Comment by nicoburns
3 hours ago
Regulation has everything to do with this.
> EVs are DESIGNED and MANUFACTURED to be extremely difficult to repair even by excellent technicians and software experts.
Correct. So we should pass regulation that makes this illegal (or otherwise prohibitively expensive for manufacturers due to legal responsilities which would be difficult to fulfil with such a design). We know that repairable EVs are entirely possible.
The same applies to smartphones and whole bunch of other hardware from washing machine to tractors, and is the basis of the "right to repair" movement.
If 40+ years of mobile phones have not solved such problems through regulations, I am afraid they won't be solved for EVs either.
Furthermore, once EVs become mainstream across the world, it will be China controlling the world [since batteries and chips & ICs (integrated circuits) need Lithium, Rare Earth Metals, etc., but China has the monopoly on them (especially on Rare Earths processing)].
That's why China is doing its best to dominate EV market (as hinted in the above linked article), because it knows no nation can dethrone it for the basic essentials of any EV.
It would be a bad idea for the world to be beholden to a single country for anything. Oh wait, the world is already beholden to China for most of the manufacturing. LOL.
We are doomed.
> If 40+ years of mobile phones have not solved such problems through regulations, I am afraid they won't be solved for EVs either.
I don't think that follows. Nobody has even attempted to solve these problems for mobile phones. And the main reason for that is that it's a pretty new problem. Appliances 40 or 50 years ago were much simpler and typically quite repairable. It's only the recently that a focus on manufacturing efficiency and profitability have led to these kind of problems.