It’s funny how I extrapolate car design sessions in my head based on software design sessions.
I sold my bmw after 15 years of multiple bmws because their design is so poor for maintenance. I had cooling system problems that required hours of labor to get to just to replace a plastic part that cost $5 where an aluminum one would cost $7.
It seems to me that bmw was designing for best case scenarios where everything goes perfectly. And since it’s supposed to go perfectly who cares if it’s $5000 to fix because it will “never break.”
Reminds me of Rube Goldberg software designs where 9 things have to happen in sequence for success.
The idea of rubust design that assumes everything breaks and you can still operate is one I value. I look for car companies (and everything I suppose) following this principle.
One would assume taxi companies etc would be willing to pay for cars that have high uptime and reliability. But I think they drive mostly the same stuff as regular people. At least one would assume they could get beefier suspension and transmission and high displacement downtuned engines.
In general new cars are still vastly better than old ones. 90:s cars rusted from everywhere after ~8 years while most cars nowadays have zinc coating and more plastic and are still mostly fine after 15 years.
> while most cars nowadays have zinc coating and more plastic and are still mostly fine after 15 years.
In your part of the world, maybe. I live in the middle of the salt belt in the US and we get about 10 years out of most cars. That's when you start seeing rust holes in the fenders around the wheels, when most of the frame has flaked away and the floor pans become involuntary structural elements.
If you're a car nut who spends extra time and money on preventive maintenance and rustproofing, you can get a few more years. But the rust comes for your car at some point anyway.
Car manufacturers know how to make the frames and bodies last longer, this is not an unsolvable manufacturing and design challenge. It's just that nobody is getting a raise for going to their boss and saying, "I know how to make the company sell slightly fewer cars..."
I don't think it's a coincidence that an enormous number of rideshare/delivery drivers drive priuses though. Reliable, not too expensive, low maintenance, and high mpg is kind of exactly what you'd expect them to look for.
It's not just BMW, it's basically all car manufacturers. There are several car maintenance YouTubers who complain about it for many brands. For example "The Car Care Nut" complains about Toyotas being badly designed for maintenance, questionable material choices, etc..
The problem is that $2 here and there adds up, and at the level of the whole car it can add hundreds, or thousands of dollars of extra cost for reliability that the user can't experience directly. For some percentage of owners the plastic part works fine for the whole time they have the car. On the other hand sturdier parts add expense in the case of an accident or replacing parts during routine maintenance.
I watch "The Car Care Nut" sometimes, as I've got a Toyota. Nothing I've ever seen there would lead me to put Toyota into the same maintenance cost/difficulty category as BMW or Mercedes.
Consumer Reports puts them at almost opposite ends of the spectrum, as well.
BMW has been the worst of the worst for a long time though. [0] is a representative example, but pretty much any "car brands ordered by upkeep cost" list will have BMW out on their own planet.
Before Teslas really took over the "high income tech worker" market, in Seattle you used to be able to get a used BMW for quite cheap, because all the Microsoft and Amazon workers would lease them and then they'd go on the used market when the lease was up. I actually considered doing this, but multiple mechanics said very bluntly, "don't, this is a trap, the maintenance costs will eat you alive".
What you're describing is the stereotype for "rich west europe" engineering culture.
Every now and then you see it leak out into some other environment, like Toyota and their pull-apart ball joints that "aren't an issue" because "the user will just service it on schedule" where it reliably causes problems in all sorts of dumb ways (because like anything else, designing stuff to within an inch of it's life takes practice).
Now, don't get me wrong, this European approach creates a lot of cool highly performant products, but it's stuff that tends to fall on it's face real good if you violate any of the assumptions made when designing it and the approach is naturally suited to some products more than others.
Here is an American example, Fox suspensions. Fox is one of the main producers of bicycle suspensions. Great products, but check their service intervals for a fork [0], 125 hours.
Now if you practice mountainbike you may ride your bike 1 to 5 times a week. Let's say you only ride once a week for 4 hours: 125 / 4 = 31, you would need to service your fork every 31 weeks. Add some few more rides and you have to service the fork twice a year.
Each service easily costs $150 if done by a bike shop. If you do it yourself (plenty of tutorials on youtube), you need expensive special tools, oil, special grease and spare o-rings and seals easily costs 30-40$ for every service. And you have to properly dispose the old oil.
My last 4 cars were BMW. I love the way they drive, but ...
I think they are optimized for the EU leasing market. 4 years, 120.000km. If you buy one for long ownership and want more out of them (they can most certainly do 400=500k km reliably), you have to take care of them from day 1. You change the maitainance schedule (which by default is set to lowering fleet lease costs and who cares beyond that), learn about and do preventive maintainance (such as replacing the entire cooling around 120k km), stricktly use BMW oil (for the additives) unless you are realy knowledgeable about it, and invest in a decent fault scanner (to lnow what is going on and not just run up expensive maintainance bills at the BMW shop).
If you think that's all too much hassle, just lease them short term or buy something else.
I was looking for this reply as well; definitely my perception that a lot of mid- to high-end cars are engineered to drive and feel great for 4-5 years, and after that it's kind of a crapshoot. You can see it as well with the various subscriptions, for app connectivity, M2M infotainment data, etc.
I never considered buying a BMW before they put out an EV (the i4, not the i3). One of the reasons is maintenance, the EV still needs some, but much less than an ICE.
Thats why they've been increasing the service interval to silly numbers. 3 years ago, 10k miles, now... 18k miles for the same model of car for the first service! Absolutely insane.
Ask a car guy and they’ll tell you that German car makers have been known to be be maintenance money sinks for 40 years.
But German car makers are really quick to add new technology. They were quick to add ABS, fuel injection, complex suspensions, etc.
But have you ever tried to make something you built to easy to maintain? You have to reroute everything, redesign your layout, add access ports, switch fittings… my god it can take almost as much time as building the thing to begin with. As an engineering requirement, it’s a high impact one.
(OK most people probably don’t build physical things they design much, but I’m sure some of you play Minecraft. Especially for those contraptions, do you add access corridors, extra access entrances, plan access into the construction? No, most people just make some tiny hole somewhere to get in. You’re just happy it works.)
And at the pace some car makers add new technology, I don’t think they budget the time to go back and do that. I think with the quick pace of EV technology as well, previously more maintenance friendly car makers are in the same boat.
> But have you ever tried to make something you built to easy to maintain?
There is still a difference between e.g. Lada 2104 which, while admittedly having some strange fastening designs, was relatively straight-forward do (partially) disassemble and reassemble, and e.g. modern Fords where you can't to take the lights off of your trunk door without fully disassembling it first. Even better, the exact jigsaw puzzle of the design varies from one modification/year to another even for what is supposedly the same car model.
BMWs at least up to the mid-2000s are really cheap and easy to maintain. Parts are pennies, service documentation is readily available, and they're reliable enough that they last a long time with basic maintenance.
Compared to stuff like Toyotas or Hondas, they practically cost nothing to keep on the road.
This is literally how all software works. Except it is thousands of instructions. Further, it is very often that programs don’t handle anything besides the happy path.
Management only cares about analyzing and completing the 'happy path' because customers only buy 'happy path'. Customers don't (with rare exceptions) buy 'unhappy path', even though statistically it is a near certainty that where they will find themselves at some point.
I guarantee no engineer wanted an expensive, difficult to replace pyro fuse. Unfortunately, it doesn't particularly matter what individual engineers want, it's what the system wants, and the system wants to make money.
>I had cooling system problems that required hours of labor to get to just to replace a plastic part that cost $5 where an aluminum one would cost $7.
If the car has 10 places where the manufacturer saves 2 dollars, that is 20 dollars a car. At around 2.5 Million cars shipped each year that is 50 Million Euros each year profit for BMW.
The entire car industry is extremely cost sensitive, especially right now, with so much global competition and little consolidation.
The issue also isn't that the part is cost optimized. The issue is that it fails.
€4000 euros plus tax to replace the module that contains the fuse. Insane.
The ford transit custom PHEV costs £4500 to replace the timing belt. Access issues mean dropping the hybrid battery and parts of the sub frame. Compare with the mk8 transit, i've done the wet belt myself on that and it requires no special tools (well, i bought a specific crank pulley puller for £20) and can be done in a day on the driveway. I believe in some markets the replacement schedule is down to 6 years for the new phev due to all the wet belt failures on older models.
So far my favourite brand to work on has been Mazda, the engineering is very thoughtfully done with consideration for repairs.
I hear a lot of praise for toyota but it's from people who haven't worked on a car themselves rather than mechanics and they must be talking about toyotas from a bygone era because i'm not impressed with a 2019 corolla engineering at all, specifically various parts of the electrical system. I believe that was the most popular car in the world at that time.
Tesla is remarkably well done. Simplicity is under rated. So much so i bought one with the intention to keep for a looooong time.
Is it insane? I'm working in this field, and I know how quickly you can come up with such a number if you are BMW and you are deathly afraid that someone will get electrocuted while working on your car, driving it or rescuing someone in a crash. It's a safety and liability issue, where they go to great lengths to actually re-certify a battery after crash. The whole thing is setup so, that even the dummy electricians in an average BMW shop can safely certify that this battery is still safe. It's a lot easier to kill yourself (or someone else) when working on a EV Battery than wet belt. Also a lot harder to repair said battery than wet belt. And that goes for all EVs and manufacturers that actually care about people (Tesla, demonstrably does not).
If you and BMW are correct - if we take it for a fact that a simple fender-bender can make batteries develop life-threatening faults, which absolutely require a 4k euro inspection that involves complete disassembly and specialist equipment, then that means that EVs are unsuitable for public use.
So either all EVs need to be scrapped forever, or BMW needs to engineer a more tractable solution to the problem, or BMW is overreacting and overcharging customers.
Yes, it is insane. It's a fuse. They must have some stats on how often those things need replacing and it should have been accessible. The customer has - when they buy the car - absolutely no way of knowing what kind of surprises like this there are hidden in the vehicle and besides, it kills the second hand market so you can only trade your vehicle to a BMW dealership where they can absorb those costs for a fraction of what it will cost an end user. BMW is a crap brand in spite of their reputation, we've had one leased Mini in our company and it is the very last time we do business with BMW, that thing was more in the shop than out of it with electrical issues. A friend had pretty much every BMW ever made since he got wealthy enough to afford them (car enthusiast) and his experience is much the same, but he keeps buying them.
Many people drive older cars worth less than £4000.
Sticking to old/cheap cars seems like an increasingly good option with so many scare stories about the pain and extreme expense of getting modern cars, particularly EVs, repaired.
And the impending ban on new ICE vehicles seems likely to lead to more older cars being kept on the road for a lot longer.
It's not excusable to do this to the product because of some hand wavey napkin math about liability.
Understand how people will interact with your product and then use that information to avoid doing things like routing power where firefighters want to cut and you'll accomplish the same thing without a stupid expensive hair trigger fuse.
The article and comment aren't debating whether the fuse plays an essential role. There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error.
Making it a very complicated and expensive fix isn't what's saving your rescuer or mechanic from getting electrocuted while working around your car.
> I hear a lot of praise for toyota but it's from people who haven't worked on a car themselves rather than mechanics and they must be talking about toyotas from a bygone era because i'm not impressed with a 2019 corolla engineering at all
Toyota hybrid powertrains are more reliable than any other company, but other than that they are no longer special.
I've got a '91 Toyota Carina and can attest that it's very easy to work on, my friend and I pulled the engine and gearbox in under two hours with hand tools, but I can't really speak for anything modern.
As a lifelong Toyota fan, I agree they are miserable to work on, especially the electronics. I have a stoplight switch issue in my 86 (from being rear-ended) that I have neglected because it would require pulling out the trunk assembly to fix.
The engineering praise comes from the fact that if you are taking care of it, you will probably never have to work on it until it's well into 6-digit mileage. This remains consistent through pretty much their entire line with the one exceptional black mark really being the RAV4.
> As a lifelong Toyota fan, I agree they are miserable to work on, especially the electronics.
I had a Toyota Yaris a couple of decades ago. Very reliable, very few issues. But some routine things like replacing headlights were completely bonkers. You had to wiggle your hand between some sharp metal parts to unscrew the back end of the armature. Sheesh, would it have been that prohibitive to add a few cm of extra space there?
I occasionally like to see what the highest mileage Toyota Prius I can find for sale is. They are obviously used as taxis and it's common to find one for sale with half a million miles.
Usually at that point someone puts in a new hybrid battery and sells it to someone else starting out driving Ubers.
I am affacted by this as well: the rear knuckle uniball bearing was broken after 3 years (Achsschenkel). Many MY here in Europe have this issue, due to bad parts or too hard suspension.
But there are two other things that make it a bit unfair for Tesla in comparison to other brands:
Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten breaks - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking instead of the real breaks. Simple solution is to force breaking from time to time (I.e. breaking in neutral). Another aspect is, that all the other brands have a mandatory inspection from the manufacturer before the cars will be tested by the independent check. This avoids that they will fail it, because the car will be repaired before it is checked by the independent inspection. This is not mandatory for Teslas.
