Since EVs are mechanically simpler, I'd really like to see a return to kit cars.
Perhaps you could buy the preassembled chassis and modify the rest of the car as you'd like.
Maybe you could tear down the whole thing and rebuild it.
In theory this should be super accessible. You might see a whole community spring up over it. It's potentially a huge market ranging from teenagers to retirees. Lots of people love cars and modifying them.
There might be lots of companies that get in on the action and build a full ecosystem of compatible parts.
Despite the untold expense and full on car workshop... it felt very accessible and possible. Ridiculous hubris on my part obviously hah! I doubt I could change a tire on humvee without help.
I'm not sure how this is accessible, the drive-shaft is entirely customly designed and customly built to handle the torque. That's not even mentioning the 3D design software and laser cutting for the motor mount. This feels simple because he already has everything planned very well and it's a year long endeavour compactified into short youtube videos.
I don't see why 3D design software and getting parts fabricated (if you don't have the equipment to do it yourself) is all that inaccessible. It may cost more than getting into computer software, but just about everything is. It may not go very quick but there's nothing stopping you from doing this.
Heh, of course, I'm just taking the mickey out of myself. It avoids the car things that make me I'm know out of my depth: carburettors, gearboxes, firing patterns and such. Those come from a mysterious world I have no experience with.
If imagining a kit car then you won't be worrying about the custom designed elements you highlight.
This might be a youtube thing... but as far as I can tell, I linked to the first video in the playlist and you have linked to the last. It looks like the playlist is in the reverse order? i.e. it will play newest to oldest. God I hate yt.
After starting to watch the link I found, I realized it was reversed too. Even though it says "in order" from his profile's page. I've never really used YT for anything other than one off videos, and only recently started trying to watch some content in a more consumerist manner. I'm not liking it at all, and wonder why people put up with it, and don't just stop like I'm already considering
It would be great, but personally I think that modern chain-of-liability concerns would probably make the premise very difficult to work out.
An EV burns down. The chassis maker points its fingers at what they claim were low quality electronics used, the electronics manufacturer points its fingers at the sharp edges left on the chassis that could create chafe points.
Technical interoperability too aside from standards; in a collision it's difficult to model/simulate/test a car that may have 20 different motor options, placement options, dozens of batteries, etc. They'll all fail differently, how do we regulate that kind of safety?
I'd love for it to work.
It's already legal in the US to build your own car from scratch. There are certain minimum safety requirements (headlights, windshields, seatbelts, bumpers), but less than you may think (e.g. doors are not required, the steering wheel doesn't have to be on the left). The NHTSA isn't going to ask you to prove your car's crash-safety, all you need to do is pass inspection in your state.
>On page 376, under 'Eligibility for Title' it says "Homemade vehicles are not eligible for title or registration. Homemade vehicles are described as vehicles that were not previously manufactured by a NHTSA approved manufacturer..."
Texas was till recently. I have family that works at the registration office and needless to say there are a lot of people with custom vehicles that are surprised
Would be nice, but the economics would be kinda wack with how much of the cost is in the battery pack. Especially when companies like tesla put the same pack in all their cars and determine your "capacity" in software.
I'd imagine that would either change, or people would start buying up the lowest-cost EVs just to pull the battery out of them (like "shucking" external drives) and resell all the other parts.
My thought would be buying modular battery packs so you can start small, save some money, buy more, then just keep adding them in month-after-month.
Start with 50 km range at beginning, end up with 500 km range by the end of the year.
Would also enforce positive replacement and recycling procedures by creating a standard modular power unit.
Arguably doable, but I doubt any manufacturer or EV will ever tolerate such easy mod-ability or repair-ability. They live to destroy any attempts by the consumer knowing how to service their own property.
> Especially when companies like tesla put the same pack in all their cars and determine your "capacity" in software.
This is an enormously exaggerated statement, bordering on entirely false. Yes, the company has done this from time to time, including on some current Model S/X models, but the vast, vast majority of Tesla cars sold (the 3/Y) almost always have a different sized battery pack in reality, not just in software (~50kwh or ~75kwh - there is genuinely ~1/3 less cells in the 50kwh cars almost always).
The Model S/X sell in very tiny volumes, relative to the 3/Y too. There absolutely is not the same pack in "all their cars". Even the type of cells used varies between model packs, typically 2170/4680 in the 3 or Y, 18650s in the S/X. I think there are even some BYD blade batteries in some European Y variants, but I'm not as familiar with the German or China made cars.
Just use Google or Youtube... This isn't some secret information, this is widely known among EV enthusiasts. Even reviews that weigh the car will illustrate the different sized packs - the 50kwh cars are of course lighter too. EV fans obsess over the cell form factor and battery chemistry much like combustion car fans know the internals of car engines. Tesla's own presentation videos (also on youtube) talk endlessly about the new battery cell form factors they've introduced too and which products they are applied to.
> or people would start buying up the lowest-cost EVs just to pull the battery out of them (like "shucking" external drives) and resell all the other parts.
Problem is the battery packs. These kits need batteries and the best and cheapest batteries come out of wrecked teslas. If Tesla is allowed to continue locking down their batteries behind proprietary battery controllers the parts aren’t parts they’re intellectual property which Tesla can turn off at their convenience. And it’s super convenient for them to render parts unusable in the secondary market.
Tesla’s batteries are modular, and you can easily repurpose them. Yes, you’ll need a new charge controller, but that’s it.
