My family bought an electric forklift for their factory in the early 90s. I think it is a Yale.
My sister has since taken over the forklift for her company and she has only replaced the batteries and the controller once.
These things are cheap to replace and not as much of a mystery as ICE engines.
I am seeing people replace old Prius hybrid batteries themselves with basic tools now.
I think the only thing I would be concern about is the crash safety for cars. Newer cars are safer. I think that would be the only draw to buy a newer vehicle.
I replaced the main battery in a Gen1 Prius. Fiddly. Had to get a strong buddy to help lift it in and out of the car, but we did it in a long weekend. A full set of 'used but tested' cells cost something like $750 but that was probably 8 years ago.
Actually the low cost part of this was that they weren't upgraded cells. Just tested-good cells from other battery packs. Most of the time it's just a couple cells in the bigger battery that have issues, and they take those out of the pool and make a good amount of $$$ because we were required to send back all of our cells. Assuming that of the 26 (iirc) cells that 3 or 4 were bad that's a big profit margin for sure. The car worked great after swapping them out.
That said, we might be able to make industrial scale recycling an economically efficient activity if we build more durable goods with a longer lifecycle and limit the availability of new territory to strip mine and abandon.
So much of our "cheap" access to minerals and fossil fuels boils down to valuing unimproved real estate as at zero dollars and ignoring the enormous waste produced during the extraction process. Properly accounting for the destruction of undeveloped real estate and the emissions/waste created during industrial processing could dramatically improve how much waste we produce and - consequently - how long our durable goods last.
And few people want to work for free or want put aside too much of there personal wealth to help people for things that don't seem critical (like healthcare for example which has a lot of nonprofit activities).
I hope OpenSource keeps takening off in the field. Communalize the engineering results so we advance together, and lower the cost of manufacturing with diy/small scale manufacturing and maybe we can get better things at costs more can afford without enslaving people.
Its really worth reading the whole Article. Im looking forward to long lasting EVs, but I really fear that, what the author also described in his article, may come true. I think we will see that car manufacturers will start to act like hardware company's and start to force you to regularly buy a new car by making your car incompatible to new features or by designing it to fail after a few years.
I think we will see that car manufacturers will start to
They started to do this decades ago. Generally any given part in a car might be left unchanged for 5 or 6 model years before it gets changed, often for completely arbitrary reasons. For many cars, if it's over ten years old your only hope for a replacement part is the junkyard.
Yeah, options open up for some massively popular models or otherwise very well loved models. I got replacement gears for headlight motors for a 90s car with pop-up headlights, because people got tired of the OEM design wearing out so easily. I suspect someone trying to keep a Pontiac Aztek going might have a harder time finding enthusiasts keeping things alive.
The opensource edm machine that is just now gain popularity seems like a great choice for parts! LumenPNP for machine replacement circuit boards on larger scales is exciting to me too ( I hate hand soldering so maybe its just a personal thing lol).
My local maker space built a plasma tourch and table too. Honestly it feels likes all coming together for it to be done
After ~20-30 years, rubber gaskets and seals and cable insulation start failing. Plastic becomes brittle, especially if exposed to the sun. How do they solve this problem?
I would think an electric vehicle would have quite a lot fewer things like gaskets and other seals since gas isn't involved. Other than the normal wear and tear items like brakes, shocks, rotors, etc, battery repair would be the major thing I'd expect to need work. I imagine many mechanics aren't trained to handle these, so they end up just replacing the whole unit. Obviously this is wasteful though but could be easily solved via training.
Pretty much this, diagnosing and fixing an electric motor is about as difficult as an alternator. Check signal, if good remove unit and swap (core gets remanufactured). With drive by wire and steer by wire and all that most things are equally modular. Gas pedal/throttle unit is pretty much a rheostat with a spring-loaded pedal, steering rack actuators, etc
Then you got ICE which becomes a ship of theseus. If you put enough hours on a combustion engine you go from the simple stuff like hoses and timing belts to having to replace piston rings, bearings, or even the cylinder heads if they get so worn out that they leak and fail compression tests
Cars used to be much more modular. Newer models of car - much like newer models of cell phone - are deliberately engineered to be difficult to disassemble and fix, in order to compel people to replace the whole vehicle on a tighter time frame.
