> 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.

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.

Ladies and gentlemen - behold the perfect consumer

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.

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.

It's like the manufacturer discovering to their complete surprise they are building a car. :-D

> 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.

At least over here where we have mandatory inspections you can find statistics on percentage of cars broken down by brands and models which fail the inspections. Toyota seems to consistently place in the top.

> 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).

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.

> 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.