I am no Tesla fanboy. But let’s face the truth. Teslas leave factory with end of line check. Then they are driven more than average cars for 3 years without any maintenance. Then go for check. And surprise surprise, the first model Ys were not well made. I bet with 1000-1500€ maintenance cost over these 3 years the TUV result would be dramatically different.
Btw, my petrol car had ugly rusty rear brakes. No way to pass the check. The car had manual handbrake and I used in every highway exit to slow down and removed rust.
I don't know how "German engineering" became a badge of honor. Probably from the people who continually roll new leases every 2 years.
Even 25 years ago working on German vehicles compared to the Japanese counter-parts was a harrowing endeavor.
Germans are excellent at making cool flashy features...that rely on 16 moving parts that cost $700 each, and need to remove the engine exhaust manifold to access one screw to release part #15.
They get a 10 for "Wow!" factor, a 0 for "well thought out", and a 10 for "extremely over complicated". Unsurprisingly this mindset has carried over into EVs now too.
>>Probably from the people who continually roll new leases every 2 years.
100% this. BMW's own stats say that something like 90% of buyers of new BMWs keep them for 3 years or less. The fact that parts like oil pans are made out of plastic or that lately all their gearboxes have the oil drain port completely removed is just irrelevant to the buyers because none of them care about keeping the car for a decade like people used to. And the collapse of second hand prices due to these catastrophic repair costs is not really a problem for them either.
>>Germans are excellent at making cool flashy features...that rely on 16 moving parts that cost $700 each
To be completely fair - Mercedes used to do this in their S Class and also it would work for decades despite the complexity. That's German Engineering. But that quality has been missing across all German brands for a good while, it pops up every and now then in specific components that are still extremely well designed and reliable, but it's not standard across the entire vehicle.
BMW always had a reputation for frequent & expensive repairs, even as far back as the 1970s (although I guess "typical" BMW drivers aren't the most careful either, so maybe that's also relevant...).
This reminded me of the video about the Tesla door handles, where its explained how they redesigned the retracting door handles of the Model S from having a bunch of switches and mechanical parts to just a motor + a position sensor:
Not just BMW. I've been watching (and enjoying) Mat Armstrong's youtube videos where he restores crash damaged luxury cars, one of them was a Lamborghini Revuelo. The car's battery was completely intact, but the safety fuse blew up in the BMS and despite replacing the entire module, the car wouldn't talk to the battery and wouldn't even start. Eventually he had to buy an entire 30K battery, and even then, the car wouldn't start because the car was so new Lamborghini themselves still didn't have the diagnostics tool to clear the crash code.
PHEVs are great, I've driven two in the past 6 years, but in most cases, you're one airbag deployment away from a very, costly repair and in 99% of cases, a totaled car.
Interestingly I’ve seen YouTubers replace the fuse in a Tesla for about £40 and a few hours of labour (it’s under the rear seats). Maybe something they’re doing right.
You can replace the fuse (not that easly) but for approximately the same price in a BMW. You do have to put in more work but the problem is with re-certifying the battery. Tesla does not care if the battery was damaged in the crash, they will (more or less) happily re-enable it. BMW decided that the only safe way is to re-certify the whole battery. I'm not saying it's the right decision, I think they over did it and VW does it better - but I do understand WHY they chose to do it so, and the WHY is not nearly as outrageous as a lot of people here think.
After reading the blog post I had the same thought. Doing an oil change on my F650GS motorcycle required removing the plastics, draining the oil from both the top and bottom of the motorcycle, removing a plate on the side of the engine after install the BMW specified oil redirection funnel, extracting the filter and reinstalling. The oil funnel had a legit BMW part number. Most of us either just made a mess or used a piece of a milk jug. Probably 15 fasteners and 2 drain plugs.
Comparable process on my Sv650: drain plug out. Drain plug in. Screw off filter. Screw on filter. Fill.
Not too bad though all things considered, there are worse examples out there, like my old KTM adventure bike.
Interestinlgy, the BMW R1200/1250/1300GS is actually simpler due to the boxer engine design.
You win some, you lose some. Comparable process on my E46 and E39: Drain plug out (potentially flipping a little dust cover out of the way). Drain plug in. Stand up because everything else happens up top. Unscrew filter housing. Replace filter element. Replace filter housing. Fill.
I won't argue with non EV engineering, but high voltage stuff in an EV is a lot harder problem to make safe in event of a crash and subsequent repair. I come out as a BMW apologist, but Vanja (evclinic Head boss) likes to be overly dramatic. BMW (and almost all other brands) are very afraid that someone will die when repairing/driving/rescuing someone from an EV and they go to great (and expensive) lengths to make sure the battery and the vehicle is as safe as possible. The fuse here is a small part, checks and certifications that go into making the battery truly safe (in scale, all edge cases ect) are a lot more than just the fuse. And that is expensive.
Thanks for pointing that out - at first I thought this was an act designed to turn cheap repairs impossible to drive new car sales, and force people into BMWs hugely expensive service network, but after learning this is for my own good, I'm relieved and happy to learn BMW is looking out for me.
Exactly, these are intentional decisions for German cars. They’re gorgeous, over-engineered, cutting edge pieces of machinery and the expense of being practical or repairable. The common understanding for decades has been if you’re buying a German luxury car as a daily driver and repair costs are something you even have to consider, you’re buying the wrong car.
Old BMW is nothing like new BMW - I know a few older folks who drive 20+year old BMWs and Audis with 500k+ km they drove off the salon parking lot - not because they can't afford a new one, but they like the current ones.
These old cars were engineered to a high standard, and designed to be maintained - while maintenance isn't cheap, with proper servicing and car, they could last forever.
This is entirely different - in the past few years BMW has become infamous for using low quality plastic fasteners that become brittle and break eventually, and all around penny-pinching everywhere.
It seems they even took the logical next step and installed draconian repair and service prevention measures.
They took the stance that once the car is out of the warranty period and isn't brough to an official service center, they stand to make no profit on it, so it should end up in the scrapyard in the shortest time possible.
This proves to me they don't understand their own market - people who buy expensive (70k+ish EUR) BMWs are all financial wizards who lease their cars, tax optimize them to the gills through legally grey methods and other schemes, and then resell them at the end of the lease.
This means they're able to drive them for like 300-400 euro a month cost - but only because of resale value. If they kill resale, then people won't buy them.
The amount of people who will put down 70k+ in cash at the salon is exceedingly small.
It was not always so. The E30 I used to drive - a 1986 model 325 - was a marvelous little thing, not only a joy to drive but a pleasure to work on. Its engineers had been just as thoughtful about its maintenance as its operation.
The car was 20 years old when I had it, but still ran like a top. I'm sure I'd have been driving it for many more years had my ex not run it into the back of a tow truck.
They have not over-engineered anything in this case - they have deliberately taken user-hostile actions, going out of the way to prevent repair, and turn cheap repairs into very expensive ones.
- They welded the case: even the engine block that experiences combustion pressures and temps is just bolted together - why?
- They even outdid (pre-R2R) Apple in every aspect - proprietary components, everything put together on the same PCB, with third party replacements impossible, replacement parts locked out cryptographically, and 'anti-theft' (anti-repair) systems installed so even authorized dealers are at a risk of bricking the vehicle - and third party shops can't even repair it.
- They are German so in the EU they are above the law (or more accurately they write the law) - but it'd be nice if us Europeans had their own Louis Rossmans and actionable right to repair laws, and the EU did something beyond bullying foreign tech companies, and applied the same level of scrutiny to domestic ones as well.
This is a comical level of evil - they know that due to the proprietary components (that you can't get at an auto parts store), when these vehicles become 10-15 years old, they will be either uneconomical to repair, with repair costs exceeding the value of the vehicle, no third party parts, no possibility of third-party service - people will resort to stealing these cars to source replacement parts.
So they installed a system that bricks the vehicle should it detect tampering - which might happen if somebody tries to fix their own vehicles.
And let me reiterate, Germans are above the law in the EU - the only reason Dieselgate became a huge scandal is that the US found out about it - please, American friends, could you do another 'gate' about this - its for the good of all.
Yet somehow adaptive cruise is a rarity on the BMWs out there, often requiring an option package that few dealers spec. (Though I think this may be finally starting to change with the 2025 model year).
I think it's a German thing to be honest. I've wrenched on Mercedes Benz and VW personally, and I've heard horror stories from Audi as well.
My merc exposure is both on very old (70s) and modern. So I would actually argue that over engineering shit is in their DNA, they don't know how not to do it.
My brother had an old W123 body Merc for a while. It had fucking vacuum lines running to all the doors for central locking. I had a SsangYong with an old-school Merc OM617 diesel engine in it. Great engine, and it was relatively easy to work on, but the oil filter was positioned such that you can't replace it without spilling oil all over the engine bay. Infuriating!
I love this take. Thanks for sharing it. Puts into words why sometimes I can spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve a system: trying to save future effort.
People get upset when a BMW is expensive to repair, but they're misunderstanding the sophisticated German engineering. You're not supposed to repair it. You're supposed to throw it away and buy a new one.
In Germany BMW's target market are company cars. Having the company pay for your car has tax benefits here even if you also use it outside work, so the company giving you a nice car that gets replaced by a new model every three years is a sought-after benefit. Those cars are indeed sold to the next idiot before they develop any issues
I missed the memo when putting everything together on one impossible to repair PCB and then gluing/sealing it permanently became 'sophisticated German engineering' instead of bottom-shelf junk.
The sophisticated engineering works (or worked?) mostly fine if the piece of machinery is operated in the extremely narrow "just right" operating ranges the sophisticated engineer defined. To much dust in the air? One too many potholes? Not the premium brand oil? There goes your sophisticated machinery.
Times have changed and now the fuse replacement is not just a mater of over engineering, something someone put together thinking it's a technically perfect process. It became a revenue stream. Car designed also by accountants.
The article misses to explain why this is an EU problem, not just a BMW problem. Is the problem described caused by a specific EU regulation (which?) or is mentioning the EU just click bait? (Honest question.)
It is a BMW problem and the rest is clickbait. If you own a BMW you know all this as it has been the case for over decades.
It's also not a eu thing as all manufacturers are locking things up, Ford and other US brands are trying as much as all other manufacturers. They just haven't reached BMW levels yet.
UN Regulation No. 155, and 156, and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) are requiring car manufacturers to implement cryptographic validation that allows only authorized software from the manufacturer to be run.
This 2022 BMW X1 my wife drives is the last BMW we will ever own. £395 for an oil change. £180 for brake fluid. £500 a year road tax.
Meanwhile my 2011 Prius continues to pass its MOT without fail, needs just the usual very affordable consumables, gets 50% higher MPG and actually has a larger cargo capacity than the X1.
1. The EU de facto mandates the car manufacturers have to develop and sell cars that produce less CO2 (mostly by the way of fines for higher polluting vehicles). This led to the development of hybrid ('mild-hybrid', 'full-hybrid', and PHEV) and EV vehicles.
2. The manufacturers tend to both complicate the technology and lock the stuff down, so it's not easily repairable. This has its own enviromental price, and EV Clinic says this is not accounted for. That's not completely fair as on one hand there are EU repairability directives that address this but on the other we still want to have some degreee of market competition and in the end the market should punish those manufacturers (as it is already doing, I think).
One thing I want to add is that the EU also mandates real-world-fuel-consumption-measurement (OBFCM) devices in new cars and if that is followed to its logical conclusion and the manufacturers pressure is resisted, this will mean the end of hybrids as the real-world data is horrible for them.
>Lot of vehicles designed and produced in Europe — ICE, PHEV, and EV — have effectively become a missleading ECO exercise. Vehicles marketed as “CO₂-friendly” end up producing massive CO₂ footprints through forced services, throw-away components, high failure rates and unnecessary parts manufacturing cycles, overcomplicated service procedures, far larger than what the public is told. If we are destroying our ICE automotive industry based on EURO norms, who is calculating real ECO footprint of replacement part manucfacturing, unecessary servicing and real waste cost?
>We saw this years ago on diesel and petrol cars:
DPF failures, EGR valves, high-pressure pumps, timing belts running in oil, low quality automatic transmissions, and lubrication system defects. Everyone calculates the CO₂ footprint of a moving vehicle — nobody calculates the CO₂ footprint of a vehicle that is constantly broken and creating waste.
More like a weird rant that reduces EVs to only existing due to the environment. But they’re just better cars lol. And the poor reliability of european cars applies regardless of propulsion type
This makes me feel that peak car was 2010 ish, when, when engines were powerful, cheap, and not too polluting, but also not overly complex.
Spare parts were small, cheap, and easily accessible too (atleast for my toyota)
I dread being forced to upgrade, not out of disdain for the environment, but the fact that I will spend more money, on a less reliable, less "mine" car, and more something big daddy government wants.
I would argue peak car was a little earlier, maybe the 2000-2010 decade. Fewer screens to fail, analog buttons and dials. Airbags, and ABS for safety but without the additional computers/screens.