More often than not, you’d want your own charge controller anyway to for example run at a lower voltage (different series). At least for the Model S/X modules. The 3/Y modules are a little bit trickier to re-use because they are higher-voltage and not as modular.
I think this is a great idea and would massively improve repair-ability and possibly even affordability of EVs for everyone.
I also think that most car manufacturers will hate this idea since it directly competes with and shows how incredibly un-repair-able current vehicles are. They don’t want to change. They just want to pretend to change.
And evwest.com also stocks a lot of parts. There literally thousands of videos on YouTube about conversions, and companies all over who are dedicated to doing them.
Love it. Want it. In the USA, the manufacturers would probably be sued out of existence when someone got killed or maimed in one, no matter whose fault it was.
Yet, in aviation, we have the "experimental, amateur built" (or, E/AB) category of homebuilt aircraft which is going strong and honestly I'd say that most of the technical innovation happening in light aircraft is happening in the E/AB category. There are thousands of homebuilt kit aircraft safely flying in the sky above you right now.
The difference, of course, is that for obvious reasons, aviation has developed a pervasive culture of safety and rigorous root-cause analysis whenever an accident happens, and deadly crashes frequently result in regulatory corrective action. If car accidents were as rare as aircraft accidents, the NTSB brought a team of investigators whenever one happened, and the results of that investigation led to stricter laws and enforcement, we'd probably be OK with kit cars, too.
The sad truth about automotive is that crashes are so routine that police won't even get out of bed unless there are injuries. And, there is basically no penalty for negligence that leads to a car "accident". It's almost impossible in the USA to lose your driver's license, even after dozens of repeated DUIs. Totally different cultures.
Who’s to say what comes first? Even if one thinks other things as being more important to fix, fixing less important things builds the ability to fix other thing.
this is the ignorance that drives these silly headlines. building these things is very hard. theres all kinds of crazy solvents and adhesives. the pack is structural. the product that tesla builds is fundamentally not well suited to repair or modification and tesla isnt under any obligation, on any level, to prioritize people who like to imagine they could repair or build a tesla over building the most excellent and sophisticated product possible. tesla is singlehandedly responsible for the EV explosion and they have earned the right to do what they want.
people buying a kit aren't building a tesla, they're building a kit car. When you buy a kit, you're not expecting the same thing you get from a dealership. You're expecting something you can build yourself, which is fundamentally different
What does earned the right to do what they want even mean. Why ought a society with pragmatic concerns ever concede those concerns based on a defective moral model where a party by doing some good somehow earns the right for society to somehow to put aside the needs of 338 million for the benefit of a dozen assholes in a boardroom.
This is a privilege that in a decent society ought not be available at any price.
It's silly to say that they are under no obligation when what we are talking about with right to repair is literally whether we ought to create such an obligation.
If you disagree you must explain why such an obligation is a net negative for the millions not the few.
Being responsible for making EVs popular does not give them the right to do whatever they want.
Tesla didn't push EVs out of the goodness of their hearts. They did so because they thought they could build a profitable company. Tesla's execs and shareholders are being compensated quite well already for their investment of money/time/work. No need to give them a blank check to do anything we (as a society) don't want them to do.
yeah it does. the EV market wouldnt exist if they hadnt stuck to their guns. people were adamant that EVs could never be real cars before the roadster and model s. when somebody invents something, we allow them to have a monopoly on that invention for a time. it incentivizes innovation but it also gives power to people who actually have the right idea, see things as they could be rather than just follow the herd. tesla definitely invented the modern EV market and the modern EV drivetrain. and now the same people who called me an idiot in 2011 are here saying that tesla is morally obligated to make their cars “hacker friendly” or whatever nonsense? all i can say is if youre so smart then why werent you asking for this in 2012 and 13? you could have asked musk directly at the shareholder meeting.
lol. am i supposed to type out a response to this? yes, i am aware of musk opening the patents. it doesnt conflict with or negate anything ive said. it certainly isnt an indication that elon musk believes teslas products should be subject to the will of the idiotic masses.
Rather than us fighting for the right to repair, shouldn't manufacturers be fighting for the right to limit our ability to repair? Isn't "right to repair" the default state? The right to repair, modify, disassemble, recombine your own property is a key component of capitalism, is it not?
In addition to all the legal restrictions on "reverse engineering" (i.e. examining how stuff works) and circumventing DRM, as technology advances, using technical means to restrict otherwise legal end-user activities is becoming a big problem.
That you're legally allowed to repair your tractor doesn't help much if the on-board secure TPM chip flags your replacement parts as counterfeit, locks the engine, and reports you to the manufacturer so they refuse to sell you parts in the future.
This is something I've wondered about. For cars there is a bunch of regulatory stuff that might preven you from doing this, but I believe the regulatory burden on tractors is much less. Why has no one just built a full on control system swap for tractors? Yeah, the OEM control board won't recognize your replacement part. Or it won't tell you whats actually wrong. Etc. Etc. But if you just replace it with an entirely OSS control system, that problem goes away.
I know that this probably not a trivial task, but, given the amount of money at stake, it feels worthwhile, but maybe I'm just underestimating the degree of integration of the current control system into the parts. If everything down the internal engine sensors is running priprietary, encrypted software and you basically have to tear it down and replace every single electronic component on the tractor, then yeah it probably won't ever make sense.
The software is the value proposition of modern equipment. Making a tractor is comparatively easy - we've been making them since the age of steam. Making a tractor with all the features of a day cab tractor truck, plus EPA compliant engine management through a host of proprietary systems, plus the systems and sensors needed for self-driving... Very non-trivial to replace.