It was a big reason for the surge in popularity of Japanese cars, during the 80s/90s. Honda Civics were famously very easy to mod, leading to the trend of "Rice Rocket" cheap urban street racing cars. That's fallen off substantially in the last ten years, thanks to Japanese companies becoming infested with Wall Street / McKinley Consultant profit-chasers. Toyota and Hyundai might as well be run by the CEO of GM, the way they build their vehicles.
But a lot of the new Indian and Chinese vehicles are adhering to more traditional modular manufacturing style. They're also having a really hard time getting their vehicles into Western dominated car-markets, for some curious reason.
Agreed 100 percent. I’ve never touched anything Chinese so I’m clueless there, but from what I’ve seen they are quite far ahead in the EV front. It’s a shame we don’t get the good stuff that Toyota still makes in Australia
Modularity of construction, so that rubber components can be replaced without scrapping the whole vehicle. Reducing reliance on plastic parts, or improving the ease and quality of plastic recycling, so that we can fix the exterior components without sacrificing the chassis and core parts.
Not really. There's no excessive heat outside of the engine bay, but plenty of rubber and plastic. Heck, even my rubber grip on my toothbrush has turned into a mush after some years and it wasn't even exposed to sunlight, as there are no windows in the bathroom. Organic matter decays, it's just life.
The engine compartment is what I was addressing. There's a number of gaskets where failure can destroy an engine etc vastly reducing the life span of the car. Like while it does matter if the tail lights go out you can often reroute a cable for something like that with little difficulty. You cannot reroute the critical degrading components in a combustion engine as easily.
Electric cars are estimated to have 2/3 the maintenance costs of ICE vehicles. Their lifespan is likely only limited by the frame whereas ICE is limited by the frame and the engine. Major fail points of older cars include timing belts and head gaskets.
You have way too much confidence. Have you owned a car for 10+ years? Almost everything rubber - especially within the suspension system needs replacement within the first 10 years of wear and tear.
Seriously, no one is going to mention "Right To Repair"? If this was law, and companies had to divulge how there stuff worked and was assembled, as well as sell parts, things would last longer. If every trade zone had a repairablity index, competition would make things last longer still.
States have had no trouble passing and enforcing IP law that allows companies to get away with this. Reverse engineering would be the norm for closed source anything to the point it would be made irrelevant if companies didn't have the overwhelming weight of the legal system on their side to shut down anyone who dares try open up access to their designs.
Right to repair is great, but we are fighting against the entire weight of the entrenched ruling class to get it passed. It's going to take a lot of activism, and even then it's almost certainly going to be watered down and cater to large corporations when it does pass. We need to keep the pressure on them.
If this was law, and companies had to divulge how there stuff worked and was assembled, as well as sell parts, things would last longer.
I'm all for it but I think you're being a bit too optimistic. If we had the right to repair then the prices of repair kits and materials is going to go up most likely. I can think of a few other ways they can make that system obnoxious too.
It's like everything else. Yeah, the general systems in place could be greatly improved but ultimately the majority of the issues lie with the people at the top who refuse to let us have good things. No matter what laws are passed they will find a way to profit at any cost. The shareholders behind massive corporations are the first priority because no solution we create will work as efficiently as it can unless they are out of the picture.
Regulations can work. Latest is EU's USB-C phone/laptop/tablet standardization. It's great! No more crazy range of different laptop power supplies.
Some stuff is pretty much as I want already. Henry vacuum cleaners for example. Tough as nails and easy to get parts and help for. Framework laptop and fair phone aim to be good for repair and upgradablity.
France repairablity index can be rolled out further field.