Entirely agree, although I think it varies by make / model. Roughly look for whenever a particular car got OBDII, which makes diagnostics way easier (and was kinda the perfect level of digitization, again in my opinion), through (as you say) whenever they started digitizing the cockpit and/or (which oddly - maybe? - coincide, in my experience) manufacturers stopped considering ease of maintenance in engineering decisions. In general late-1990s through 2005-2010. Cars since that decade (or so) are more sophisticated, at the expense of far, far shorter useful lifespans.
Nobody is currently selling new, small pickups. Maybe if the Slate materializes, that'll prove the market and we'll see them again.
In the meantime, 200x Ford Ranger or 200x Chevy S-10 are the last of the small pickups where you can get a 6 foot bed and a single row of seats. (Afaik)
I sold my small white pickup once, and ended up with a different small white pickup a few years later. I do enough (small) truck things that having a truck on hand just in case is worth it for me; but even with minimal miles per year there's certainly added expense from maintenance some of which ends up being time based, registration fees, and incremental costs for liability insurance on another vehicle. For quite a while, my family vehicles were a 4-door car/wagon and a small pickup, but that doesn't work for everyone; I feel better served with a minivan, a 4-door phev, and a pickup (and a silly old rear engined vw van with only the front seats, mostly for midlife crisis, but also handy for picking up large items that don't want to be inside for transport)
I've felt similarly recently, and I think those days are fleeting if not gone. Ford recently talked about replatforming their entire range, which would include basic trucks at more reasonable prices, but there's not really a market for work trucks in the way there used to be, and they're gone in favor of the luxury ones with small beds. It is annoying. There is an interesting startup that I can't remember the name of that touts an 8 foot bed (which is great) in the chassis footprint of a Mini Cooper. I don't think I saw pricing, but I would snatch one of those up.
CAFE standards have made that pretty hard. The trucks got bigger to hold more complex engine setups to boost mileage, coinciding with preferences shifting to super crew cabs because buying a new truck is basically the same price as buying a luxury vehicle.
I did own a 1994 Dodge ram up until a few years ago, but it needed new brake lines and there was so much rust coming off the frame I honestly wasn't sure I trusted it anymore, and the cost of the brake lines was probably more than it was worth at that point.
The most expensive tooling was the two floor jacks I purchased to make the process easier. The software needed was available from the manufacturer for a reasonable fee. The battery pack itself was surprisingly modular and simple to dismantle for repair.
I don't many things GM has done, but (at least back in 2010) they did a good job of letting owners do their own work.
I have no info on Tesla batteries. But, just as a point of reference, you can now buy knock-down 48V battery "kits" from China for under $90/kWh. They include everything you need: case, cells, BMS, circuit breaker/isolator, and fire suppression. Assembly takes about an hour. (The raw prismatic cells without the rest go for ~$50/kWh).
Shipping from China to the west coast runs an additional $30/kWh due to the weight of the cells and volume of the box (shipped in several boxes to reduce cost). So you can have a 300 lbs, 15 kWh 48V battery shipped to your door for about $120/kWh).
High voltage EV batteries need additional components (like HV contractors) due to stacking so many cells in series, but it seems entirely plausible that Tesla's economies of scale allow them to offer a 75 kWh battery for $10k (~$133/kWh) plus installation.
This is like comparing a Casio to a Rolex. Both do roughly the same thing, but the markets are completely different. Nobody buys a high-end luxury car like a Taycan because it makes financial sense. The manufacturers know this and price everything accordingly.
That is such a terrible example. Why are you comparing Teslas to cars where the battery pack costs more than the Tesla, instead of the myriad of competitively priced models?
It's like the S60, VW W12, old V12 Continentals, etc. If it's expensive to maintain no one wants to buy it off you so you get hit with massive depreciation costs. You can get a 20y/o 'no issues' 500+hp V12 Continental for 10k where I'm at. They've had a brutal cost/year and cost/mile.
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.
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.
OP did not say they would not travel on electric trains or unicycles or elevators or electric forklifts or electric container ships. They said they don't want an EV. The things that modern carmakers make complicated.
EV is indeed easy. Safe and reliable EV is hard. Vehicle environment is hostile to electric components, where they are exposed to vibration, dirt, and moisture. Even if you get "safe" chemistry in the battery cells of an Alibaba e-bike, it only means the cells themselves are less likely to explode in a chemical fire. It still has enough current to melt metall and set off a regular fire. And in the best case it will just stop working and good luck repairing some random components, which might have been from a short production run and there are no spares in the existence.
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
My Hybrid F-150 is so freaking complex. They basically seem to have swapped many components over to electrical drive (like the F-150 Lightning), but they still have to slap all of the ICE components in there as well.
Yeah, modern ICE is a massively complex control system problem, requiring so much more compute than EV, just to meet regulations.
Here's a funny example: the fuel vapor recovery system. It stores fuel vapors from the gas tank, that otherwise would have leaked into the air, in a canister of activated carbon. When under appropriate driving/environmental conditions, it opens valves and feeds the vapor into the intake stream, so it's burned.
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.
As they point out, the Tesla pyro fuse (at least on a Model S) is a cheap part. However, in some model years it's on top of the pack, which means you have to drop the pack to get to it. And, from memory, it's a 10 year lifespan part. However, on other Model S cars, it's easily accessible from the bottom.
I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars. Obviously, right-to-repair and allowing access to documentation and tools for independent shops is a a necessary but not sufficient step.
I shudder to think at some of the other possibilities -- heavy-handed attempts to regulate how much specific repairs can cost.
Maybe mandating the sale of manufacturer-provided extended warranties for no more than x% the cost of the vehicle purchase price would be an incentive to keep repair cost in check?
On the Model 3, you have to drop the HV battery pack to replace the brake lines that prematurely rust in wintery climates, so Tesla is not fully immune either.
And check some videos of what you have to do to swap the door-actuating motor (which gets guaranteed water ingress) in the front doors (yes, not the gullwings) of a Model X.
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)
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.
One would expect a plug in hybrid to be the most complex of all the vehicle types. It has all of the complexity of an EV combined with all of the complexity of a gas burner.
Does that make a difference in this regard? If so, how, and is it an unavoidable penalty for PHEVs? I can see PHEVs having a complexity penalty from having an IC engine over and above the EV components, but that does not seem to be the source of the problems here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was getting the 12v battery in my car replaced the other day, and my mechanic told me I'm lucky not to have a BMW, which apparently uses lithium ion batteries that cost $1,200 to replace. I assume they last much longer than lead acid batteries, but I do wonder what the value is to the driver. Is this just a way to juice the maintenance bills, to keep dealers happy?
Compare this car to the Toyota RAV4 PHEV which in some ways is simpler than a gas powered RAV4 (no alternator, no transmission) but maintains the same ease of maintainability and cheap parts availability as the base RAV4 (makes sense, they sold >4M of them).
PHEVs are complicated tech so I figured I would choose one with a proven design (Prius -> Prius Prime -> RAV4 Prime).
If you love cars or Top Gear, watch Mat Armstrong on YouTube. Mat restores crash damaged cars. The BS he has to go through because car manufacturers either won't sell him parts, won't sell him repair manuals, and unnecessarily cryptographically lock parts to the VIN is sometime heartbreaking. He has run across this pyro fuse issue many times. Sometimes he has even has to buy two cars just to repair one because of this nonsense. Like the article points out it just leads to more waste and it has to contribute to higher insurance rates for us all.
Bumping this. Mat went through the exact same crazy process with the Revuelto. Audi/Lamborghini overengineers the heck out of these cars its really absurd.
Meanwhile, if you work on old Landrovers from the Defender 90/110 to early RR L322, you need this: https://rangerovers.pub/downloads/rave.zip (500MB zip, PDFs of all service and user manuals).
Even if you don't work on them, grab yourself a copy. You never know when you might need to know how to rebuild a Borg Warner transfer box or ZF 4HP24 gearbox.
100%. I watch him literally just to see how much bullshit he has to go through to get modern cars running again against the wishes of the manufacturers.
I get it, though. Cars are becoming like iPhones where the manufacturers are totally against you making any repairs at all. We've just grown used to cars being one of the most commonly repairable items we buy. At some point in the near future car ownership will probably diminish significantly as robotaxis flood the market and the manufacturers will become even less interested in self-repairs.
The funny one is the Ferrari he is working on now where not even the Ferrari techs could figure out why the car wouldn't start, as they couldn't get the car to spit out codes and they didn't know why it didn't do that.
The goal is to eliminate outright vehicle sales, and move everyone to leases and rentals? Just like in software? Safety is important, too (nudge nudge wink wink).
Given that speed and alcohol are the top two causes of traffic deaths, mandatory SAE J3016 Level 4 self-driving would prevent a lot of deaths. But of course, it will make the price of a "safe" automobile many times the annual income of 99% of North American and EU drivers.
Even a FAANG HENRY who would buy a BMW i7 M70 won't be able to afford a "safe" automobile in a "safe" country.
I wouldn't mind if cars were so expensive only the top 2-5% of earners could afford them, but we need viable alternatives to driving. We have dismantled our transportation infrastructure at the pleasure of car companies. Now you have drivers that cannot afford their cars but must drive anyways. You also have people who are unfit to drive that are forced to do so.
Self-driving is a bandaid for a problem that is made by cars. It doesn't address the hundreds of other issues caused by them. Also it adds to the incremental squeezing of the middle class out of existence.
It seems to me an analogy that as a product is increasingly complex, the ultimate consumer/demander of it becomes more and more disconnected from maintenance, operations, etc. considerations and whether that system is well designed and serviceable.
Cars of a past generation were able to be owner-maintained (or understood), and therefore the owner had some interest in knowing that it was easy to maintain and would buy (at least partly) on that premise. Something that was a nightmare to maintain would not be so easily bought because the owners would soon realize how hard they were to fix.
Now, with a car that is so complicated, the owner is far distant from being the fixer of it until years later seeing a surprise repair bill. Even the maintainers are not even directly knowledgeable about the design and how to repair. And the information about its maintainability is a low factor on the buying considerations list. But by then you've already given the company the money and incentive to keep on building this way. And rarely (or extremely/too "laggily" does that information feed back).
It seems to me enterprise software systems have this problem as well.
Right to repair laws should cover this, and / or have a very clear procedure for e.g. consumers and mechanics to report these anti-repairability practices. Even if they're not on purpose (which I doubt, but have no evidence of), the author of this post clearly explains what the problem and what the various hurdles are.
I get that from a safety point of view, certain things should be checked and / or replaced after a crash, especially when volatiles like batteries or fuel tanks are involved. But they shouldn't cost thousands.
I am in Germany. I will keep my 14-year-old Renault gasoline car roadworthy and use it for as long as possible. When it is no longer economically viable to drive a gasoline-powered car, I expect there to be electric cars that cost a four-figure sum in euros when new, are virtually maintenance-free, and come with a guarantee that a replacement battery will be available at a reasonable price (preferably from third-party suppliers) that I can replace myself without having to go to a specialist workshop. I hope that there will be manufacturers who recognize the need for such vehicles and will meet that demand. I will definitely not pay 20,000 or 50,000 euros or whatever for a skateboard with a battery and car bodywork.
Articles like this confirm my opinion on the subject. What annoys me most is that we argued in favor of electric cars because of climate protection. I am in favor of climate protection, but when I read this article, I just feel like I'm being taken for a ride. Politicians should not have simply decided to phase out combustion engines. They should have imposed further constraints on the automotive industry with regard to low purchase costs, durability, reusability, and affordable maintenance.
Yeah just don’t go to a BMW dealer, and save 50+% of the cost. I recently had numerous repairs done for €2k on my 2er, and the dealer had quoted me €5k. 1k for a part isn’t that outlandish, you just can’t go to a dealer that bills you €300 per hour.
my VW Multivan's gearbox needed a replacement. 17000 CHF, I kid you not. Luckily VW Germany paid for the whole ordeal, but I wouldn't have been happy to pay that...
I cannot find any explanation for that this is the result of EU regulation. Tesla should also adhere to the same EU regulation and they manage to do this without the "extra CO2" costs as the article states itself. This article smells like FUD to get attention.
There are tons of used BMWs on the used market here in the states. They don't hold their value because everyone knows that some stupid thing is wrong with them that either can't be fixed or is so ludicrously costly to fix that it would be more than the whole entire car is worth. BMW is a shit company, doesn't matter if it is ICE or EV or whatever it is, they're intentionally made to be impossible to repair cheaply. It would be so easy to build "open" hardware and have onboard diagnostics built into the cars, but no.
>"Everyone calculates the CO₂ footprint of a moving vehicle — nobody calculates the CO₂ footprint of a vehicle that is constantly broken and creating waste."
Did anyone think politicians are there for a common good? They are there to turn us unto sheep to shear. Their primitive lies and propaganda and us being idiots are their main instrument
>Did anyone think politicians are there for a common good?
The problem is that a whole bunch of people who know the politicians are not concerned with anything in the same ballpark as the common good will lie to your face about it when the thing the politicians are pushing suits them for the next 5min even if the long term consequences are obvious.
The politicians behavior is just a symptom of the problem.
At this point, when I look at ANY electric vehicle, I'm seeing basically what Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow warned about.
Its a DMCA DRM hellscape, full of equipment that was sold (with a state registration no less), and these car companies still maintain remote control and real ownership indefinitely.
