>This simplifies vehicles considerably.

On the contrary, this much integration makes repairs nearly impossible, meaning you might have to swap the whole unit(for a lot of $$$) when something small inside it inevitably breaks.

Check out the articles published by EVclinic that cover such cases.

Aftermarket EV repairs are already big business due to how difficult and expensive the OEMs make it.

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ssl-3 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

On the other hand: If the assembly is reliable-enough, then repair isn't normally something that needs to be pursued in the first place.

Like Honda engines on their myriad pedestrian cars. I'm sure there's exceptions, but the engines tend to be ridiculously reliable. The rest of the car often fails (due to age and/or rot and/or deferred maintenance and/or crash) and leaves a very good engine behind.

Accordingly, junkyards are full of Honda engines that work fine.

Thus, there's very few people rebuilding them. They certainly can be rebuilt, but it usually just doesn't make financial sense to strip it all down and freshen everything up.

So when an engine does fail on an otherwise-working Honda daily-driver that is actually worth repairing, then the usual move is to swap in a used motor.

---

So if it's reliable enough, and there's also critical mass, then it doesn't matter much if the BYD drivetrain unit has easily-repairable components.

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HPsquared 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The eternal conflict between "design for manufacture" and "design for maintenance".

	▲	justinclift 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Apparently both can be done together, it's just that it takes a bunch more effort so most places don't bother.

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mnahkies 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't have so much knowledge about EV repairs, but I got burnt by this on ICE cars already - had a car fail a regular fitness test on suspension bushes, they weren't replaceable without replacing the whole arm(s). What should've been a $40 part was being quoted as more than the cars value.

(I'm not sure if there was a way around this, there may well have been but I had other things going on and sold for scrap)

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jhatax 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

FWIW, this has been my experience since 2003 when I had to get suspension work done. Doesn’t matter if it’s a BMW or Honda, dealership or indie repair shop, the story I have heard consistently is that the bushing is part of the arm for structural integrity, stability, <reason I can’t remember, truth or crock>. Bushings typically fail faster than the arm does, and this repair is expensive ($1000+ for performance cars, not that much cheaper for Civics).

The “Design for purported Safety vs. Design for Saving Dollars” principle at work.

	▲	simplyluke 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> repair is expensive ($1000+ for performance cars, not that much cheaper for Civics) I can almost guarantee the lion's share of this is shop labor, not parts, and pressing a bushing out and back in would be more expensive after accounting for that labor than just swapping the suspension arms. This is often the piece that gets missed in these discussions of "why am I replacing this huge assembly for a tiny part", if the whole assembly is coming out to deal with that tiny part anyways and shop labor is $200/hour it's cheaper to swap the assembly a lot of the time. Try getting any repair beyond routine maintenance done on a car in the US for under $1000 these days. Car maintenance is one of the things I'm happy to DIY in most cases because the delta on costs is massive and as someone that works on computers all day it's vaguely enjoyable to get angry at a mechanical object for a change.

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slaw 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Instead of $40 part it is $150 part. Very easy to replace. Less than 1 hour labor for both sides.

https://www.rockauto.com/en/catalog/jeep,2012,grand+cherokee...

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cyberax 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why would it be less repairable? Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable. Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.

And once they give out, you can just replace the whole unit for maybe $2000.

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numpad0 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

EU added "cybersecurity" requirements in response to Comma.ai that means that a lot of ECUs going forward use signed messages AND often crypto key pairing against an onboard security auth box. The pairing process often require something like a scuffed up manufacturer rental Panasonic Toughbook with weird half baked apps and passwords. The car would refuse to drive or whatever if the owner wouldn't play along with that game.

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joe_mamba 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable.

Only if someone makes and sells those power electronics to you along with the appropriate DRM tools required for calibration and pairing with the other electronics of the car. Otherwise you're shit outta luck.

>Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.

Simple != decades of reliability, when the design and manufacturing quality are piss poor in the race to the bottom for cost cutting and shareholder returns. Timing chains were also supposed to last a lifetime but plenty have been recalled due to know timing chain issues from manufacturing quality.