That sounds like a fun project if you are a bitcoin millionaire that moved to a ranch. Rip the components out and try to re-engineer all of the control systems.
Given the number of sensors, it could also be a great way to collect open data for farming innovation, environmental data, etc.
Manufacturers make things difficult to repair, use nonstandard components and tools that you can't get from a third party, they glue things together in such a way that you have to have break it to get inside, they take away your warranty if you do anything they don´t want you to do, and so on.
This dispute is all about not letting manufacturers use such tactics. I see it also as an ecological issue, because unrepairable and upgradeable stuff means more garbage.
We found out that this is no longer the case since hardware can contain software which just prevents the "owner" from replacing a part. On top of this manufacturers abuse copyright laws to prevent "owners" from tinkering with said software.
That's why we need specific laws to protect the freedom which should be the default.
Part of the solution isn't just laws that require something to be reparable, but getting rid of the laws that constrain it. DMCA 1201 is used for this more than it's used for its ostensible purpose, and should have a general purpose exemption for any case where the circumvention or tool is necessary for any reason other than actual non-fair use copyright infringement.
Have a look at Louis Rossmann’s car repair videos.
There is a war going on between government and car manufacturers because they succeeded in side stepping most of the right to repair requirements.
Currently, most new car’s OBD2 ports are somewhat useless because they now use a proprietary wireless communicator to transmit error codes. Apparently, the old right to repair laws didn’t say anything about “wireless communication” so they took the loophole and ran with it.
The days of buying a reasonably affordable scanner and diagnosing and repairing your own vehicle are over. We’re back to square one of forcing them to give us right to repair again. It’s actually really really bad.
I think new cars are still required to report engine codes (ones that cause the CEL to trigger) on the OBD port. That’s still a large percentage of engine problems, and in particular, the ones that prevent you from getting registration renewed in many US states.
There are now Audi, Peugot, and Volvo vehicles sold in the US that don’t have an OBD port. You can’t pull an engine code from a port that doesn’t exist on the vehicle.
Toyota, Ford, and Chevrolet are also rumoured to be removing the OBD2 port with their 2025 line-up. They’re just testing how much they can get away with before committing to it.
It’s going to become very hard to repair or even diagnose our vehicles if we don’t start fighting back.
Right to repair is about making sure manufacturers can’t intentionally block repair. Also there have been some cases of people getting into legal trouble for doing things like using aftermarket (“counterfeit”) parts, I remember hearing about a repair shop having to destroy iPhone screens
Agree, the language is problematic. But unfortunately companies sometimes use the law to take away that right. Additionally, right to repair sometimes means going beyond the default state and requiring companies to go the extra mile, so that is where the langauge may also stem from.
Would you support a ballot measure(if this is an option in your jurisdiction) that enacts a strong right to repair? I don’t see how we can make it a default way otherwise. Lobby makes any attempted bill toothless.
To my understanding, you do have the right to repair a device or a piece of equipment yourself, but you don’t have the right to force the manufacturer to make it easier or to keep your warranty.
If you use the former definition, it’s already the default state. If you use the latter, “right to repair” becomes a reasonable-sounding term for a concept that’s not quite as reasonable.
The latter is already the case in some jurisdiction, and it's quite reasonable.
You can't just declare that any modification of the product voids the warranty, you need to show that the consumer's modification caused the warranty claim.
E.g. you won't get anywhere claiming that replacing the car seats caused the engine to lock up.
You can already intentionally ruin your seats, or use olive oil for your engine. So manufacturers already need to diagnose warranty claims in more detail, without considering modifications to the car itself.
But if you do change your seats on a tractor to more comfortable ones, you might further exacerbate the hazards of an already potentially dangerous piece of machinery, to the extent that the manufacturer wants to avoid such liability.
But even so, as long as the customers aren’t legally obligated to use a particular manufacturer’s equipment, any competitor should be able to win them over by avoiding a particularly unpopular practice.
Where do your rights begin and another’s end? If they wish to build a product in a way that you dislike, does it not impede their rights for you to inflict your will on them against their wishes?
This idea of a nice binary black and white cutoff for rights does not, and has not ever existed. This really is an absurdist American viewpoint. Let's make an example
"it's my legal right to pour a cup of water out on my property"
And, no one would really disagree with that.
"So I'm going to do it with a million cups of water all at once"
In which a flood happens destroying others property..., then we would see that the measure of ones actions is the consequences to others. If you make a car for yourself, go ahead and build it how you want. If you are making a mass produced product it's no longer about you or your rights. It's a superposition of your rights, the buyers rights, and the 'publics' rights as you dispose of that product.
The concept of rights is not binary, but at a certain point there cannot be multiple conflicting “rights” — 1 must get preference.
The maker starts with a right to make a product as they see best. The buyer has a right to purchase or not. The “public’s” rights are an interesting concept.
>The maker starts with a right to make a product as they see best.
I'm pretty sure we're not even on the same planet at this point. If you think this is true, go produce some products as 'you see best' and see how long before you end up in criminal/civil court. There are myriads of regulations on what you can and cannot put in products that are sold to others. To think otherwise is a level disillusionment that only the most staunch libertarians reach.
The public has rights, the market is not a free for all do to whatever you'd like.
This is easier than you think. If more people are apt to be disadvantaged by your actions than not why shouldn't they simply vote your rights away?
As a business person in any industry this is already true in 1000 mostly reasonable ways that mostly derive from outrageous behavior of prior actors in your space. In that context it seems ridiculous to argue against 1001 on principle unless the specific regulation is itself ill advised. The only justification it needs is for it to be a net positive.
