Comment by mannykannot
18 hours ago
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.
Well designed PHEVs can actually be simpler than pure ICs (at least on the hardware side. To build a combustion only car well, you need to balance efficiency, power, and responsiveness. This means you need all sorts of complicated tech, like correctly sized turbos, variable valve lift, variable valve duration, etc. In a PHEV, otoh, you have an electric engine (which can also steal power from the driveshaft), which means you don't need to worry about responsiveness of the combustion engine. You can fill half a second of turbo lag with the motor, and optimize for narrower RPM ranges since you can charge/discharge the battery to keep the engine running in its happy place. You also no longer need fancy and complicated brakes because you can do 99% of your braking with regen.
All of this does come with more complex software, but the hardware can end up with significant simplification.
I would say so for this particular failure.
The issue in this case has everything to do with the electronics design and close to nothing to do with propulsion.
The issue described is happening because German car makers love to put generic parts inside proprietary modules that cannot be repaired, and require extensive OEM tooling to replace. This kind of dumb shit happens on ICE cars and EVs that follow this design paradigm.
As described int the article the actual failed piece is ~$50 if you can replace just that pyrofuse. BMW doesn’t allow tha though. So you have to replace the entire module