VW and Kia/Hyundai EVs were found to use custom dimensions motor bearings that can't be bought on the open market from anywhere, so only the OEM and their dealers can get them via their supply chain.

	▲	cyberax 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There is nothing terribly complicated there. It's just an AC motor ("brushless DC") with a classic 3-phase inverter and a resolver. There are plenty of companies that make controllers for this kind of setup. Granted, they are typically not powerful enough for SOTA drivetrains, but it's a question of time. Power electronics will need to fit into the footprint of the e-axle. Or maybe you'll need to manufacture a new housing. Both are easily doable for small companies. > VW and Kia/Hyundai EVs were found to use custom dimensions motor bearings that can't be bought on the open market from anywhere, so only the OEM and their dealers can get them via their supply chain. Again, an independent manufacturer can easily make them.

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rwmj 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.

Edit: I agree with you and upvoted your comment which I feel was unfairly downvoted. But economics are going to win here, only a tiny fraction of the user base of cars (or phones) tinkers with them.

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binary132 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People don’t want cars they can tinker with, they want cars they can get repaired instead of replaced when something breaks….

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rwmj 4 hours ago | parent [-]

People actually want a convenient and cheap service for getting around. All other considerations can be derived from this. If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it. Currently this is almost never the case of course, but if it happens in future, watch people switch behaviour instantly.

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bcrosby95 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it.

This is doing a lot of work but I'm going to go with a charitable interpretation. I seriously doubt that we'll ever hit a state where replacing a 2 ton vehicle is cheaper than repairing it. And if we do, I'll have to re-evaluate my charitable interpretation, because something shady is likely going on.

The crazy thing is people don't even repair things that are cheaper to repair than replace. Our countertop icemaker broke and my wife wanted to throw it out. I fixed it with 20 minutes of time and a $15 motor from Amazon.

I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive. People in large part have no idea how to repair anything they own. This mass ignorance is leading to some pretty poor market incentives.

	▲	binary132 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A lot of it does come down to a cost / benefit analysis where time preference is extremely overweighted due to an abundance of seemingly free credit and, shall we say, a tragic dustbowl famine of available cognitive resources.
	▲	joe_mamba 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive. I don't think this is true. If this is the trend you're seeing it's probably because you're sampling through people with relatively high disposable income(or who don't mind endless credit card debt), who can just afford to throw away broken things when it's just a rounding error of their income. But if you look at lower income people(with sane spending habits and financial literacy) you'll see how they first ask around if something can be repaired before they claw money from their checking account to buy something new. My local facebook group is full of students asking if someone can fix their macbooks for cheap as they can't afford a new one or what Apple is quoting them, which is close in cost to buying a new one. My minimum wage gf still had her barely functional Windows 7 notebook up until a year ago because she didn't feel like spending money to buy a new one if I could just keep fixing it. Some broke people try not to buy new things if they can, but some are broke because they can't stop buying new things.

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binary132 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

well, people want to have enough money to do what they need to do, of course, so they will choose things that they can in order to minimize cost and time spent, and increase convenience. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to own things that can be repaired. Owning repairable things is also valuable. I don’t think anyone actually wants to “own nothing and be happy”. But they might be able to be coerced into it, sure.

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joe_mamba 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.

Which is why I'm so baffled how and why the EU has spent so much time and effort regulating batteries and charging ports for phones, but still ignores this massive issue of ease of repairability and right to repair of personal vehicles that has been plaguing car owners since the ICE days and is now only getting worse with EVs, that's costing us a lot more money than what's costing users to pay Apple to replace your cracked display and dead battery.

It feels like they just keep going for the lowest hanging fruits to score easy wins that don't impact local industry, while ignoring the entire forest behind them.

Jarvis, pull up on the central HUD how much the EU car industry spent on lobbying in the EU over the last 15 years.

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markvdb 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Any electric gear with the battery as its main wear part. Ebikes. Sit-on mowers. Cars.

This is about so much more than cost. Agency, autonomy, environment, efficiency, geopolitics even.

