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EVs Could Last Nearly Forever—If Car Companies Let Them
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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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
Spoken like someone that doesn’t work on cars.
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.
Yep. Like Tesla with its large castings. Makes the cars unrepairable. EV’s are the worst at this too.
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
True, but even electrical vehicles need lubrication, cooling, breaking fluids etc.
I'm expecting that, as EVs become more common, the car maintenance industry will catch up.
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.
20-30 years for rubber...
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.
I have a 12y old car and have no such issues.
I guarantee you’ve become use to the slop in nearly all of the components.
My guess is the thermodynamics of a hot engine makes the rubber and plastic parts fail more quickly than they would otherwise.
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.
Especially if it's made by Delco. Ask me how I know.