Mercedes EQS won't "let" owners open the hood.
BMW "rented heated seats" bullshit.
GMC Hummer EV Requires dealer-level authentication to reset the 12V battery or perform certain repairs.
Tesla uses proprietary diagnostic tools and encrypted software.
Will I consider an EV? Sure. Am I going to place primary buying decision on reparability and full ownership? Damn straight I will. If that means I buy hybrids and/or ICE vehicles. I want something I can maintain without running to the vendor to ask permission, or even "giving" them the ability to say no.
This is absolutely not limited to EVs, the same enshittification is in a lot of ICEs and hybrids as well. Today's cars won't be driving in 2040 when a student could buy it for a grand wit 300 000 miles on the clock, and keep fixing it himself in order to save money.b
Owning a car (or device) you have "purchased" is getting more and more difficult to achieve. So is owning of anything at all that can or is allowed to connect online. You basically pay for it in order to rent it because you no longer control its lifetime.
I have a BMW PHEV. There's a 3 cyl turbo engine with an auto box at the front and a 90hp electric motor and 7.6kwh battery at the back. Most of the new ones just have a more traditional layout with an electric motor built into the autobox.
You get more elec range than a hybrid but less than a full EV.
Now that it's cold I start my commute on engine to get the car warmed up with 'free' heat then switch to EV later. If I want to beat someone off the lights I use both together.
Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle. It's the most complex drivetrain you can possibly buy with a full gas engine and transmission mated to a full EV with external charging support.
I can't speak for other PHEV drivetrains but the Toyota PHEV design isn't that complex. It uses an ingenious planetary CVT with a small gas engine instead of a full gas engine and regular transmission.
Also, because the gas engine mostly runs at its most efficient RPM, there is little stress on it so it runs very reliably.
I think it continues to be under-appreciated how much of a lead Tesla still has in EVs. Even BMW can't make something that is practical.
First people said "competition is coming" for about a decade. Now the competition has finally half arrived, but it's still so far behind. Perhaps the closest is BYD, but most BYD drivers would prefer to be driving a Tesla.
I think Nissan is a bit underrated here. I’m leasing an Ariya which has been great (including its charging curve, which is better than much of the competition) and feels more premium than you’d expect from the brand (to the point that the top trim is sometimes referred to as a “baby Infiniti”) with things like dual pane windows to cut down on road noise, as well as a proper heat pump where many still only have resistive heaters.
The 2026 Leaf takes many of the Ariya’s good qualities and one ups them at one of the lowest price points in the industry.
And both can be parked in spots that no model of Tesla will fit. The 3, Y, etc aren’t even a consideration for me since they won’t fit my garage. Tesla badly needs a proper small hatch option.
> The 2026 Leaf takes many of the Ariya’s good qualities and one ups them at one of the lowest price points in the industry.
Still costs $30k+ USD for base trim. Chinese cars are going for sub-$20k. Few governments want a repeat of the Japanese disruption of US/European car manufacturing, so they were banned before getting the opportunity.
I have a theory about EVs - they don't allow much engineering range.
To have a broadly usable car, you need at least 50+ kWh battery, 100kWish fast charge, and basically almost everything you need in a big car. If you don't have it your car is not really usable as the main car.
Motors are small and efficient so they are not big cost drivers.
Small cars, such as 'cheap' B-segment cars still need all this stuff. If you look at the weight of something like a Renault 5, you find its not lighter than a Model 3. The manufacturer still pays for all that stuff, but the car's supposed to be cheap so they cant pass on the cost.
But in a small car, you have packaging problems with having to fit the battery pack, meaning you need to build them taller and draggier - that means your highway range decreases, and the big weight means big (and compact) crash structures, which again are more expensive.
In contrast, in a Model 3, you can make the pack thinner, design a more aerodynamic shape, have the big roomy frunk as a crash structure.
Your extra cost ist like tens of centimeters of steel and glass, but customers will happily pay more because its an upmarket car.
You can't really go beyond that, because the acceleration and torque is crazy even at the base level and at high speeds your range will still suck.
This basically means imo that the Model 3 and Y are at the ideal intersection of what the technology's good and bad at, and market positioning.
That's why I don't think Tesla will make a C-segment car.
Lots of the traditional car manufacturers now have good options: Renault, Nissan, Kia, and Hyundai's EVs seem to be particularly well regarded. I'd definitely opt for any of those over a Tesla given Tesla's reputation with regard to quality and repair costs.
If you ignore cost, then Tesla's cars are probably still better at this point, but the gap doesn't seem that large.
Even BMW has a few electrical cars that aren't half bad. The main problem is that they are compromise cars that can be sold as ICE, PHEV, or full EV.
That means more complexity, sub optimal design, less efficiency, etc. However, competition is indeed brutal right now. Tesla did something that only some other manufacturers have managed to copy so far: make cars that are EV only from the ground up. Love them or hate them, they don't make any design compromises to allow space for a combustion engine, a generator, or whatever. There's no room for a transmission, a fuel tank, or even an engine compartment. That's where the Frunk goes. The result is a car that's simpler, more efficient, and more optimal for what it does.
BYD did the same. Kia and Hyundai are having a lot of success with their electric only line of cars. And in the EU Renault and the Stellantis group have some decent and competitive low cost models on the market. Tesla's advantage is rapidly evaporating here.
Japanese car makers have been more conflicted on this. But Nissan's collaboration with Renault is giving them access to the right tech to adjust course. And even Toyota is now using a lot of Chinese made drive trains and components to finally offer EVs that are actually not that bad. The danger is of course that "made in Japan" has very limited value in this world if all your core tech is effectively Chinese and European. That's something that might change in the next years of course.
Cost wise, buying a compromise car means having to deal with more that can break, more components that may need replacing, and a lot of increasingly obsolete parts and components that are no longer being modernized. Combustion engine R&D ground to a halt about fifteen years ago. All those fuel injection systems, and other computer intensive hardware that keeps them going is aging fast and not really being invested in a lot at this point. Sourcing replacement parts might get harder and more expensive over time.
> Tesla's reputation with regard to quality and repair costs.
Tesla lives in the limelight 100x more than any other car brand. Every mistake or possible scandal gets insanely amplified. They are by far the most repairable EV car and have the most durable engines. What they do not tell you is that in an EV the engine giving out is the more common scenario not the battery pack.
as long as you don’t compare them to any car. teslas in 2025 belong in a museum lol
I own tesla s 2014, my neighbour has 2025, same car. tesla x was cool… in 2017. tesla 3 is like a worse looking kia and model y is like if you took tesla 3 and pumped some air in it.
Seeing the BYD trucks and other BYD vehicles around where I live in Australia, as well as the other Chinese and Korean brands, they outnumber the Teslas on the street now.
BYD targets a different market. Tesla should compete with the likes of Polestar, Rivian, maybe Porsche if they dare but I'd take any of those before a Tesla any day of the week.
I wouldn't understate BYD, but Tesla did play a massive role in helping build China's domestic EV ecosystem because Tesla also worked on building a supplier ecosystem in China, which also helped incubate much of the Chinese ecosystem.
That said, BYD is outcompeting most other Chinese players as well, and it can be argued that this is due to the fact that BYD is also a private sector player unlike most of it's domestic competitors.
The only competitor in China that can compete against BYD is SAIC - an SOE owned by Shanghai's government.
That said, the EV glut has become a significant headache from a local government fiscal perspective - the majority of Chinese automotive companies are owned by state and local governments - a large number of whom ended up spending eye bleeding amounts of yuan on EVs despite no competitive advantage, and it's these state and local governments that are now increasingly holding the bag - which Chinese market regulators have increasingly raised red flags about [0] (and I myself foreshadowed on HN a couple times [1][2]).
Which is kind of exciting if you don't care about IP law.
Likewise their CR series/Fuxing high speed trains seem to be quite nice. They were spawned off their experience working on Euro/Japanese trains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuxing_(train)
From what I can tell the Chinese are targeting the bottom of the market with cars that are essentially disposable. The ones to watch, IMO, are Hyundai/Kia. If they can sort out the reliability issues there's a lot of potential there.
Honestly I'm cautiously optimistic about VW, especially after they've started backing away from those awful capacitive buttons.
Manufacturer locked crash resets for BMS are a common theme amongst EVs, especially European ones. Exclusive to neither this model year nor BMW, although some other makes have less arcane procedures than the ISTA one.
And this is one of the reasons I won't be replacing my gas-powered Lexus any time soon. Then there is the spyware issue: most modern cars (and especially Tesla-like electric cars) are a privacy nightmare.
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.
It’s funny how I extrapolate car design sessions in my head based on software design sessions.
I sold my bmw after 15 years of multiple bmws because their design is so poor for maintenance. I had cooling system problems that required hours of labor to get to just to replace a plastic part that cost $5 where an aluminum one would cost $7.
It seems to me that bmw was designing for best case scenarios where everything goes perfectly. And since it’s supposed to go perfectly who cares if it’s $5000 to fix because it will “never break.”
Reminds me of Rube Goldberg software designs where 9 things have to happen in sequence for success.
The idea of rubust design that assumes everything breaks and you can still operate is one I value. I look for car companies (and everything I suppose) following this principle.
Porsche had a research program about a very reliable car in the 70s. It has some odd technical choices from today's perspective. https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/when-porsch...
One would assume taxi companies etc would be willing to pay for cars that have high uptime and reliability. But I think they drive mostly the same stuff as regular people. At least one would assume they could get beefier suspension and transmission and high displacement downtuned engines.
In general new cars are still vastly better than old ones. 90:s cars rusted from everywhere after ~8 years while most cars nowadays have zinc coating and more plastic and are still mostly fine after 15 years.
> while most cars nowadays have zinc coating and more plastic and are still mostly fine after 15 years.
In your part of the world, maybe. I live in the middle of the salt belt in the US and we get about 10 years out of most cars. That's when you start seeing rust holes in the fenders around the wheels, when most of the frame has flaked away and the floor pans become involuntary structural elements.
If you're a car nut who spends extra time and money on preventive maintenance and rustproofing, you can get a few more years. But the rust comes for your car at some point anyway.
Car manufacturers know how to make the frames and bodies last longer, this is not an unsolvable manufacturing and design challenge. It's just that nobody is getting a raise for going to their boss and saying, "I know how to make the company sell slightly fewer cars..."
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I don't think it's a coincidence that an enormous number of rideshare/delivery drivers drive priuses though. Reliable, not too expensive, low maintenance, and high mpg is kind of exactly what you'd expect them to look for.
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It's not just BMW, it's basically all car manufacturers. There are several car maintenance YouTubers who complain about it for many brands. For example "The Car Care Nut" complains about Toyotas being badly designed for maintenance, questionable material choices, etc..
The problem is that $2 here and there adds up, and at the level of the whole car it can add hundreds, or thousands of dollars of extra cost for reliability that the user can't experience directly. For some percentage of owners the plastic part works fine for the whole time they have the car. On the other hand sturdier parts add expense in the case of an accident or replacing parts during routine maintenance.
I watch "The Car Care Nut" sometimes, as I've got a Toyota. Nothing I've ever seen there would lead me to put Toyota into the same maintenance cost/difficulty category as BMW or Mercedes.
Consumer Reports puts them at almost opposite ends of the spectrum, as well.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cos...
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Anyone can build a car that will never fall apart. It takes a great deal of engineering to build a car that just barely doesn't fall apart.
To be fair the "The Car Care Nut" while clearly very knowledgeable and extremely good at his job, all he does is complain in his videos.
Edit: but at the end of the day all his own cars are Toyota/Lexus
BMW has been the worst of the worst for a long time though. [0] is a representative example, but pretty much any "car brands ordered by upkeep cost" list will have BMW out on their own planet.
Before Teslas really took over the "high income tech worker" market, in Seattle you used to be able to get a used BMW for quite cheap, because all the Microsoft and Amazon workers would lease them and then they'd go on the used market when the lease was up. I actually considered doing this, but multiple mechanics said very bluntly, "don't, this is a trap, the maintenance costs will eat you alive".
[0]: https://www.crsautomotive.com/what-are-the-total-costs-of-ve...
What you're describing is the stereotype for "rich west europe" engineering culture.
Every now and then you see it leak out into some other environment, like Toyota and their pull-apart ball joints that "aren't an issue" because "the user will just service it on schedule" where it reliably causes problems in all sorts of dumb ways (because like anything else, designing stuff to within an inch of it's life takes practice).
Now, don't get me wrong, this European approach creates a lot of cool highly performant products, but it's stuff that tends to fall on it's face real good if you violate any of the assumptions made when designing it and the approach is naturally suited to some products more than others.
Here is an American example, Fox suspensions. Fox is one of the main producers of bicycle suspensions. Great products, but check their service intervals for a fork [0], 125 hours.
Now if you practice mountainbike you may ride your bike 1 to 5 times a week. Let's say you only ride once a week for 4 hours: 125 / 4 = 31, you would need to service your fork every 31 weeks. Add some few more rides and you have to service the fork twice a year.
Each service easily costs $150 if done by a bike shop. If you do it yourself (plenty of tutorials on youtube), you need expensive special tools, oil, special grease and spare o-rings and seals easily costs 30-40$ for every service. And you have to properly dispose the old oil.