Basically why do 338 million people give a fuck if a handful of people want to do user hostile things. Do them somewhere else.
control of a political situation by those outside the conventional or lawful realm, typically involving violence and intimidation.
I'm advocating for regulating industry for the greater benefit of the overwhelming majority of society as is already practiced in every developed nation on earth. You already can't build a house or sell a sandwich without following half a hundred regulations which are written in the ashes if a million poor fuckers who were maimed, killed, or fucked prior to yourself. If you exist in the modern business landscape you have internalized this and accepted it as the cost of doing business. Nobody gives every a little fuck if for instance you think your sandwich shop doesn't need health inspections or your workers don't need food handlers cards or if you would like to sell houses that don't meet building codes.
If we mutually understand that is literally how the world works everywhere then going back and pretending that society needs to justify "taking away Elon's rights to sell consumer hostile cars" then we are being intellectually dishonest. The same way you are being intellectually dishonest by denigrating simple democracy as "mob rule".
There should be limits to what companies are allowed to do in order to stop user hostile behaviour. It’s reasonable to say that if you want to sell things as a company you should have to take some basic steps like this
Rights to impose your will about something, should end at the point where you sell this thing to someone else. That's how it should be. Sadly a lot of companies are trying to rent rather than sell (see: ebooks, anything as a service, etc.) because this way they don't lose control.
That's called renting, not buying. There's no buyer in that case. And that's exactly the rent-seeking trend I talk about. Most virtual "purchases" are actually just rent because you don't actually own the thing.
Freedom is the key component of capitalism, in the purist sense. Including the freedom to trade the "right to repair" for other benefits, such as a superior vehicle due to higher integration, reliability and peace of mind knowing that any work will have been done by authorised repairers, lower up-front cost afforded by vendor lock-in, etc.
If people wish to voluntarily trade vehicles without the "right to repair", that's their choice, that's capitalism. The state intervening in transactions one way or the other is a violation of the capitalist ideal.
I think this ignores the complexity cost on the consumer. If every product has a different set of rules, the consumer will not be able to know them or follow them. This is already a big problem with long and unique EULAs for software. This is a market failure due to an inherent information asymmetry between supplier and consumer, favoring the supplier. A similar effect is present in the healthcare industry. It harms consumers and makes the market less efficient. It makes sense to regulate against this effect for that reason. Standardization efforts have yielded a great deal of value for society.
> Freedom is the key component of capitalism, in the purist sense.
Competitive markets and price information are also key components of capitalism - and the "right to repair" enhances both. Empirically, manufactures don't like competing for repairs, and they also obfuscate the cost of those repairs so customers would never know the total cost of ownership ahead of time.
State intervention does not violate capitalist ideals when it enhances competition, I'll go further and say coercive monopolies are anti-capitalist. Just because I bought a widget from you shouldn't force me to have it solely fixed by you at a price of your choosing.
Yes, coercion of any kind is anti-capitalist, yet you advocate for coercion by the state.
No coercion (voluntary transaction, no state involvement):
"I'll sell you this widget, but only if you agree to bring it to me for any repairs." "Ok."
Coercion (state intervention):
"Hi, I see you are about to sell your widget to that other guy who would like to buy it, knowing only you can perform any future repairs. If you go ahead, I will use the full force of the justice system to punish you, up to and including death."
I realise this is unrealistically ideal. The language is very important to get right though. You are advocating for coercion for the common good, not the absence of it. The state is impotent without violence, you don't need to shy away from it. State == force.
> I'll sell you this widget, but only if you agree to bring it to me for any repairs." "Ok."
I don't see how you don't see how this all-or-nothing approach as coercive. Maybe if I change the actors it'll become more apparent to you:
"You can sell your widget in our jurisdiction, but only if you agree to our laws." "Ok."
The power imbalance and lack of choice is what makes it not great. Clearly, you see the power of the state, but somehow ignoring the power of corporates over individuals; they might not be legally able to end your life, but they can ruin it (e.g. how recently-convicted eBay executives hounded their victim, or thr list of dead companies that "agreed" to work with Apple or Walmart).
I am unashamedly for using state power as a counterbalance to corporate power. Unregulated profit-seeking has never resulted in good outcomes for humans.
History is driven by theory tempered by pragmatism. The market cannot set its own rules, and standardization helps markets thrive by reducing the risk to the participants. It sounds like you've recently read Ayn Rand, so perhaps you're not ready to hear this, but an unregulated market will quickly fall apart because of rampant fraud. In a way there is a market for markets, and buyers and sellers both generally prefer a regulated market to an unregulated one. Not for ideological reasons, but for practical ones.
Does Tesla sell parts? If so, do you need a Tesla tool to program/activate them?
Electronics fail more often than mechanical parts and even today with independent auto shops having access to manufacturers programming software you still have to go to the dealer for some things
Assuming they do, that's not enough. There needs to be a market for non-Tesla-built parts that will nonetheless work in the cars. We shouldn't allow manufacturers to lock things down so that becomes impossible (or even illegal, when the DMCA comes into play).
Even the need to "reverse engineer" something that you paid for and ostensiblyown, though, is overwhelmingly insulting and in some ways (though obviously not technically legally, ethically) is basically directly challenging public perception of property ownership.
It's not even like it's say, a watch that I might actually need specialist equipment or knowledge to repair/maintain.
It's actually something I'm expected to at some point, be required of me, but is tactically not provided to me as to benefit a private entity.
