit 300 000 miles on the clock, and keep fixing it himself in order to save money.b
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.
> Theoraticaly
> missleading
Please check spelling before posting
seems like this would run afoul of american right-to-repair laws
I think it continues to be under-appreciated how much of a lead Tesla still has in EVs. Even BMW can't make something that is practical.
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.
I think Nissan is a bit underrated here. I’m leasing an Ariya which has been great (including its charging curve, which is better than much of the competition) and feels more premium than you’d expect from the brand (to the point that the top trim is sometimes referred to as a “baby Infiniti”) with things like dual pane windows to cut down on road noise, as well as a proper heat pump where many still only have resistive heaters.
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.
> 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.
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.
Australia managed to destroy its car industry on its own.
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.
Atto1 is like half size of model 3 tho.
I’d love to see a ~$20k EV too, but it’s gonna be tough to pull that off without China’s cheap labor and materials, at least until EVs start moving at the kind of volumes that traditional ICE and hybrid vehicles sell at.
We're never going to see a $20k car in the US again. Why would they sell any car for $20k, when they could sell it for $30k like they are doing now? They make more money selling fewer cars at higher prices, so no manufacturers are interested.
https://evmagazine.com/news/how-chinas-byd-is-using-ai-to-sc... , it's automation and vertical integration. It shows what was always possible if companies focused on product instead of stock buybacks. Fuck Jack Welch.
Nothing to do with cheap labor/materials and everything to do with a very integrated and highly sophisticated and competitive supply chain.
Prices are always set in a manner in order to optimize for margins.
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.
Household incomes are also much lower in China compared to Western countries. The kind of upper line BYD EV model that would appear to be a discount to a Western buyer is fairly unaffordable in a country where the median household incomes are around Yuan 2-3k (US$300-500) a month.
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...
Lots of the traditional car manufacturers now have good options: Renault, Nissan, Kia, and Hyundai's EVs seem to be particularly well regarded. I'd definitely opt for any of those over a Tesla given Tesla's reputation with regard to quality and repair costs.
If you ignore cost, then Tesla's cars are probably still better at this point, but the gap doesn't seem that large.
Even BMW has a few electrical cars that aren't half bad. The main problem is that they are compromise cars that can be sold as ICE, PHEV, or full EV.
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's reputation with regard to quality and repair costs.
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.
> Hyundai's EVs seem to be particularly well regarded
lol.
you wanna search about kona's gearbox and iccu's beforehand.
i'm not going to get into software.
"I think it continues to be under-appreciated how much of a lead Tesla still has in EVs".
As long as you don't compare them to BYD etc.
as long as you don’t compare them to any car. teslas in 2025 belong in a museum lol
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.
2025 S is the same as your 2014 S? That’s some hilarious cope. Stop lying. You know it’s completely different. Yes, a model S is still a model S. And the F150 is still a pickup truck. Surprise!
2025: https://www.kbb.com/tesla/model-s/2025/
2014: https://www.kbb.com/tesla/model-s/2014/
If this was like “find 5 differences game” you’d lose :-)
Are you serious?
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.
just asked my wife and she said the first thing she looks when she is deciding to buy a car are giga castings and facia and door handles - boom - tesla s ftw ;)
putting a lipstick on a pig, eh? :)
When I bought my S in 2014 people were breaking their necks checking it out, it was the shit - now this car is soooo dated there is no reason to buy 2026 vs. my 2014 (I got new DU, new battery…)
Tesla entire lineup is old outdated cars. Ford has F-150 and then another 50 models to choose from…
If all you care about is looks, that is. Get out of any other car and you forget you can't just walk away from it and it'll shut itself off and lock the doors. I've had my Tesla driving friends drive my ICE car, and then not even turn off the engine when they go into the store because you don't need to do that with a Tesla.
> Get out of any other car and you forget you can't just walk away from it and it'll shut itself off and lock the doors.
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.
> A lot of cars have that. My (gulp) BMW EV for instance. Newer BMW ICE cars too.
Yeah, the recent BMWs (both EV and ICEVs) have Apple/Android CarKey UWB support, which is much more reliable and precise than Bluetooth.
> If all you care about is looks, that is
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
When my buddy got his first Tesla back in 2018 he had a ICE rental for some reason and he left it running in the driveway all day once on accident.
The complete lack of awareness with which some people operate cars never ceases to amaze me.
lol - quite amazing!
How is a persons behavior a positive feature for a car?
I have a theory about EVs - they don't allow much engineering range.
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.