[0] https://tech.ridefox.com/bike/owners-manuals/2979/fork--2025...
My last 4 cars were BMW. I love the way they drive, but ...
I think they are optimized for the EU leasing market. 4 years, 120.000km. If you buy one for long ownership and want more out of them (they can most certainly do 400=500k km reliably), you have to take care of them from day 1. You change the maitainance schedule (which by default is set to lowering fleet lease costs and who cares beyond that), learn about and do preventive maintainance (such as replacing the entire cooling around 120k km), stricktly use BMW oil (for the additives) unless you are realy knowledgeable about it, and invest in a decent fault scanner (to lnow what is going on and not just run up expensive maintainance bills at the BMW shop).
If you think that's all too much hassle, just lease them short term or buy something else.
I was looking for this reply as well; definitely my perception that a lot of mid- to high-end cars are engineered to drive and feel great for 4-5 years, and after that it's kind of a crapshoot. You can see it as well with the various subscriptions, for app connectivity, M2M infotainment data, etc.
I never considered buying a BMW before they put out an EV (the i4, not the i3). One of the reasons is maintenance, the EV still needs some, but much less than an ICE.
Thats why they've been increasing the service interval to silly numbers. 3 years ago, 10k miles, now... 18k miles for the same model of car for the first service! Absolutely insane.
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Ask a car guy and they’ll tell you that German car makers have been known to be be maintenance money sinks for 40 years.
But German car makers are really quick to add new technology. They were quick to add ABS, fuel injection, complex suspensions, etc.
But have you ever tried to make something you built to easy to maintain? You have to reroute everything, redesign your layout, add access ports, switch fittings… my god it can take almost as much time as building the thing to begin with. As an engineering requirement, it’s a high impact one.
(OK most people probably don’t build physical things they design much, but I’m sure some of you play Minecraft. Especially for those contraptions, do you add access corridors, extra access entrances, plan access into the construction? No, most people just make some tiny hole somewhere to get in. You’re just happy it works.)
And at the pace some car makers add new technology, I don’t think they budget the time to go back and do that. I think with the quick pace of EV technology as well, previously more maintenance friendly car makers are in the same boat.
> But have you ever tried to make something you built to easy to maintain?
There is still a difference between e.g. Lada 2104 which, while admittedly having some strange fastening designs, was relatively straight-forward do (partially) disassemble and reassemble, and e.g. modern Fords where you can't to take the lights off of your trunk door without fully disassembling it first. Even better, the exact jigsaw puzzle of the design varies from one modification/year to another even for what is supposedly the same car model.
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BMWs at least up to the mid-2000s are really cheap and easy to maintain. Parts are pennies, service documentation is readily available, and they're reliable enough that they last a long time with basic maintenance.
Compared to stuff like Toyotas or Hondas, they practically cost nothing to keep on the road.
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> 9 things have to happen in sequence
This is literally how all software works. Except it is thousands of instructions. Further, it is very often that programs don’t handle anything besides the happy path.
Management only cares about analyzing and completing the 'happy path' because customers only buy 'happy path'. Customers don't (with rare exceptions) buy 'unhappy path', even though statistically it is a near certainty that where they will find themselves at some point.
I guarantee no engineer wanted an expensive, difficult to replace pyro fuse. Unfortunately, it doesn't particularly matter what individual engineers want, it's what the system wants, and the system wants to make money.
>I had cooling system problems that required hours of labor to get to just to replace a plastic part that cost $5 where an aluminum one would cost $7.
If the car has 10 places where the manufacturer saves 2 dollars, that is 20 dollars a car. At around 2.5 Million cars shipped each year that is 50 Million Euros each year profit for BMW.
The entire car industry is extremely cost sensitive, especially right now, with so much global competition and little consolidation.
The issue also isn't that the part is cost optimized. The issue is that it fails.
€4000 euros plus tax to replace the module that contains the fuse. Insane.
The ford transit custom PHEV costs £4500 to replace the timing belt. Access issues mean dropping the hybrid battery and parts of the sub frame. Compare with the mk8 transit, i've done the wet belt myself on that and it requires no special tools (well, i bought a specific crank pulley puller for £20) and can be done in a day on the driveway. I believe in some markets the replacement schedule is down to 6 years for the new phev due to all the wet belt failures on older models.
So far my favourite brand to work on has been Mazda, the engineering is very thoughtfully done with consideration for repairs.
I hear a lot of praise for toyota but it's from people who haven't worked on a car themselves rather than mechanics and they must be talking about toyotas from a bygone era because i'm not impressed with a 2019 corolla engineering at all, specifically various parts of the electrical system. I believe that was the most popular car in the world at that time.
Tesla is remarkably well done. Simplicity is under rated. So much so i bought one with the intention to keep for a looooong time.
Is it insane? I'm working in this field, and I know how quickly you can come up with such a number if you are BMW and you are deathly afraid that someone will get electrocuted while working on your car, driving it or rescuing someone in a crash. It's a safety and liability issue, where they go to great lengths to actually re-certify a battery after crash. The whole thing is setup so, that even the dummy electricians in an average BMW shop can safely certify that this battery is still safe. It's a lot easier to kill yourself (or someone else) when working on a EV Battery than wet belt. Also a lot harder to repair said battery than wet belt. And that goes for all EVs and manufacturers that actually care about people (Tesla, demonstrably does not).
If you and BMW are correct - if we take it for a fact that a simple fender-bender can make batteries develop life-threatening faults, which absolutely require a 4k euro inspection that involves complete disassembly and specialist equipment, then that means that EVs are unsuitable for public use.
So either all EVs need to be scrapped forever, or BMW needs to engineer a more tractable solution to the problem, or BMW is overreacting and overcharging customers.
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Yes, it is insane. It's a fuse. They must have some stats on how often those things need replacing and it should have been accessible. The customer has - when they buy the car - absolutely no way of knowing what kind of surprises like this there are hidden in the vehicle and besides, it kills the second hand market so you can only trade your vehicle to a BMW dealership where they can absorb those costs for a fraction of what it will cost an end user. BMW is a crap brand in spite of their reputation, we've had one leased Mini in our company and it is the very last time we do business with BMW, that thing was more in the shop than out of it with electrical issues. A friend had pretty much every BMW ever made since he got wealthy enough to afford them (car enthusiast) and his experience is much the same, but he keeps buying them.
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Many people drive older cars worth less than £4000.
Sticking to old/cheap cars seems like an increasingly good option with so many scare stories about the pain and extreme expense of getting modern cars, particularly EVs, repaired.
And the impending ban on new ICE vehicles seems likely to lead to more older cars being kept on the road for a lot longer.
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You, you are the problem.
It's not excusable to do this to the product because of some hand wavey napkin math about liability.
Understand how people will interact with your product and then use that information to avoid doing things like routing power where firefighters want to cut and you'll accomplish the same thing without a stupid expensive hair trigger fuse.
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Yes, it's insane. People working in the field have their perception warped by what they see around them.
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The article and comment aren't debating whether the fuse plays an essential role. There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error.
Making it a very complicated and expensive fix isn't what's saving your rescuer or mechanic from getting electrocuted while working around your car.
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> So far my favourite brand to work on has been Mazda, the engineering is very thoughtfully done with consideration for repairs
I've heard this from mechanics already 15+ years ago. Mazda seem to still have this reputation.
I wish there were more repairability scores for cars.
I traded from Mazda to Merc. There's definitely big difference in cost to repair and probably difficulty.
Talk to car guys who are into ~2000s era or before cars. They usually have pretty solid recommendations.
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> I hear a lot of praise for toyota but it's from people who haven't worked on a car themselves rather than mechanics and they must be talking about toyotas from a bygone era because i'm not impressed with a 2019 corolla engineering at all
Toyota hybrid powertrains are more reliable than any other company, but other than that they are no longer special.
I've got a '91 Toyota Carina and can attest that it's very easy to work on, my friend and I pulled the engine and gearbox in under two hours with hand tools, but I can't really speak for anything modern.
As a lifelong Toyota fan, I agree they are miserable to work on, especially the electronics. I have a stoplight switch issue in my 86 (from being rear-ended) that I have neglected because it would require pulling out the trunk assembly to fix.
The engineering praise comes from the fact that if you are taking care of it, you will probably never have to work on it until it's well into 6-digit mileage. This remains consistent through pretty much their entire line with the one exceptional black mark really being the RAV4.
> As a lifelong Toyota fan, I agree they are miserable to work on, especially the electronics.
I had a Toyota Yaris a couple of decades ago. Very reliable, very few issues. But some routine things like replacing headlights were completely bonkers. You had to wiggle your hand between some sharp metal parts to unscrew the back end of the armature. Sheesh, would it have been that prohibitive to add a few cm of extra space there?
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I occasionally like to see what the highest mileage Toyota Prius I can find for sale is. They are obviously used as taxis and it's common to find one for sale with half a million miles.
Usually at that point someone puts in a new hybrid battery and sells it to someone else starting out driving Ubers.
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>Tesla is remarkably well done. Simplicity is under rated.
https://electrek.co/2025/12/03/tesla-model-y-named-worst-car...
>So much so i bought one with the intention to keep for a looooong time.
Good luck with that.
I am affacted by this as well: the rear knuckle uniball bearing was broken after 3 years (Achsschenkel). Many MY here in Europe have this issue, due to bad parts or too hard suspension.
But there are two other things that make it a bit unfair for Tesla in comparison to other brands:
Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten breaks - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking instead of the real breaks. Simple solution is to force breaking from time to time (I.e. breaking in neutral). Another aspect is, that all the other brands have a mandatory inspection from the manufacturer before the cars will be tested by the independent check. This avoids that they will fail it, because the car will be repaired before it is checked by the independent inspection. This is not mandatory for Teslas.
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I am no Tesla fanboy. But let’s face the truth. Teslas leave factory with end of line check. Then they are driven more than average cars for 3 years without any maintenance. Then go for check. And surprise surprise, the first model Ys were not well made. I bet with 1000-1500€ maintenance cost over these 3 years the TUV result would be dramatically different.
Btw, my petrol car had ugly rusty rear brakes. No way to pass the check. The car had manual handbrake and I used in every highway exit to slow down and removed rust.
I don't know how "German engineering" became a badge of honor. Probably from the people who continually roll new leases every 2 years.
Even 25 years ago working on German vehicles compared to the Japanese counter-parts was a harrowing endeavor.
Germans are excellent at making cool flashy features...that rely on 16 moving parts that cost $700 each, and need to remove the engine exhaust manifold to access one screw to release part #15.
They get a 10 for "Wow!" factor, a 0 for "well thought out", and a 10 for "extremely over complicated". Unsurprisingly this mindset has carried over into EVs now too.
Germans are also famous for how hard they work, working a grueling 1350 hours per year, compared to freeloading lazy Greeks, who merely work 2000.
That's not even 26h /week. All this stat show is that there are probably more jobs in Germany. Need more data to draw any conclusions.
It’s about productivity, not about the raw amount of hours.
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Nowadays, when I hear "German Engineering", I internally translate it to "German love of complexity and bespoke/manual manufacturing".
The extreme depreciation of BMWs and Germany's loss to the Allies in WWII are both aspects of the same phenomenon; that fact is very funny to me.
>>Probably from the people who continually roll new leases every 2 years.
100% this. BMW's own stats say that something like 90% of buyers of new BMWs keep them for 3 years or less. The fact that parts like oil pans are made out of plastic or that lately all their gearboxes have the oil drain port completely removed is just irrelevant to the buyers because none of them care about keeping the car for a decade like people used to. And the collapse of second hand prices due to these catastrophic repair costs is not really a problem for them either.
>>Germans are excellent at making cool flashy features...that rely on 16 moving parts that cost $700 each
To be completely fair - Mercedes used to do this in their S Class and also it would work for decades despite the complexity. That's German Engineering. But that quality has been missing across all German brands for a good while, it pops up every and now then in specific components that are still extremely well designed and reliable, but it's not standard across the entire vehicle.
BMW always had a reputation for frequent & expensive repairs, even as far back as the 1970s (although I guess "typical" BMW drivers aren't the most careful either, so maybe that's also relevant...).
This reminded me of the video about the Tesla door handles, where its explained how they redesigned the retracting door handles of the Model S from having a bunch of switches and mechanical parts to just a motor + a position sensor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bea4FS-zDzc
Everything is branded for what it is not. Quality Inns, etc...
Not just BMW. I've been watching (and enjoying) Mat Armstrong's youtube videos where he restores crash damaged luxury cars, one of them was a Lamborghini Revuelo. The car's battery was completely intact, but the safety fuse blew up in the BMS and despite replacing the entire module, the car wouldn't talk to the battery and wouldn't even start. Eventually he had to buy an entire 30K battery, and even then, the car wouldn't start because the car was so new Lamborghini themselves still didn't have the diagnostics tool to clear the crash code.
PHEVs are great, I've driven two in the past 6 years, but in most cases, you're one airbag deployment away from a very, costly repair and in 99% of cases, a totaled car.