And arguments can be made about who's ethical and economical burden it is to make documentation, but the fact is it'd just save an overall immense amount of societal time and productivity for those who already have the potential to provide documentation, to do so.
And so the expectation that we are left to our own devices on various forums and social media websites that may or may not be SEO'd by google to be brought to our attention with the right combination of keywords.
Is kind of baffling, to be honest. If it's easy for us, it should be even easier and quicker for them. Especially when most in many countries are unfortunately reliant on such things, many of them may not be reverse engineerers, or even versed in google-fu.
>It's not even like it's say, a watch that I might actually need specialist equipment or knowledge to repair/maintain.
If it doesn't need specialist knowledge then why are you asking for people to release their knowledge on how it works? Just use your general knowledge on how it works then.
Right to repair eventually runs head first into security and encryption--how do you allow right to repair and TLS, encryption, secure computing, etc to coexist? Get rid of IoT black boxes like Google Homes? Allow Linux on Xbox?
How do you create secure platforms while also giving consumers the keys to their devices?
(FWIW I'm not advocating against right to repair, I actually hope it helps to get rid of black box IoT devices. My device, my keys, etc)
I don't see the conflict. If it important that the device can prove its authenticity to some centralised service then yes, it is likely that the consumer can't also modify that device.
But how many devices really need that level of attestation? Does a tractor need to be able to prove to John Deere that it is a genuine unmolested vehicle, or does it just need to prove to JD that an active subscription is in place for whatever remote service is being used?
If just the latter, then we can still have encryption, no problems. That's just username & password over TLS, same as we have been doing for decades on untrusted endpoints.
In automotive, we've had to conform to Right to Repair laws for 10+ years. We handle encryption by facilitating access to tools that allow users to encrypt/unencrypted the data so they can make the repairs, but without exposing how the data is encrypted/unencrypted.
With TLS it’s just authing the server, accept any income connections. Support basic authentication.
For home devices don’t require TLS. I don’t run TLS on my home network. I’m remote, I get devices, I accept that risk. TLS is not required for security.
For encryption just design so customers can swap out keys.
The biggest problem is designing cloud in the loop so they can mine data. This needs to stop.
People have been repairing their own cars for a century, and the world functioned just fine with it. This locking down is a recent phenomenon. Your car is not going to mow down people just because someone other than the dealer serviced it.
Sorry but still doesn't hold water. A user accepts risk modifying their vehicle. However, The burden of proof would be on the manufacturer to show that they modified something that had an impact on the automated systems. To my knowledge there's not a single case of an automated tractor or car due to end user modification related to the automated systems that's caused injury. So right now your argument is by and large hypothetical. John Deere and the right to repair will be the proving ground for a end user modifications of personal vehicles.
Which is another reason right to repair is so important, because carmakers can go out of business without all their cars ceasing to to exist. Someone finds an exploitable bug in a million cars after the only systems with the documentation and signing keys have been wiped and sold at auction, and what then?
It calls for the ability of the general public to be able to repair their vehicles, so that anyone with such a vehicle can fix such problems.
What alternative would you even propose? The only entity with the ability to feasibly fix the bug is defunct and bankrupt, leaving them both judgment proof and with no resources to develop a patch. The only people with the incentive to spend resources fixing it are the people who own the vehicles. So the owners need the ability to repair their vehicles.
Which you can solve by just doing that to begin with, requiring no separate legislation.
I’d propose something like the FDIC. Every car sold pays into an insurance fund that, if a company collapses, takes over to maintain access to software updates for the reasonable lifespan of the vehicles.
I don’t think people should be forced to self-manage software updates on multi-ton machinery.
> Every car sold pays into an insurance fund that, if a company collapses, takes over to maintain access to software updates for the reasonable lifespan of the vehicles.
That's still a third party. Where are they supposed to get parts or source code after the company fails? It could be a car company in Asia with no engineering team in your country. The reason they failed could be a natural disaster that wiped out their facility.
The ability to make repairs has to be in the hands of the public before something happens to them. And it has to be the public and not some government filing cabinet to demonstrate that whatever they provide actually allows it to be done.
A clear example would be that they rotate the signing keys without providing the new ones to anyone else. Third party mechanics would notice this immediately; government bureaucrats may not.
> I don’t think people should be forced to self-manage software updates on multi-ton machinery.
They're not forced to do it any more than they are now. They can have someone else do it for them -- anyone else, in fact.
The problem right now is that the one someone else is trying to keep a monopoly on being able to do it, which creates a single point of failure in the event that anything happens to them.
You could perform phone phreaking in the 1960s, but a million phones in a botnet provides different challenges even if both are technically just a compromised phone.
Remember the old days when you would open up an appliance and there would be the full circuit diagram pasted on the inside of the case? Unfortunately VLSI kinda killed this off, nowadays everything is crammed into a single chip that you can't repair.
What makes you think looking at that google news search was the extent of the research they did to justify that assertion? Journalists typically do not show all their workings (though they could always show more). To me, the link is obviously just a moderately useful stepping stone/prompt for people to research the point themselves.
Repairability is like online security: if companies really cared about it, they'd have built it into the product beginning at the design stage. With most products these days, repairability is actively discouraged at many different levels: components are inaccessible, soldered or glued on, specifications are unavailable, replacement parts are not sold direct to the public, etc. This is all done to shorten product lifetimes such that consumers have to purchase new products more frequently, that's clear enough.
Some companies might realize that there's a market for repairable products and shift tactics, there seem to be a few out there, though not many.
