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.

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

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?

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

PHEV in the title is plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. Different from a pure EV.

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 am, perhaps naively, hoping the Slate pickup can be better about this.

Are ICE cars really any better with BMW? The used values indicate they are very expensive to maintain.

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.

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.

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.

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.