Interestingly I’ve seen YouTubers replace the fuse in a Tesla for about £40 and a few hours of labour (it’s under the rear seats). Maybe something they’re doing right.
You can replace the fuse (not that easly) but for approximately the same price in a BMW. You do have to put in more work but the problem is with re-certifying the battery. Tesla does not care if the battery was damaged in the crash, they will (more or less) happily re-enable it. BMW decided that the only safe way is to re-certify the whole battery. I'm not saying it's the right decision, I think they over did it and VW does it better - but I do understand WHY they chose to do it so, and the WHY is not nearly as outrageous as a lot of people here think.
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Tesla is the DIY's EV enthusiast car for a reason.
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> BMW has over-engineered the
They have over-engineered the everything, because that is what BMW does. That is what they have been about for the last thirty years.
After reading the blog post I had the same thought. Doing an oil change on my F650GS motorcycle required removing the plastics, draining the oil from both the top and bottom of the motorcycle, removing a plate on the side of the engine after install the BMW specified oil redirection funnel, extracting the filter and reinstalling. The oil funnel had a legit BMW part number. Most of us either just made a mess or used a piece of a milk jug. Probably 15 fasteners and 2 drain plugs.
Comparable process on my Sv650: drain plug out. Drain plug in. Screw off filter. Screw on filter. Fill.
It's basically the plot of the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
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Not too bad though all things considered, there are worse examples out there, like my old KTM adventure bike. Interestinlgy, the BMW R1200/1250/1300GS is actually simpler due to the boxer engine design.
The proper BMW oil change procedure is to remove the engine and flip it upside down.
Wait until you see a picture of a clutch replacement on an R1200... this should probably have a NSFW tag attached: https://www.reddit.com/r/motorcycle/comments/1he20rk/r_1200_...
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You win some, you lose some. Comparable process on my E46 and E39: Drain plug out (potentially flipping a little dust cover out of the way). Drain plug in. Stand up because everything else happens up top. Unscrew filter housing. Replace filter element. Replace filter housing. Fill.
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I won't argue with non EV engineering, but high voltage stuff in an EV is a lot harder problem to make safe in event of a crash and subsequent repair. I come out as a BMW apologist, but Vanja (evclinic Head boss) likes to be overly dramatic. BMW (and almost all other brands) are very afraid that someone will die when repairing/driving/rescuing someone from an EV and they go to great (and expensive) lengths to make sure the battery and the vehicle is as safe as possible. The fuse here is a small part, checks and certifications that go into making the battery truly safe (in scale, all edge cases ect) are a lot more than just the fuse. And that is expensive.
Thanks for pointing that out - at first I thought this was an act designed to turn cheap repairs impossible to drive new car sales, and force people into BMWs hugely expensive service network, but after learning this is for my own good, I'm relieved and happy to learn BMW is looking out for me.
evclinic overly relies on drama for their content
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Exactly, these are intentional decisions for German cars. They’re gorgeous, over-engineered, cutting edge pieces of machinery and the expense of being practical or repairable. The common understanding for decades has been if you’re buying a German luxury car as a daily driver and repair costs are something you even have to consider, you’re buying the wrong car.
Old BMW is nothing like new BMW - I know a few older folks who drive 20+year old BMWs and Audis with 500k+ km they drove off the salon parking lot - not because they can't afford a new one, but they like the current ones.
These old cars were engineered to a high standard, and designed to be maintained - while maintenance isn't cheap, with proper servicing and car, they could last forever.
This is entirely different - in the past few years BMW has become infamous for using low quality plastic fasteners that become brittle and break eventually, and all around penny-pinching everywhere.
It seems they even took the logical next step and installed draconian repair and service prevention measures.
They took the stance that once the car is out of the warranty period and isn't brough to an official service center, they stand to make no profit on it, so it should end up in the scrapyard in the shortest time possible.
This proves to me they don't understand their own market - people who buy expensive (70k+ish EUR) BMWs are all financial wizards who lease their cars, tax optimize them to the gills through legally grey methods and other schemes, and then resell them at the end of the lease.
This means they're able to drive them for like 300-400 euro a month cost - but only because of resale value. If they kill resale, then people won't buy them.
The amount of people who will put down 70k+ in cash at the salon is exceedingly small.
It was not always so. The E30 I used to drive - a 1986 model 325 - was a marvelous little thing, not only a joy to drive but a pleasure to work on. Its engineers had been just as thoughtful about its maintenance as its operation.
The car was 20 years old when I had it, but still ran like a top. I'm sure I'd have been driving it for many more years had my ex not run it into the back of a tow truck.
They have not over-engineered anything in this case - they have deliberately taken user-hostile actions, going out of the way to prevent repair, and turn cheap repairs into very expensive ones.
- They welded the case: even the engine block that experiences combustion pressures and temps is just bolted together - why?
- They even outdid (pre-R2R) Apple in every aspect - proprietary components, everything put together on the same PCB, with third party replacements impossible, replacement parts locked out cryptographically, and 'anti-theft' (anti-repair) systems installed so even authorized dealers are at a risk of bricking the vehicle - and third party shops can't even repair it.
- They are German so in the EU they are above the law (or more accurately they write the law) - but it'd be nice if us Europeans had their own Louis Rossmans and actionable right to repair laws, and the EU did something beyond bullying foreign tech companies, and applied the same level of scrutiny to domestic ones as well.
This is a comical level of evil - they know that due to the proprietary components (that you can't get at an auto parts store), when these vehicles become 10-15 years old, they will be either uneconomical to repair, with repair costs exceeding the value of the vehicle, no third party parts, no possibility of third-party service - people will resort to stealing these cars to source replacement parts.
So they installed a system that bricks the vehicle should it detect tampering - which might happen if somebody tries to fix their own vehicles.
And let me reiterate, Germans are above the law in the EU - the only reason Dieselgate became a huge scandal is that the US found out about it - please, American friends, could you do another 'gate' about this - its for the good of all.
It's also how they got a lot of things very early in the game like radars. They had adaptive cruise control in 1999 (similar to Mercedes).
Yet somehow adaptive cruise is a rarity on the BMWs out there, often requiring an option package that few dealers spec. (Though I think this may be finally starting to change with the 2025 model year).
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I think it's a German thing to be honest. I've wrenched on Mercedes Benz and VW personally, and I've heard horror stories from Audi as well.
My merc exposure is both on very old (70s) and modern. So I would actually argue that over engineering shit is in their DNA, they don't know how not to do it.
My brother had an old W123 body Merc for a while. It had fucking vacuum lines running to all the doors for central locking. I had a SsangYong with an old-school Merc OM617 diesel engine in it. Great engine, and it was relatively easy to work on, but the oil filter was positioned such that you can't replace it without spilling oil all over the engine bay. Infuriating!
Hard to maintain systems, whether it's hardware or software, are underengineered if anything.
I love this take. Thanks for sharing it. Puts into words why sometimes I can spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve a system: trying to save future effort.
I have a BMW G20 3-series. So far I've counted 31 electric motors in the car for various things. I keep discovering more.
People get upset when a BMW is expensive to repair, but they're misunderstanding the sophisticated German engineering. You're not supposed to repair it. You're supposed to throw it away and buy a new one.
In Germany BMW's target market are company cars. Having the company pay for your car has tax benefits here even if you also use it outside work, so the company giving you a nice car that gets replaced by a new model every three years is a sought-after benefit. Those cars are indeed sold to the next idiot before they develop any issues
/s or /$ What's the best tag for your post?
I missed the memo when putting everything together on one impossible to repair PCB and then gluing/sealing it permanently became 'sophisticated German engineering' instead of bottom-shelf junk.
The sophisticated engineering works (or worked?) mostly fine if the piece of machinery is operated in the extremely narrow "just right" operating ranges the sophisticated engineer defined. To much dust in the air? One too many potholes? Not the premium brand oil? There goes your sophisticated machinery.
Times have changed and now the fuse replacement is not just a mater of over engineering, something someone put together thinking it's a technically perfect process. It became a revenue stream. Car designed also by accountants.
The article misses to explain why this is an EU problem, not just a BMW problem. Is the problem described caused by a specific EU regulation (which?) or is mentioning the EU just click bait? (Honest question.)
It is a BMW problem and the rest is clickbait. If you own a BMW you know all this as it has been the case for over decades.
It's also not a eu thing as all manufacturers are locking things up, Ford and other US brands are trying as much as all other manufacturers. They just haven't reached BMW levels yet.
UN Regulation No. 155, and 156, and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) are requiring car manufacturers to implement cryptographic validation that allows only authorized software from the manufacturer to be run.
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This 2022 BMW X1 my wife drives is the last BMW we will ever own. £395 for an oil change. £180 for brake fluid. £500 a year road tax.
Meanwhile my 2011 Prius continues to pass its MOT without fail, needs just the usual very affordable consumables, gets 50% higher MPG and actually has a larger cargo capacity than the X1.
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Lol no way do BMW owners commonly know this. Most buy the car because it says BMW on it and they think that means quality.
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What they mean by the EU-bashing is two things:
1. The EU de facto mandates the car manufacturers have to develop and sell cars that produce less CO2 (mostly by the way of fines for higher polluting vehicles). This led to the development of hybrid ('mild-hybrid', 'full-hybrid', and PHEV) and EV vehicles.
2. The manufacturers tend to both complicate the technology and lock the stuff down, so it's not easily repairable. This has its own enviromental price, and EV Clinic says this is not accounted for. That's not completely fair as on one hand there are EU repairability directives that address this but on the other we still want to have some degreee of market competition and in the end the market should punish those manufacturers (as it is already doing, I think).
One thing I want to add is that the EU also mandates real-world-fuel-consumption-measurement (OBFCM) devices in new cars and if that is followed to its logical conclusion and the manufacturers pressure is resisted, this will mean the end of hybrids as the real-world data is horrible for them.
https://zecar.com/reviews/plug-in-hybrid%27s-real-emissions-...
It's clickbait, but at the very least it's not LLM slop, considering how they spelled the word "theoretically".
Who dictates the EU regulation? Hello?
Correct, it isn't it's more a "German Boomer Engineering problem"
Though I'd say this is 80% of the problem, the safety fuse thing is needed but it probably takes a while for companies to get it right
>Lot of vehicles designed and produced in Europe — ICE, PHEV, and EV — have effectively become a missleading ECO exercise. Vehicles marketed as “CO₂-friendly” end up producing massive CO₂ footprints through forced services, throw-away components, high failure rates and unnecessary parts manufacturing cycles, overcomplicated service procedures, far larger than what the public is told. If we are destroying our ICE automotive industry based on EURO norms, who is calculating real ECO footprint of replacement part manucfacturing, unecessary servicing and real waste cost?
>We saw this years ago on diesel and petrol cars: DPF failures, EGR valves, high-pressure pumps, timing belts running in oil, low quality automatic transmissions, and lubrication system defects. Everyone calculates the CO₂ footprint of a moving vehicle — nobody calculates the CO₂ footprint of a vehicle that is constantly broken and creating waste.
Extremely well put.
More like a weird rant that reduces EVs to only existing due to the environment. But they’re just better cars lol. And the poor reliability of european cars applies regardless of propulsion type
They aren’t better cars if they are disposal items like phones and most electronic devices.
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This makes me feel that peak car was 2010 ish, when, when engines were powerful, cheap, and not too polluting, but also not overly complex.
Spare parts were small, cheap, and easily accessible too (atleast for my toyota)
I dread being forced to upgrade, not out of disdain for the environment, but the fact that I will spend more money, on a less reliable, less "mine" car, and more something big daddy government wants.
I would argue peak car was a little earlier, maybe the 2000-2010 decade. Fewer screens to fail, analog buttons and dials. Airbags, and ABS for safety but without the additional computers/screens.
Entirely agree, although I think it varies by make / model. Roughly look for whenever a particular car got OBDII, which makes diagnostics way easier (and was kinda the perfect level of digitization, again in my opinion), through (as you say) whenever they started digitizing the cockpit and/or (which oddly - maybe? - coincide, in my experience) manufacturers stopped considering ease of maintenance in engineering decisions. In general late-1990s through 2005-2010. Cars since that decade (or so) are more sophisticated, at the expense of far, far shorter useful lifespans.
Depending on the make, rust-protection wasn’t quite there yet.
4th gen 4Runner w/ a 2UZ-FE
Still got my E46!
The sad part is that the plastics from around that time are starting to fail.
That E92 M3 LCI is now a 14 year old car.
I've got a supercharged E92 M3. I'll own that thing till I die, funnest car ever.
I have never owned or wanted a pickup, but now I'm wondering about getting a basic one (if that's still an option.) It is annoying and depressing.
Nobody is currently selling new, small pickups. Maybe if the Slate materializes, that'll prove the market and we'll see them again.