In the other news, BMW has "stopped" selling service manuals for motorcycles showing a damn middle finger to everyone including law makers (in Europe even). That is absolutely rubbish, but somehow they can do it legally.
Well, most EVs have weak 12V batteries to power computers, lights etc. They are not designed to output the amps needed to turn an engine. That makes sense for the EV since it saves a lot of weight. And the main batteries are usually 400V to 800V, which you can't use to jump another car (or you can use it once, at most).
That's pretty common for EVs (and hybrids), since they don't have (or need) a traditional starter engine and only use the 12V to boot up the car they downsize the 12V and / or switch to lithium chemistries.
Small nit: I can 'jump' (read: charge the battery of) other cars with my model X, as long as the other car is an ICE car. In the frunk there is a panel that pops off and underneath there are (unlabeled) 12V and ground terminals that I can put jumper cables on.
However, I have had to get my car towed a mile to a charging station before, I really deeply wish I could have received a jump then.
There's nothing magic about it, you have a regular j1772 plug on the end of a generator, or a battery to provide it. Also a few evs now have 120v or 220v AC outlets, that you could put a j1772 into and give another car a charge. Sadly there appear to be no direct DC charging systems available between cars at this moment.
That map is a lot more expansive than I expected, that's awesome! AAA was the roadside assistance provider I called in that instance I mentioned and they didn't offer this service at that time. (Although the driver did an incredible job dropping my car off in a difficultly placed charging stall!)
> Small nit: I can 'jump' (read: charge the battery of) other cars with my model X, as long as the other car is an ICE car. In the frunk there is a panel that pops off and underneath there are (unlabeled) 12V and ground terminals that I can put jumper cables on.
"Jump" isn't the same as "charging the battery" of other cars.
You can charge a 12v car battery with as little as 4A if you're willing to wait. Jump starting requires between 45 and 60A, minimum. For a larger car engine, you're looking at 80A-100A, or even more.
I don't think that the EV 12v terminals are able to provide that sort of current; I think those terminals are provided so that normal camping equipment (lights, winch, things like that) can be powered.
Another commenter already pointed that out about the word jump, you can reference that comment for my reply. On the second point, I can comfortably pull 50-100 amps for an inverter from those terminals. I believe the DC-DC is 2500W on my car - I have an early model X which is over specified in many regards. It does not take long to charge an ICE battery enough to be able to turn a starter.
And to clarify: I don't try to start the ICE with my Tesla hooked up, mostly out of superstition. I don't see why it wouldn't work given there's also a regular old 12v sealed lead acid battery behind the frunk.
I would be cautious doing that. The analogous (I think) terminals hiding under the old Model S nosecone are not particularly thick, and you might fry something. Also, if they are fused (I don’t know whether they are) and you blow the fuse, then merely opening the doors of the car if anything else goes wrong with the 12V system becomes quite complicated.
Oh yeah, I take caution, but believe me, I'm no stranger to being locked out by an inoperable 12v system.
Regarding the topic of the original post, it is infuriating to try to figure out which fuses do what in this car. It is information that is simply not provided.
It is provided at service.tesla.com. Wiring diagrams, service manual, etc. Sign in with your Tesla account to get the documents that match your VIN. It's free.
Not for me, after signing in and prompting for my country, takes me to a page asking for 165 dollars for a one day access, 500 for a month, or 3,000 for a year.
Edit: oops, despite what I said above, after browsing around I think I found what you're talking about? Nice! TY! This is awesome! There are wiring diagrams!
Have you tried it? My Tesla doesn’t keep the terminals charged unless the car has recently been in motion and shuts down in a few minutes.
Also Tesla says not to do this, jumping in the conventional sense is more as you describe, charging the other battery and may require more than 20min to do it.
Yes, I have an unfortunate habit of leaving the lights on in my ICE vehicle, and I've used it to run an inverter many times in a camping type of scenario. My memory is that there's two 12v terminals in my frunk, one that turns off and one that does not. My car is older though, pre facelift.
That's not normally what people mean by "jump": jumping an ICE car is using the battery of one car to power the starter motor of another to get it running (after which it doesn't need a battery to keep running).
That's being unnecessarily nitpicky. Anytime someone helps you get started when your starter battery is dead is close enough that people will call it a "jump".
Not having jumper cables, I've "jumped" several people by hooking them up to my battery charger and getting enough charge into their battery to start their engine.
For me it means "no longer stranded" but I get the point. To explain the semantic ambiguity in my head, I find that ICE vehicles needing a jump often have a voltage so low (or that the battery pack or donor vehicle I'm using is anemic enough) that they need to be charged the same way, or the dead battery disconnected to allow the other battery to turn the starter motor.
That is the exact use case where solar roofs on EV’s become very useful. However you can “jump” EV’s, supply power to their 12v system and then charge off of another cars 120v plug, or a portable generator etc.
Similarly, I've always thought it's a no brainer for any ICE car to have a solar roof. At a minimum it can keep a 12v battery from dying over long parking durations or high parasitic drain, and at best it could like, keep a container refrigerated or something.
I once drove back to SF from Castle Lake with a dead alternator by hanging an 85W portable solar panel over the rear window of my mx-5, connected to the battery in the trunk.
It supplied enough juice to run the car with no accessories most of the way back, until a combination of overcast sky and uncooperative route direction started making the car hesitate at the slightest throttle input.
So it'd definitely give a little MPG boost by taking a load off the alternator, in addition to keeping the battery topped up like you said. I was tempted to epoxy a cheap flexible one permanently on the trunk-lid. With the trunk-mounted battery it'd be trivial.