I refuse to buy drm'ed gear. The exception is second hand where I can reliably avoid the drm with little effort. At its simplest, that means never using specific drm'ed functionality. At its most complicated, that means mitm'ing an encrypted can bus.

	▲	com2kid 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Even older chemistry EV batteries last over 200k miles. Given that so far in my 20 years of driving I've only racked up around 80k miles, that 200k "wear part" will out last the rest of my time on earth.

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hnav 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The EU is beholden to the Germans, ease of repair would wreck the profit margins of VAG, BMW and Daimler both because of reduced after-sales profits and due to cost increases to manufacturing and engineering.

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XorNot 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The EU has scored wins there though.

The mobile phone industry turns product into landfill on a yearly or more frequent basis.

People might do a yearly model swap on a car, but the car itself stays on the road for 10-20 years.

Changing how it's built needs to be done cautiously, but also has a much longer payback period.

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lowbloodsugar 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most of those stories are 1/ crashes and 2/ hybrids. Again, with rare exception, manufacturers are just making gas cars with EV power trains. Tesla and BYD are making next gen transport. Are you old enough to remember when TVs broke so often that TV Repairman was a job? One day we will look back on car mechanics the same way.

I do remember the visceral joy of trying to keep a supercharged Camaro on the track, but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”. Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once.

If I win the lottery I will buy another Camaro and a Corvette and I’ll work on them for fun, and kids will look at me the way I looked at old men who take care of antique steam engines and traction engines and take them to fairs. That sure is a lot of noise and smoke and doohickeys for very little speed and power!

	▲	jbm 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I own a Model 3 and I like driving it, but I scratch my head at everyone who claims there are no mechanical problems. I'm glad you didn't have any, but there are some repairs that are almost obscenely common. In the past year, the heater failed (PTC Heater had to be replaced), and the lateral link ball joint ball joint had to be replaced. That is about CAD5000$ worth of work. There is also an issue with a wire in the rear center seatbelt that broke (but after a check, it doesn't really have any safety concerns wrt airbags so it is OK to leave as is), and the top roof glass cracked. (I also had to replace the front windshield, but that's normal in Calgary and I don't hold it against the car) I'm not "rough handling", I have a Toyota Sienna without any of these problems. On the bright side, the battery has no problems and no imbalances so fixing it will keep the car running for years (hopefully). I bring this up because I find it very annoying that people were painting hagiographies of these cars when they have real issues. None of the issues above should be happening. Moreover, there are no 3rd parties providing parts (supposedly because of patents). In the end, I'll never buy another gas car again but my cute tiny car has a bigger turn radius than my Sienna. It's lost more value than my Sienna. I agree with the poster who said that it isn't even clear if Tesla is interested in cars anymore. If BYD is also creating cars that are expensive to maintain, then hard pass. I'm ok with having legislation to fix this.
	▲	numpad0 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> manufacturers are just making gas cars with EV power trains. Tesla and BYD are making next gen transport. From what I see online, Teslas, especially MS/MX, are actually quite like an EV-swapped Toyota than anything futuristic. A lot about their cars(exception being CT and Semi) are ICE-mass-market-car coded. They're car equivalents of ARM PCs in ATX form factor like NVIDIA's DGX Station, opposite to the likes of trashcan Mac Pro.
	▲	joe_mamba 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>Most of those stories are 1/ crashes and 2/ hybrids. No, they're faulty coolant seals of the electric motor, wrecking the power unit. >but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”. I just turned up the music till the noise went away. Problem solved. >Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once. Good for you, but do you know there's a whole lotta other EV brands out there? And many are not as well and reliably designed as your Tesla. >I do remember the visceral joy of trying to keep a supercharged Camaro [...] If I win the lottery I will buy another Camaro and a Corvette and I’ll work on them for fun Nice story, but what does all this have to do with the parent you're replying to? Did he mention ICEs anywhere?

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binary132 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m very confused as to why this is downvoted but I tossed you an upvote since I do my best to work against the constant brigading I always see on this forum.