In the meantime, 200x Ford Ranger or 200x Chevy S-10 are the last of the small pickups where you can get a 6 foot bed and a single row of seats. (Afaik)
I sold my small white pickup once, and ended up with a different small white pickup a few years later. I do enough (small) truck things that having a truck on hand just in case is worth it for me; but even with minimal miles per year there's certainly added expense from maintenance some of which ends up being time based, registration fees, and incremental costs for liability insurance on another vehicle. For quite a while, my family vehicles were a 4-door car/wagon and a small pickup, but that doesn't work for everyone; I feel better served with a minivan, a 4-door phev, and a pickup (and a silly old rear engined vw van with only the front seats, mostly for midlife crisis, but also handy for picking up large items that don't want to be inside for transport)
I've felt similarly recently, and I think those days are fleeting if not gone. Ford recently talked about replatforming their entire range, which would include basic trucks at more reasonable prices, but there's not really a market for work trucks in the way there used to be, and they're gone in favor of the luxury ones with small beds. It is annoying. There is an interesting startup that I can't remember the name of that touts an 8 foot bed (which is great) in the chassis footprint of a Mini Cooper. I don't think I saw pricing, but I would snatch one of those up.
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CAFE standards have made that pretty hard. The trucks got bigger to hold more complex engine setups to boost mileage, coinciding with preferences shifting to super crew cabs because buying a new truck is basically the same price as buying a luxury vehicle.
I did own a 1994 Dodge ram up until a few years ago, but it needed new brake lines and there was so much rust coming off the frame I honestly wasn't sure I trusted it anymore, and the cost of the brake lines was probably more than it was worth at that point.
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Maybe Slate? https://www.slate.auto/
A new 1980's mini truck would be awesome. If only...
Last week, I replaced a faulty cell in my PHEV.
The most expensive tooling was the two floor jacks I purchased to make the process easier. The software needed was available from the manufacturer for a reasonable fee. The battery pack itself was surprisingly modular and simple to dismantle for repair.
I don't many things GM has done, but (at least back in 2010) they did a good job of letting owners do their own work.
This is what makes Teslas sustainable and other car cos, like Porsche, not.
A battery pack for a Model 3 is $10K. So even if the whole car is only worth $20K, it's still worth keeping on the road.
The Porsche Taycan battery pack is $70K. The moment you have any issue at all with it, the car will be considered totaled.
Is that $10k the list price, or have you actually seen a recent invoice from a mechanic for a Model 3 battery swap?
I have no info on Tesla batteries. But, just as a point of reference, you can now buy knock-down 48V battery "kits" from China for under $90/kWh. They include everything you need: case, cells, BMS, circuit breaker/isolator, and fire suppression. Assembly takes about an hour. (The raw prismatic cells without the rest go for ~$50/kWh).
Shipping from China to the west coast runs an additional $30/kWh due to the weight of the cells and volume of the box (shipped in several boxes to reduce cost). So you can have a 300 lbs, 15 kWh 48V battery shipped to your door for about $120/kWh).
High voltage EV batteries need additional components (like HV contractors) due to stacking so many cells in series, but it seems entirely plausible that Tesla's economies of scale allow them to offer a 75 kWh battery for $10k (~$133/kWh) plus installation.
I've searched the internet and I found some articles and people talking about prices around $11-16k, most of the times including labor.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/new-battery-cost-for...
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/183if34/what_i...
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/1blczt1/what_a...
https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/tesla-battery-replace...
https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/tesla-model-3-battery-re...
I was quoted $15k in a Tesla service center for a Model 3 battery replacement, with parts and labor.
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It’s an urban legend.
This is like comparing a Casio to a Rolex. Both do roughly the same thing, but the markets are completely different. Nobody buys a high-end luxury car like a Taycan because it makes financial sense. The manufacturers know this and price everything accordingly.
Like a G-Shock to a Seiko.
EV Clinic identified some issues in Teslas too, for example this one: https://x.com/evclinic/status/1994876173277335745
That is such a terrible example. Why are you comparing Teslas to cars where the battery pack costs more than the Tesla, instead of the myriad of competitively priced models?
> The moment you have any issue at all with it, the car will be considered totaled.
Huh? The taycan has an 8-year/100k mile battery warranty. How many 100k+ mile carreras do you see for sale on eBay?
Carrera is not Taycan. Why would you equate both? Different cars with different targets.
Quite a few actually, regular 911s often end up being daily drivers and given Porsche build them to last there's plenty of high milers out there.
It's like the S60, VW W12, old V12 Continentals, etc. If it's expensive to maintain no one wants to buy it off you so you get hit with massive depreciation costs. You can get a 20y/o 'no issues' 500+hp V12 Continental for 10k where I'm at. They've had a brutal cost/year and cost/mile.
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The warranty isn't going to cover underside damages caused by going over a shallow bump
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.
> EVs are not complicated.
> Modern carmakers might make them complicated
OP did not say they would not travel on electric trains or unicycles or elevators or electric forklifts or electric container ships. They said they don't want an EV. The things that modern carmakers make complicated.
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EV is indeed easy. Safe and reliable EV is hard. Vehicle environment is hostile to electric components, where they are exposed to vibration, dirt, and moisture. Even if you get "safe" chemistry in the battery cells of an Alibaba e-bike, it only means the cells themselves are less likely to explode in a chemical fire. It still has enough current to melt metall and set off a regular fire. And in the best case it will just stop working and good luck repairing some random components, which might have been from a short production run and there are no spares in the existence.
> electronic propulsion is pretty simple
So simple that it’s usually called electric propulsion.
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
My Hybrid F-150 is so freaking complex. They basically seem to have swapped many components over to electrical drive (like the F-150 Lightning), but they still have to slap all of the ICE components in there as well.
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?
Yeah, modern ICE is a massively complex control system problem, requiring so much more compute than EV, just to meet regulations.
Here's a funny example: the fuel vapor recovery system. It stores fuel vapors from the gas tank, that otherwise would have leaked into the air, in a canister of activated carbon. When under appropriate driving/environmental conditions, it opens valves and feeds the vapor into the intake stream, so it's burned.
[1] https://www.motor.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Evap_0319-1...
Article: https://www.motor.com/magazine-summary/vapor-tales-understan...
However when you advertise your car as eco friendly, you should be forbidden to create a non-repairable apple phone on wheels
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.
As they point out, the Tesla pyro fuse (at least on a Model S) is a cheap part. However, in some model years it's on top of the pack, which means you have to drop the pack to get to it. And, from memory, it's a 10 year lifespan part. However, on other Model S cars, it's easily accessible from the bottom.
I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars. Obviously, right-to-repair and allowing access to documentation and tools for independent shops is a a necessary but not sufficient step.
I shudder to think at some of the other possibilities -- heavy-handed attempts to regulate how much specific repairs can cost.
Maybe mandating the sale of manufacturer-provided extended warranties for no more than x% the cost of the vehicle purchase price would be an incentive to keep repair cost in check?
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On the Model 3, you have to drop the HV battery pack to replace the brake lines that prematurely rust in wintery climates, so Tesla is not fully immune either.
And check some videos of what you have to do to swap the door-actuating motor (which gets guaranteed water ingress) in the front doors (yes, not the gullwings) of a Model X.
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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)
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.
One would expect a plug in hybrid to be the most complex of all the vehicle types. It has all of the complexity of an EV combined with all of the complexity of a gas burner.
PHEV in the title is plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. Different from a pure EV.
This is true. EVs are much simpler than ICE, and PHEV basically have all the complexity of EV+ICE.
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Does that make a difference in this regard? If so, how, and is it an unavoidable penalty for PHEVs? I can see PHEVs having a complexity penalty from having an IC engine over and above the EV components, but that does not seem to be the source of the problems here.
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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 think you are referring to BEV cars. The definition of EV includes hybrid and plug-hybrid (which the fine article is about, by the way).
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.
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.
I am, perhaps naively, hoping the Slate pickup can be better about this.
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.
Are ICE cars really any better with BMW? The used values indicate they are very expensive to maintain.
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.
What are the biggest overcomplicating issues with something like the Nissan Leaf? Especially on something like a 2018-2025 S trim?
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.
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.
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.
PHEV is plug-in hybrid, for those not familiar with terminology.
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I was getting the 12v battery in my car replaced the other day, and my mechanic told me I'm lucky not to have a BMW, which apparently uses lithium ion batteries that cost $1,200 to replace. I assume they last much longer than lead acid batteries, but I do wonder what the value is to the driver. Is this just a way to juice the maintenance bills, to keep dealers happy?
Compare this car to the Toyota RAV4 PHEV which in some ways is simpler than a gas powered RAV4 (no alternator, no transmission) but maintains the same ease of maintainability and cheap parts availability as the base RAV4 (makes sense, they sold >4M of them).
PHEVs are complicated tech so I figured I would choose one with a proven design (Prius -> Prius Prime -> RAV4 Prime).
If you love cars or Top Gear, watch Mat Armstrong on YouTube. Mat restores crash damaged cars. The BS he has to go through because car manufacturers either won't sell him parts, won't sell him repair manuals, and unnecessarily cryptographically lock parts to the VIN is sometime heartbreaking. He has run across this pyro fuse issue many times. Sometimes he has even has to buy two cars just to repair one because of this nonsense. Like the article points out it just leads to more waste and it has to contribute to higher insurance rates for us all.
Bumping this. Mat went through the exact same crazy process with the Revuelto. Audi/Lamborghini overengineers the heck out of these cars its really absurd.
https://youtu.be/m37tN54FdQE?si=zXCnQTCOou13l10O
To be fair it's a lambo, not the pinnacle of maintainability or self repairable
Meanwhile, if you work on old Landrovers from the Defender 90/110 to early RR L322, you need this: https://rangerovers.pub/downloads/rave.zip (500MB zip, PDFs of all service and user manuals).
Even if you don't work on them, grab yourself a copy. You never know when you might need to know how to rebuild a Borg Warner transfer box or ZF 4HP24 gearbox.
100%. I watch him literally just to see how much bullshit he has to go through to get modern cars running again against the wishes of the manufacturers.
I get it, though. Cars are becoming like iPhones where the manufacturers are totally against you making any repairs at all. We've just grown used to cars being one of the most commonly repairable items we buy. At some point in the near future car ownership will probably diminish significantly as robotaxis flood the market and the manufacturers will become even less interested in self-repairs.
The funny one is the Ferrari he is working on now where not even the Ferrari techs could figure out why the car wouldn't start, as they couldn't get the car to spit out codes and they didn't know why it didn't do that.
The goal is to eliminate outright vehicle sales, and move everyone to leases and rentals? Just like in software? Safety is important, too (nudge nudge wink wink).
Given that speed and alcohol are the top two causes of traffic deaths, mandatory SAE J3016 Level 4 self-driving would prevent a lot of deaths. But of course, it will make the price of a "safe" automobile many times the annual income of 99% of North American and EU drivers.
Even a FAANG HENRY who would buy a BMW i7 M70 won't be able to afford a "safe" automobile in a "safe" country.
A Waymoid is your future, first-worldians!
I wouldn't mind if cars were so expensive only the top 2-5% of earners could afford them, but we need viable alternatives to driving. We have dismantled our transportation infrastructure at the pleasure of car companies. Now you have drivers that cannot afford their cars but must drive anyways. You also have people who are unfit to drive that are forced to do so.
Self-driving is a bandaid for a problem that is made by cars. It doesn't address the hundreds of other issues caused by them. Also it adds to the incremental squeezing of the middle class out of existence.
It seems to me an analogy that as a product is increasingly complex, the ultimate consumer/demander of it becomes more and more disconnected from maintenance, operations, etc. considerations and whether that system is well designed and serviceable.
Cars of a past generation were able to be owner-maintained (or understood), and therefore the owner had some interest in knowing that it was easy to maintain and would buy (at least partly) on that premise. Something that was a nightmare to maintain would not be so easily bought because the owners would soon realize how hard they were to fix.
Now, with a car that is so complicated, the owner is far distant from being the fixer of it until years later seeing a surprise repair bill. Even the maintainers are not even directly knowledgeable about the design and how to repair. And the information about its maintainability is a low factor on the buying considerations list. But by then you've already given the company the money and incentive to keep on building this way. And rarely (or extremely/too "laggily" does that information feed back).
It seems to me enterprise software systems have this problem as well.
Right to repair laws should cover this, and / or have a very clear procedure for e.g. consumers and mechanics to report these anti-repairability practices. Even if they're not on purpose (which I doubt, but have no evidence of), the author of this post clearly explains what the problem and what the various hurdles are.
I get that from a safety point of view, certain things should be checked and / or replaced after a crash, especially when volatiles like batteries or fuel tanks are involved. But they shouldn't cost thousands.
This behavior of locking down everything needs to be regulated, not only for car manufacturers but also for everything else
Let's start with smartphones.
You can make a law that encompasses all
replacing a tesla pyro fuse is about $500, and it has a lifetime.
I think it might be the ev equivalent of a wear item like a water pump or alternator on an ice vehicle.
This only applies to pre-2020 Tesla's and it was around 8-10 years. The more recent ones are designed to last the vehicles lifetime.
I am in Germany. I will keep my 14-year-old Renault gasoline car roadworthy and use it for as long as possible. When it is no longer economically viable to drive a gasoline-powered car, I expect there to be electric cars that cost a four-figure sum in euros when new, are virtually maintenance-free, and come with a guarantee that a replacement battery will be available at a reasonable price (preferably from third-party suppliers) that I can replace myself without having to go to a specialist workshop. I hope that there will be manufacturers who recognize the need for such vehicles and will meet that demand. I will definitely not pay 20,000 or 50,000 euros or whatever for a skateboard with a battery and car bodywork.