I’d rather pay $2,000 less for my Honda HR-V than get a solar roof. But I agree it seems like a very nice option for those willing to pay more for their vehicles.
2k is IMO a poor price point as it’s too much for the minimal utility but not enough for meaningful power. IMO solar roofs are useful at the low end for ~400$ ICE cars could top off their battery and run a solar fan to keep the temperature down when parked in the sun. Not a huge deal, but still a nice luxury feature.
Or a significantly more expensive solar roof could add meaningful highway mileage per year. You both largely offset its cost via less charging and have the option for a low speed crawl to a charging station.
I'd be surprised if solar panels in the roof were less than $2,000. An android-auto enabled head unit is like $500. Heated seats are often $1000 and that's "just" resistive wire. A cover for your truck bed is like $700. Premium carpet mats are $250. Unlocking your tailgate using a remote beeper instead of a physical key costs $300.
> IMO solar roofs are useful at the low end for ~400$
So I agree with this, but I don't believe that would be an option, at least without some DIY aspect.
Car options are priced independently from what they actually cost to manufacture. A cheap luxury car will often include a host of features that cost quite a bit when you added as features to a lower end car. And sometimes it’s the reverse where missing features in luxury cars ends up being almost as expensive as the cheap cars they come standard in.
It’s a combination of price discrimination and the overhead of having multiple different specs being manufactured independently of whatever the actual differences are.
> at least without some DIY aspect.
Solar car battery chargers already exist for less than 30$. I’m assuming the overhead of including it into the cars design and modifying body panels etc significantly increases costs. But it’s the kind of thing Subaru could add to every car for diversification without significantly impacting final price.
Yep. So I’m expecting it to cost me $2,000 as the consumer, and I wouldn’t want to spend that. If costs some trivial amount, I’d love to have a battery that basically never dies.
It's worth noting simple solar 'trickle chargers' can be had for less than 100 bucks, today. They are awesome for such things like additional confidence while overlanding in a remote location, or for a trailer with a winch, or an electric boat lift on a dock without shore power.
Continental America averages on the order of 4.5kWh/m^2/day total solar irradiance.
A clean, car roof sized solar panel in direct sunlight all day would be good enough to offset parasitic drain with maybe enough left over to charge a phone or two but not much else. Not worth the cost (or the variance given you’re not always going to park in direct sunlight for 8+ hours).
I would expect people in sunny areas would be more interested in a solar car.
The recent solar Prius has a small roof and gets a few miles of range per day. Things get more interesting on a van/full sized SUV with a far larger roof.
> I have had to get my car towed a mile to a charging station before
It really seems like EVs should have easily replaceable batteries, so that in situations like that you can just have roadside service bring you a charged battery and swap it out. Or for that matter, charging stations could pre-charge batteries, and you pay to swap your drained battery for a charged one.
In that case I was towing a U-haul trailer, which leads to another thing that probably should exist: trailers with supplemental EV batteries. Not sure if the extra capacity is made up for by the extra weight though.
(For context my car uses maybe ~1.5 - 4.0 times as much power when pulling the various sizes of U-haul cargo trailers)
Maybe it would be distasteful, but a trailer with an ICE engine that could charge the battery while driving. Might be a trick to make it so that the generator could supply more energy than is consumed per minute.
Aerodynamics are at least as bad as weight when it comes to trailers iirc. And there are at least leisure trailers that come with battery packs in them. The Lightship and Boulder come to mind for instance. I suspect it's a matter of time for more utility trailers, if it's not already a thing. Batteries are expensive though.
I wish there was some standard to add short term battery capacity for EVs and PHEVs. An e-scooter battery can get most EVs 5 miles down the road. A standardized battery pack and wiring harness in the trunk could allow roadside assistance to get you unstrained or rent a bigger pack for road trips.
I'm sure OEMs don't want to warranty 3rd party equipment connecting to their vehicles and making charge/discharge, cooling, securing heavy packs, etc. reliable.
Tesla has talked about that. The main issue with swappable batteries is that the whole battery has to be accessible from the bottom or side of the car. This provides design constraints on battery size. Most automakers don't want to compromise on battery size, they want to pack as much battery as possible in the space that's available.
The next biggest issue with swappable batteries is responsibility. If all of the batteries are shared, who pays for a new battery when a battery reaches its end of life? This problem will have to be solved at some point anyway since nobody likes paying $15K+ when their vehicle battery reaches end of life. It would make much more sense to amortize this cost over the life of the vehicle. It would be easy to do that with higher fees of battery swaps, but people don't normally like higher upfront costs even if it works out to the same in the end.
swapping been done and shipped on production vehicles that are still around. The original tesla model s had this capability. Tesla had a working station in california, it took a couple of minutes to do the swap. It had basically no demand.
Jump start? Pfft.
The stupid car, got stuck with AC stuck on full heat, with a blacked out screen.
Unresponsive to resets.
I couldn't even open the damm frunk to remove the fuses, yeah okay I don't carry a 12v battery around with me to jump the frunk.(how difficult is it to give damm manual overrides for critical stuff) It was a rental so no access to Tesla app.
Tesla Customer service refused to help, since it's a rental
Tesla is a smart phone with wheels that can't make calls.
It's great while it works but it is as dangerous as it can be once things go wrong.
This car must be banned. It scarred me enough to keep me away from other EVs too which put all the controls in a screen. There is no excuse for EVs to have everything electrically controlled.