Things used to be more repairable and last longer. We can reverse the trend down. No need to despair.
This is why I want an Onvo with battery swap over a Tesla.. Everyone makes fun of me for it, but nobody realizes that if you swap the battery about once a year, then you're able to preserve the life of your vehicle.
All cars could last a lot longer if people kept maintaining them and - importantly - didn't damage them. Electric cars are not going to be immune to this, I can't see them lasting much longer on average than ICE cars.
Keep in mind that even when you change out the engine for something with less parts the rest of the car still remains and contains things which will eventually cause issues. For example I bought a cheap van a few months ago and here's some of the reasons it was cheap that are not ICE specific:
Steering wheel lock mechanism sticking
Air distribution flap cables kinked/binding so A/C only blew at feet
Central locking on side door sticking
Rear shocks leaking
Front strut mount bushings worn
Head unit not functioning
Presumably the previous owner just didn't want to spend the money on fixing these issues as they arose, and eventually it added up into a lot of potential expense (if you have to pay someone to fix it for you) and more reasons to sell the car. Such behaviour seems pretty common in my experience and I fully expect it to continue with EVs. It'll be hard enough to get people to even maintain their brakes and change the motor coolant considering the natural reluctance of people to spend money on maintenance and this unfortunately prevalent idea that EVs don't need it.
Funnily enough the main ICE specific problem with that van was just as much an electrical issue as part of the petrol engine - an intermittent secondary air injection error code which ended up being down to a combination of a sticking valve and a fuse with a hairline crack causing an intermittent connection.
A lot of this also comes back to asshole design, and EV's can be particularly bad for this. Switching to large touch "entertainment" displays is a major issue. With my last ICE (Honda) vehicle, it was integrated into the backup+side cameras and a few comfort/convenience features. I could still replace that with a new head unit, though only certain ones would still support the cameras.
My wife's EV (Hyundai) on the other hand, the console isn't really made in a way where it seems swappable, and even if it was there are major system functions - such as configuring charge/power settings - which can only be configured from that (or the dogshyte app that screws up often and requires a paid subscription after 3yr)
Yes, the move towards integrating the infotainment further into the car with propitiatory parts instead of generic sizes and not separating out vehicle related controls is definitely going to make long term upkeep harder.
Exactly this...in new cars its not the transmission or engine failure that causes it to be junked but rather all the rubber/ plastic bits going to shit and costing an arm and a leg to replace...
That's my thought as well. Things like failing interior plastics, or glass that is no longer being manufactured, or basic body seals rotting away. Even body rotlike folks in cold or salty environments deal with.Those bits add up fast.
Yeah. Markass Brownie got his Tesla in an accident. Repairs? More than 50% of sticker price. Sure you can throw the chassis out and put on a new one, but what about a hundred little sensors that also need troubleshooting, repair and calibration? Gotta go through them one by one.
1 of the 👍 points that were brought up was artificial gatekeeping. Many techies know it but I guess many non-techies don't know it. Phone makers intentionally not putting the newest features on the old phones to boost the newest phones' sales should be widely known. I wonder what the public opinion will be.
With so many fewer moving parts compared to an internal combustion engine, yes, EVs could be durable enough to be handed down from generation to generation. Just keep replacing the few moving parts that wear out. Worn interiors can be refreshed. Electronics are modules that can be replaced with updated versions.
What we have to look out for here though is this overall trend of 'rent everything own nothing', though. Car companies might try to make vehicles lease-only, so you have all the responsibilities of ownership but none of the benefits of ownership, and it's never paid off, you just pay forever.
Exactly. I'm looking for a repairable EV, and so many kinda suck. A lot have big computer modules that control nearly everything, the battery pack uses bespoke parts that aren't available from the manufacturer, etc. They probably need less maintenance, but they will need that maintenance eventually.
It's disappointing the direction everything is going.
the one pain point would be the batteries, and those have no reason to not be easily maintainable and highly universal. They're all modular and often times even using the same cell types.