Articles like this confirm my opinion on the subject. What annoys me most is that we argued in favor of electric cars because of climate protection. I am in favor of climate protection, but when I read this article, I just feel like I'm being taken for a ride. Politicians should not have simply decided to phase out combustion engines. They should have imposed further constraints on the automotive industry with regard to low purchase costs, durability, reusability, and affordable maintenance.
Yeah just don’t go to a BMW dealer, and save 50+% of the cost. I recently had numerous repairs done for €2k on my 2er, and the dealer had quoted me €5k. 1k for a part isn’t that outlandish, you just can’t go to a dealer that bills you €300 per hour.
my VW Multivan's gearbox needed a replacement. 17000 CHF, I kid you not. Luckily VW Germany paid for the whole ordeal, but I wouldn't have been happy to pay that...
I cannot find any explanation for that this is the result of EU regulation. Tesla should also adhere to the same EU regulation and they manage to do this without the "extra CO2" costs as the article states itself. This article smells like FUD to get attention.
There are tons of used BMWs on the used market here in the states. They don't hold their value because everyone knows that some stupid thing is wrong with them that either can't be fixed or is so ludicrously costly to fix that it would be more than the whole entire car is worth. BMW is a shit company, doesn't matter if it is ICE or EV or whatever it is, they're intentionally made to be impossible to repair cheaply. It would be so easy to build "open" hardware and have onboard diagnostics built into the cars, but no.
The Ultimate Leasing Machine, as it were
>"Everyone calculates the CO₂ footprint of a moving vehicle — nobody calculates the CO₂ footprint of a vehicle that is constantly broken and creating waste."
Did anyone think politicians are there for a common good? They are there to turn us unto sheep to shear. Their primitive lies and propaganda and us being idiots are their main instrument
>Did anyone think politicians are there for a common good?
The problem is that a whole bunch of people who know the politicians are not concerned with anything in the same ballpark as the common good will lie to your face about it when the thing the politicians are pushing suits them for the next 5min even if the long term consequences are obvious.
The politicians behavior is just a symptom of the problem.
At this point, when I look at ANY electric vehicle, I'm seeing basically what Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow warned about.
Its a DMCA DRM hellscape, full of equipment that was sold (with a state registration no less), and these car companies still maintain remote control and real ownership indefinitely.
Mercedes EQS won't "let" owners open the hood.
BMW "rented heated seats" bullshit.
GMC Hummer EV Requires dealer-level authentication to reset the 12V battery or perform certain repairs.
Tesla uses proprietary diagnostic tools and encrypted software.
Volvo has explored payment-based bricking.
Even the EFF warned about this 12 years ago in 2013 : https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-co...
Will I consider an EV? Sure. Am I going to place primary buying decision on reparability and full ownership? Damn straight I will. If that means I buy hybrids and/or ICE vehicles. I want something I can maintain without running to the vendor to ask permission, or even "giving" them the ability to say no.
This is absolutely not limited to EVs, the same enshittification is in a lot of ICEs and hybrids as well. Today's cars won't be driving in 2040 when a student could buy it for a grand wit 300 000 miles on the clock, and keep fixing it himself in order to save money.b
Owning a car (or device) you have "purchased" is getting more and more difficult to achieve. So is owning of anything at all that can or is allowed to connect online. You basically pay for it in order to rent it because you no longer control its lifetime.
seems like this would run afoul of american right-to-repair laws
what is phev?
I have a BMW PHEV. There's a 3 cyl turbo engine with an auto box at the front and a 90hp electric motor and 7.6kwh battery at the back. Most of the new ones just have a more traditional layout with an electric motor built into the autobox. You get more elec range than a hybrid but less than a full EV. Now that it's cold I start my commute on engine to get the car warmed up with 'free' heat then switch to EV later. If I want to beat someone off the lights I use both together.
Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle. It's the most complex drivetrain you can possibly buy with a full gas engine and transmission mated to a full EV with external charging support.
I can't speak for other PHEV drivetrains but the Toyota PHEV design isn't that complex. It uses an ingenious planetary CVT with a small gas engine instead of a full gas engine and regular transmission.
Also, because the gas engine mostly runs at its most efficient RPM, there is little stress on it so it runs very reliably.
PHEW!
Plug in hybrid.
I think it continues to be under-appreciated how much of a lead Tesla still has in EVs. Even BMW can't make something that is practical.
First people said "competition is coming" for about a decade. Now the competition has finally half arrived, but it's still so far behind. Perhaps the closest is BYD, but most BYD drivers would prefer to be driving a Tesla.
I think Nissan is a bit underrated here. I’m leasing an Ariya which has been great (including its charging curve, which is better than much of the competition) and feels more premium than you’d expect from the brand (to the point that the top trim is sometimes referred to as a “baby Infiniti”) with things like dual pane windows to cut down on road noise, as well as a proper heat pump where many still only have resistive heaters.
The 2026 Leaf takes many of the Ariya’s good qualities and one ups them at one of the lowest price points in the industry.
And both can be parked in spots that no model of Tesla will fit. The 3, Y, etc aren’t even a consideration for me since they won’t fit my garage. Tesla badly needs a proper small hatch option.
> The 2026 Leaf takes many of the Ariya’s good qualities and one ups them at one of the lowest price points in the industry.
Still costs $30k+ USD for base trim. Chinese cars are going for sub-$20k. Few governments want a repeat of the Japanese disruption of US/European car manufacturing, so they were banned before getting the opportunity.
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I have a theory about EVs - they don't allow much engineering range.
To have a broadly usable car, you need at least 50+ kWh battery, 100kWish fast charge, and basically almost everything you need in a big car. If you don't have it your car is not really usable as the main car.
Motors are small and efficient so they are not big cost drivers.
Small cars, such as 'cheap' B-segment cars still need all this stuff. If you look at the weight of something like a Renault 5, you find its not lighter than a Model 3. The manufacturer still pays for all that stuff, but the car's supposed to be cheap so they cant pass on the cost.
But in a small car, you have packaging problems with having to fit the battery pack, meaning you need to build them taller and draggier - that means your highway range decreases, and the big weight means big (and compact) crash structures, which again are more expensive.
In contrast, in a Model 3, you can make the pack thinner, design a more aerodynamic shape, have the big roomy frunk as a crash structure.
Your extra cost ist like tens of centimeters of steel and glass, but customers will happily pay more because its an upmarket car.
You can't really go beyond that, because the acceleration and torque is crazy even at the base level and at high speeds your range will still suck.
This basically means imo that the Model 3 and Y are at the ideal intersection of what the technology's good and bad at, and market positioning.
That's why I don't think Tesla will make a C-segment car.
Lots of the traditional car manufacturers now have good options: Renault, Nissan, Kia, and Hyundai's EVs seem to be particularly well regarded. I'd definitely opt for any of those over a Tesla given Tesla's reputation with regard to quality and repair costs.
If you ignore cost, then Tesla's cars are probably still better at this point, but the gap doesn't seem that large.
Even BMW has a few electrical cars that aren't half bad. The main problem is that they are compromise cars that can be sold as ICE, PHEV, or full EV.
That means more complexity, sub optimal design, less efficiency, etc. However, competition is indeed brutal right now. Tesla did something that only some other manufacturers have managed to copy so far: make cars that are EV only from the ground up. Love them or hate them, they don't make any design compromises to allow space for a combustion engine, a generator, or whatever. There's no room for a transmission, a fuel tank, or even an engine compartment. That's where the Frunk goes. The result is a car that's simpler, more efficient, and more optimal for what it does.
BYD did the same. Kia and Hyundai are having a lot of success with their electric only line of cars. And in the EU Renault and the Stellantis group have some decent and competitive low cost models on the market. Tesla's advantage is rapidly evaporating here.
Japanese car makers have been more conflicted on this. But Nissan's collaboration with Renault is giving them access to the right tech to adjust course. And even Toyota is now using a lot of Chinese made drive trains and components to finally offer EVs that are actually not that bad. The danger is of course that "made in Japan" has very limited value in this world if all your core tech is effectively Chinese and European. That's something that might change in the next years of course.
Cost wise, buying a compromise car means having to deal with more that can break, more components that may need replacing, and a lot of increasingly obsolete parts and components that are no longer being modernized. Combustion engine R&D ground to a halt about fifteen years ago. All those fuel injection systems, and other computer intensive hardware that keeps them going is aging fast and not really being invested in a lot at this point. Sourcing replacement parts might get harder and more expensive over time.
> Tesla's reputation with regard to quality and repair costs.
Tesla lives in the limelight 100x more than any other car brand. Every mistake or possible scandal gets insanely amplified. They are by far the most repairable EV car and have the most durable engines. What they do not tell you is that in an EV the engine giving out is the more common scenario not the battery pack.
> Hyundai's EVs seem to be particularly well regarded
lol.
you wanna search about kona's gearbox and iccu's beforehand.
i'm not going to get into software.
"I think it continues to be under-appreciated how much of a lead Tesla still has in EVs".
As long as you don't compare them to BYD etc.
as long as you don’t compare them to any car. teslas in 2025 belong in a museum lol
I own tesla s 2014, my neighbour has 2025, same car. tesla x was cool… in 2017. tesla 3 is like a worse looking kia and model y is like if you took tesla 3 and pumped some air in it.
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Seeing the BYD trucks and other BYD vehicles around where I live in Australia, as well as the other Chinese and Korean brands, they outnumber the Teslas on the street now.
My understanding is that Tesla 16V LV batteries have a similar crash lockout in the BMS that also requires workarounds to reset: https://openinverter.org/wiki/Tesla_16v_li-ion_battery
Add to that because Tesla allows for access to its repair manuals and service tools unlike most OEMs.
BYD targets a different market. Tesla should compete with the likes of Polestar, Rivian, maybe Porsche if they dare but I'd take any of those before a Tesla any day of the week.
The BMW neue klasse is far superior to the latest Teslas.
Both in software hardware and handing.
https://youtu.be/P-H-GJaGiUg?si=eq8YWy8gyJ5YS99X
I think it even surpasses Chinese brands.
i think they look absolutely horrible both inside and out. but, of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
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I think the (negative) point is the cost of ownership. European cars are very cool, if you can afford to keep them running
I wouldn't understate BYD, but Tesla did play a massive role in helping build China's domestic EV ecosystem because Tesla also worked on building a supplier ecosystem in China, which also helped incubate much of the Chinese ecosystem.
That said, BYD is outcompeting most other Chinese players as well, and it can be argued that this is due to the fact that BYD is also a private sector player unlike most of it's domestic competitors.
The only competitor in China that can compete against BYD is SAIC - an SOE owned by Shanghai's government.
That said, the EV glut has become a significant headache from a local government fiscal perspective - the majority of Chinese automotive companies are owned by state and local governments - a large number of whom ended up spending eye bleeding amounts of yuan on EVs despite no competitive advantage, and it's these state and local governments that are now increasingly holding the bag - which Chinese market regulators have increasingly raised red flags about [0] (and I myself foreshadowed on HN a couple times [1][2]).
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275541
China is also copying SpaceX's Starship https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/11/chinas-long-term-lunar...
Which is kind of exciting if you don't care about IP law.
Likewise their CR series/Fuxing high speed trains seem to be quite nice. They were spawned off their experience working on Euro/Japanese trains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuxing_(train)
> Even BMW can't make something that is practical.
Hyperbole, but essentially true
The Japanese beat everybody when ICE ruled. Their cars were miles ahead on every measure except snob value.
In the the of EV it will be the Chinese. Tesla has no hope of keeping up, they are already fallen behind on snob value, their cars have none now.
I think the comment about BYD drivers preferring Tesla is out of date now. Ti e will tell, but my money is on China
From what I can tell the Chinese are targeting the bottom of the market with cars that are essentially disposable. The ones to watch, IMO, are Hyundai/Kia. If they can sort out the reliability issues there's a lot of potential there.
Honestly I'm cautiously optimistic about VW, especially after they've started backing away from those awful capacitive buttons.
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Uh have Tesla discovered how to make doors that align with the car body? All 4 of them in the same car?
[Note that this is not a BMW endorsement. I would only drive one if someone else pays for the car, insurance and maintenance.]
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Is this an issue with all BMW PHEVs or just one model from one year?
Manufacturer locked crash resets for BMS are a common theme amongst EVs, especially European ones. Exclusive to neither this model year nor BMW, although some other makes have less arcane procedures than the ISTA one.
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erste mal?
> Theoraticaly
> missleading
Please check spelling before posting
Just buy a Tesla, it's the most sane thing you could do for peace of mind
And this is one of the reasons I won't be replacing my gas-powered Lexus any time soon. Then there is the spyware issue: most modern cars (and especially Tesla-like electric cars) are a privacy nightmare.
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.
Tesla is leading in car privacy, look at mozilla's report.
Out of the Privacy Not Included list of car manufacturers it is the third not-worst: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/cate...
It is still very bad: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesl...
Overview: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...