My understanding is that Tesla 16V LV batteries have a similar crash lockout in the BMS that also requires workarounds to reset: https://openinverter.org/wiki/Tesla_16v_li-ion_battery
Seeing the BYD trucks and other BYD vehicles around where I live in Australia, as well as the other Chinese and Korean brands, they outnumber the Teslas on the street now.
Add to that because Tesla allows for access to its repair manuals and service tools unlike most OEMs.
BYD targets a different market. Tesla should compete with the likes of Polestar, Rivian, maybe Porsche if they dare but I'd take any of those before a Tesla any day of the week.
The BMW neue klasse is far superior to the latest Teslas.
Both in software hardware and handing.
https://youtu.be/P-H-GJaGiUg?si=eq8YWy8gyJ5YS99X
I think it even surpasses Chinese brands.
i think they look absolutely horrible both inside and out. but, of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I think the (negative) point is the cost of ownership. European cars are very cool, if you can afford to keep them running
I wouldn't understate BYD, but Tesla did play a massive role in helping build China's domestic EV ecosystem because Tesla also worked on building a supplier ecosystem in China, which also helped incubate much of the Chinese ecosystem.
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
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275593
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275541
China is also copying SpaceX's Starship https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/11/chinas-long-term-lunar...
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)
> Even BMW can't make something that is practical.
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
From what I can tell the Chinese are targeting the bottom of the market with cars that are essentially disposable. The ones to watch, IMO, are Hyundai/Kia. If they can sort out the reliability issues there's a lot of potential there.
Honestly I'm cautiously optimistic about VW, especially after they've started backing away from those awful capacitive buttons.
BYD has the world’s fastest car now. I think they are targeting the market, not a market.
And 9 times out of 10 when BYD is brought up people are talking about their low priced cars like the Dolphin or Seagull, not their halo car.
Sure - you start on a segment. Tesla started at the top of the market and got stuck trying to work down. BYD is starting at the bottom but they are making it pretty clear that’s a choice not a constraint.
From what I can tell the Chinese are targeting the bottom of the market with cars that are essentially disposable.
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.
https://www.byd.com/us/car/han-ev
Disposable as in unrepairable or difficult to repair, not disposable as in slow. Honestly, aside from people making bad faith arguments who would use disposable to imply slow?
Do me a favor and stop responding to my comments. Thanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVA3dkuiNE8
Here's 2 Korean mechanics reviewing a BYD. They seem pretty impressed.
Disposable as in unrepairable
Again, what information or source or evidence leads you think this?
Uh have Tesla discovered how to make doors that align with the car body? All 4 of them in the same car?
[Note that this is not a BMW endorsement. I would only drive one if someone else pays for the car, insurance and maintenance.]
what is phev?
I have a BMW PHEV. There's a 3 cyl turbo engine with an auto box at the front and a 90hp electric motor and 7.6kwh battery at the back. Most of the new ones just have a more traditional layout with an electric motor built into the autobox. You get more elec range than a hybrid but less than a full EV. Now that it's cold I start my commute on engine to get the car warmed up with 'free' heat then switch to EV later. If I want to beat someone off the lights I use both together.
Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle. It's the most complex drivetrain you can possibly buy with a full gas engine and transmission mated to a full EV with external charging support.
I can't speak for other PHEV drivetrains but the Toyota PHEV design isn't that complex. It uses an ingenious planetary CVT with a small gas engine instead of a full gas engine and regular transmission.
Also, because the gas engine mostly runs at its most efficient RPM, there is little stress on it so it runs very reliably.
PHEW!
Plug in hybrid.
Is this an issue with all BMW PHEVs or just one model from one year?
Manufacturer locked crash resets for BMS are a common theme amongst EVs, especially European ones. Exclusive to neither this model year nor BMW, although some other makes have less arcane procedures than the ISTA one.
I keep mulling over decisions like this, and I think the fundamental clash between the hacker ethos of repairability and the corporate ethos of products with well-defined failure modes comes down to a clash of innate human values with capitalism.
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.
erste mal?
Just buy a Tesla, it's the most sane thing you could do for peace of mind
And this is one of the reasons I won't be replacing my gas-powered Lexus any time soon. Then there is the spyware issue: most modern cars (and especially Tesla-like electric cars) are a privacy nightmare.
None of the issues in the article are specific to electric cars. This isn't even one, it's a plug-in hybrid. A modern ICE car will have the same issues of having too much electronics inside.
Tesla is leading in car privacy, look at mozilla's report.
Out of the Privacy Not Included list of car manufacturers it is the third not-worst: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/cate...
It is still very bad: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesl...
Overview: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...
Oh that's very comforting, the leader in car privacy knows where I am at all times because it needs that information for self-driving.
Self driving is offline