Comment by CraigJPerry
13 hours ago
€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.
>i've done the wet belt
All that to say that a wet belt should not even be used in the first place.
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.
No, from my experience, a simple fender-bender does not cause this.
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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.
They have no stats because the entire platform is new and different. I would guess they have a very poor prediction model.
It’s not a fuse. It’s a fuse plus guarantee plus liability.
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Fuses are not items that should be replaced normally - they are self-destroying emergency protections for the electrical system.
If it is protecting that end users can plug arbitrary loads into, that is one thing - but this doesn’t sound like that?
Why did that fuse blow? Because if that is not addressed, it’s likely to just blow again.
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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.
My current car is my last. It's a 1997 and it runs pretty much as good as new and I expect the thing to outlive me.
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Yeah - a car hits a similar valuation around ~15 years of age, meaning a failure of this component limits the financially viable lifespan of a car to this amount - mechanics do engine rebuilds for less money.
ICE bans are going to cause the value of old cars to skyrocket
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.
I am a problem, but on the other spectrum - OEMs ain't getting the repair €€€ because people like me repair stuff (but a different approach than Vanja).
Then, almost no manufacturer that sells in the EU knows how to do this (Renault is almost the only one that doesen't have pyrofuses in the battery, almost everyone else has). The catch is, the routed power is not problematic, the problem is when something gets squished and redirects that routed power to somewhere else. Which tends to happen in a metal tincan.
Yes, it's insane. People working in the field have their perception warped by what they see around them.
I mean, I don't think my perception is warped by what I see. But by "am I willing to risk that my repair will kill someone, because they wanted cheaper repair"? Or even if not kill, maybe just burn down their car (+ house,...). "Am I willing to use cheap tools, not rated for 800V (or 400V) god knows how many Amps?". Because this is not software development - you can be killed REALLY quickly working on a HV EV battery pack. It's no joke. For sure it'll cost more than working on a regular car, where there is danger, but a lot less. And that's just the basic thinking, without going deeper into why its more expensive to repair stuff like this.
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.
> There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error.
Yes there is. Either nobody is engineering towards that aspect or it is a conscious decision, deliberating between two different buckets: bill-of-material cost per unit and estimated impact on your warranty & goodwill budget. Whatever is deemed to be cheaper will win.
Source: I work at an automotive OEM and one of my first projects almost two decades ago was how to anchor after-sales requirements into the engineering process. For example, we did things like introducing special geometry into the CAD models representing the space that needs to be left free so a mechanic can fit his hands with a tool inside. These would then be considered in the packaging process. If you consider these are two completely different organizations, it becomes a very tricky problem to solve.
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You seem to be ignoring the fact that the battery pack status after a crash is essentially unknown. It should go through a thorough and competently conducted safety inspection or it may kill someone in the future. Of course, this doesn't excuse extra red tape tacked into the procedure, but the core idea of an inspection is just unavoidable.
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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.
Most people need a recommendation for something more current, from people who work on these modern cars daily. The reputation of 25+ year old models can be misleading.
Another source of good recommendations could be insurance companies. Cars with low reliability or very expensive fixes probably need more expensive insurance. But I don't know if this data is public or if you can tell apart the reliability from the repair cost.
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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?
The headlights are a sore point for me as well. I have to remove the entire front bumper piece to replace them on the 86.
Who thought that was appropriate?
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.
They reach a million miles because they're taxis, not in spite of it.
What kills the hybrids is that the kind of people who buy these sorts of "peak appliance" cars tend to be the same kind of people who'll obliviously let some critical fluid run too low. You get orders of magnitude less of that sort of behavior in taxi fleets.
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Oh yes, the Prius gets even better lifetime because the hardest strain on the engine components is completely negated by the electric motor. If I ever ditch the little mini sports car, I will most likely replace it with another Prius.
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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.
> Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten br[e]ak[e]s - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking instead of the real br[e]ak[e]s.
That's something that they should have taken into consideration when designing the car.
> that all the other brands have a mandatory inspection from the manufacturer before the cars will be tested by the independent check.
I'm in Europe. Never heard of mandatory inspection before independent checks. How would that even work, or be enforced.
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I think the break rusting issue can be fixed in software.
>Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten breaks - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking
Huh? Every EV uses recuperative braking, how is this special to Tesla?
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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.