While it's true that EVs can be built with fewer moving parts in the drive system itself, and that companies could absolutely produce longer lasting vehicles if they focused on longevity, there are still a lot of parts of a vehicle that simply will not last beyond a certain point. The moving parts of an EV still cover everything in the suspension, wheels/brakes/steering, and a number of other components that are very costly to replace, not to mention the underlying frame/unibody of the vehicle itself being vulnerable to wear over time depending on the conditions it's driven in. "The few moving parts that wear out" still covers a huge swath of a vehicle, even if you take the engine and transmission out of the equation.
Well-built EVs with a focus on longevity and repairability could extend the lifespan of the average people mover by a great deal, but at the end of the day cars will by nature eventually reach a point where the cost to repair some major core component becomes too great to justify, outside of rare or collectable cases.
I know all that. I'm talking about the moving parts in the ENGINE, which then would not exist. A brushless DC drive motor only has bearings to worry about. A gearbox is necessary but a well-made gearbox should last for decades and is way easier to rebuild than an entire ICE engine. Of course suspension and brake parts wear out over time, but as you can see I wasn't referring to those any more than I was referring to tires. All those things are cheaper and easier to replace, really, than having to worry about an entire ICE engine, with the fuel system, cooling system, and exhaust system to worry about. At worst an EV might have a motor or it's inverter go bad, and of course the battery pack has a limited lifespan, but those are essentially drop-in replacements compared to what you have to go through with a modern ICE and all the crap attached to them.
I've been taught that capitalism is all about innovation... So I'm sure the perfect long life car is just around the corner, they wouldn't actually just build crappy cars just to force us in a never ending cycle of consumerism, right?... Right?
This will make starting a business (any kind) in this area another little bit more expensive, while much less affecting the existing ones. And when everybody big is sabotaging a rule, you'll see it becoming just a symbolic fine.
EDIT: I wrote a lot of stuff elaborating it further, don't read it if you are not interested in my political views.
It's counterintuitive, but regulations won't work. Those supposedly in our favor still have such side effects, being the more bothersome the smaller you are. Those openly not in our favor work more efficiently, cause the state enforcing them is an organism much more similar to corporations than to us. They understand each other better and work in symbiosis.
All these things are the consequence of patent and trademark laws. Very basic and short-term versions of these are better than none, but what we have now is killing our civilization. Not slowing it down, not making it worse, just killing it.
Competition does work when it's not fucking prohibited! And that's what we now have, competition being discouraged.
With idealized unimpeded competition everybody really gets their needs, because the demand of poor people for housing, for example, is still something that can well be provided with the value they can give back.
I don't understand people who look at our current world and think it's not regulated enough, thus it's capitalism's fault. It's regulated to sea hell. And the more regulated a country is, the more likely it is to be an oligopoly. Say, Sweden which many people like a lot. Most of its economy is owned by a few families. They are just kinda magnanimous.
Which leads us to the question why the legal and social and economic systems become what they are, that's because they are affected by power manifested in various ways. You can't vote for the world becoming better and expect it to become better.
Openness, transparency, voluntarism, right to cut off voices you don't want to hear and right to raise your voice anywhere on any matter are things that make power more distributed and competitive.
And any regulation gives additional power to people who already have enough.
My uncle bought a used car built in communist east Germany. He always emphasized how it was built like a tank to last. Capitalism is great and all, but it promotes waste. Companies have an incentive to make products that fail and need to be repurchased. Planned obsolescence is fine if it was only about people craving something better. As it stands, it’s more of a forced switch with breakable parts.
Because I lived there when the Wall came down, and I can tell you based on the huge influx of Eastern Germans who had floorboards you could see through that quality was not a priority.
More it still exists because they were literally incapable of replacing it. They weren't good quality; people just didn't have any other options. I'm sure we can make our cars last just as long if we clamp the screws tighter and ensure no one can afford to buy a new car.
I’m sure we can make our cars last just as long if we clamp the screws tighter and ensure no one can afford to buy a new car.
doubtful, if you look at the differences between a lot of soviet engineering and a lot of western engineering, the western engineering is often much nicer, but also rather temperamental in terms of long term maintenance. It's certainly possible, but it's just a different design meta. Especially if we're talking modern western equipment, which is designed to be "service life only"
Sometimes you stuck gold. Got one of those amazing Philips electric kettles 20 years ago. Works like new still. Of course they don't make them anymore.
I would love to see a car company create a vehicle platform with battery replacements central to the design of the car. Make larger packs out of smaller units so their larger models (or simply longer range models) simply use more of the smaller pack units. Recycle old packs back into making newer ones to reduce the need to mine more materials.
Sure, charge me enough on the replacement to keep this cycle going. Buying a car you know will get battery (and therefore range) upgrades as time goes on is a no-brainer.
Imagine the goodwill and free word-of-mouth advertising you would receive if you went the extra mile and open sourced all the software for the vehicle and allowed users to modify it if they wanted. Make the car not look like dogshit and I imagine you'd do well.
Look up Nio. They already have fully automatic battery swapping stations for cars leasing the pack. You literally swap the whole pack instead of charging when it's empty.
That is very interesting and their cars look appealing.
I think in the US, a company may have a better time selling the whole car including battery and still offering quick replacement when it comes time to upgrade.
I'm about to search more but do you happen to know if Nio is selling in the US?
Edit: Dang.. Not selling in the US yet. And with these new tariffs it's not looking good.
nice concept and i think framework might actually do a protoype of this kind of car when they get the investors and the funds currently they still are a small company so i really hope that they become larger in this decade
Company called vinfast opened up next to tesla in my town. Never heard of them so i checked it out and they have a battery subscription option which was interesting to me, if its like propane tank exchange systems it could be interesting, since its the battery that seems to be the. Biggest concern for people having to replace down the line. Would make a lot of sense for heavy use situations(delivery, sales that travel a lot etc and burn through leases regularily)
Which was also true of ICE cars. The Model T Ford had a major design flaw: everyone could work on it easily, parts were plentiful, and there was no reason to buy a replacement once you had it. In fact, there's enough of them still running, with an associated parts market, that you could still daily one if you wanted to.
So much so that TFLClassics on YouTube in Colorado bought a well maintained model T and drove it to the nearest dealership and had mechanics there change the oil and take it for a spin just the other week.
Back in the day you could buy whole (but small) parts, cut away the rusy one and solder in the new one (paint with anti rust paint). Did it on my cheap ass volvo 142 :-)
Maybe you can't do that any more because of complex crumple zones, but I bet we can do better. A car shouldn't just have a life span of 6-10 years.
A car shouldn't just have a life span of 6-10 years.
They don't.
My current daily driver is 18 years old. I expect at least another 10 barring an accident, maybe 30 more years as a spare vehicle. It got a new transmission at 200,000 miles. Engine seems like it'll make it to at least 400k. A replacement is $1500, far less than a new car.
Most cars in my family (approximately 30 cars) are between ten and thirty years old.
I've had 3 cars since 1996, all bought used, and I traveled for work with one. One car I sold to a family member, and it's still being driven.
It's people that choose to not drive cars this long.
Same. We're at 17 and 18 years, and we're looking for replacements because we want something more efficient. We'll probably sell them instead of junking them. We bought one at ~8yo, and the other at ~15yo, each has had minimal issues and I've done most of the work on them myself. Neither have any rust, though we live in a desert, so that's not all that surprised.
Cars absolutely can last quite a while if they're well maintained and designed well.
You can still do that. They're called body repair panels. They are usually plain metal. You have to cut out the old, weld in the new, grind them flat, prime and paint them. This isn't cost efficient if your car is worth less than the paint you'd need. The parts usually are around $100-$300 bucks (if you don't need OEM parts) but the labor is expensive. And if you do it for cheap it will look like crap.