I have a rivian and the 12v battery died on it while I had it plugged in charging at home. In the manual I found the emergency trunk release (access from underneath the car), and then there was a manual release for the charging port inside the frunk.
My gas cars have died with some electrical problem before, out in the boonies where there was no one to help. But that was back when all my cars had a key, so I could at least open the door with physical key.
Question out of ignorance: what does it mean to jump start an EV?
I know what it is for an ICE (and I have a jump-starter-battery always in the trunk, with usb ports it doubles as a phone charger if you’re somewhere without power), but for an EV, I’d guess you either have enough battery charge for it to run, or you need to charge, right?
The design that allows 12V to completely discharge while there's charge in high voltage batteries is idiotic. I ran into that in Toyota hybrid. Why there's no manual override that enables charging of 12V battery? It could be under the hood and turn off automatically when the voltage in 12V battery is high enough.
This same problem happens in evs where due to some problem the 12v discharges. When everything is working the 12v is charged up from the main battery bank.
Tesla in the early days sometimes ran down the 12v and it wasn't that uncommon, there were problems with runs of batteries yielding poor ones; I think they had messed up software that wasn't charging the 12v enough, but they made changes to address that long ago. On my second ev, a rivian, I just had to have my 12 battery replaced. They said sometimes the 12v batteries just die on them.
Some Hyundai hybrids and PHEVs have this (I saw it in the original Ioniq). It's a button you press that temporarily charges the 12V battery through the high-voltage system rather than being always enabled, but it seems like a great idea.
I just learned that my ICE vehicle can drain the 12v battery overnight if it fails to turn off the accessories circuit. No lights or infotainment etc. were left on. In my case, it was the switch on the park gear flaked out. I imagine a variety of similar faults could cause the same issue in an EV.
Reminds me of renting a zipcar for a few days and parking it in an underground parking lot.
When I went to use the car after a couple days, the battery was drained. This happened on multiple occasions with different vehicles parked in the same garage.
My best guess is Zipcar has cellular comms to phone home, which enter some weird “always trying to connect” state when cut off from cellular signal underground.
Zipcar’s response was to ban me from renting on their platform ever again for too many disabled vehicles.
My car (a hybrid) has a long-standing bug in the radio system that can make it "freeze" and stay on forever. Only way out once it's frozen is to pull the right fuse (or wait for it to drain your battery all the way).
Yeah, it's just a tiny compatibility issue, but it's really a bummer that you're sitting on enough electricity to power a house for days and can't even jump a car. It's gonna be great if we can utilize all the juice in our cars...
You can get a small jumper battery and leave it in the car. You can easily charge it with the EV. It'll be smaller than a full set of jumper cables, even.
Because they are apples and oranges and Tesla is using 48v! Jumping a 12v lead acid battery with 48v is a fantastic way to completely fry the ICE vehicle.
AFAIK Teslas use 12V like everyone else, do you have a source for 48V?
However EVs (and hybrids) do tend to have pretty small 12V batteries and I think some of them have switched off of lead-acid: they only need the 12V to boot up the electronics, not to power a starter engine.
No normal person can repair a Tesla, it’s basically a trade secret. My brother is a mechanic and servicing Teslas are a non starter due to the complexity. The notion that I can just download a manual, buy some parts and DIY my own repairs is absolutey ludicrous.
The only reason for Tesla to support right to repair is to increase regulatory burden on competitors, stunt innovation and raise costs for their competition. Shame on this anticompetitive behaviour.
I do not agree. The parts of the mechanical drivetrain or the molded plastics can be impossible to obtain before a large number of Teslas have been scrapped and sold for parts. But the battery and electronics can be understood and repaired without schematics. The software reverse engineering is possible. I agree that repairs can be far to time-consuming to be economically viable, but given free labour it can be done.
EVs could be a gigantic step down in complexity but that doesn’t benefit their manufacturers. It would risk making them a commodity that can be assembled from parts like an old school PC.
Instead the industry is looking at the EV transition as a way to increase costs and decrease customer freedom. This is absolutely artificial and in no way mandated by the technology.
A similar case in computing is what happened with mobile and tablets where a change in form factor allowed lock down to be smuggled in without people asking too many questions. A Mac is now a big overgrown tablet in terms of its CPU and innards but you can install your own OS on a Mac but not an iPad. Why? No technical reason at all.
Right to repair is good but it’s actually less than what we need. We need a huge rebirth of DIY technology and less centralized supplier ecosystems. This may require some regulation but it also requires consumers to stop being so passive and prioritizing shininess and laziness over every single other thing. The “millennial minimalism” era needs to end both as an aesthetic and a framework for consumer-producer relations. (The two are related.)
When we transition to 4WD in-wheel motors the drivetrain and the moving parts could become standard. The inverters could become programmable. We designed programmable networks of per-battery-cell (dis)charger computers that would take the danger out of clusters of battery cells of unequal batteries. When each battery is wired in parallel, not in series not only can you go from 800 charge cycles to 20000 cycles (lifetime nearly 50 years) but you would eliminate fires and prevent short circuits in the power networks. It would thus be possible to build cars completely from standard parts. Mind you, not a single company has tried this yet, but there is no economical or theoretical impediment to build from off-the-shelf components in the next two decades. EV car kits will be poossible and probably cheaper. After an amateur has build one, for example the Dutch Government RDW would test the car for safety for less than a thousand Euro's, like they already do for car, truck and camper conversions. I remember an Scientific American article in the 90's predicting single mechanic African custom EVs as a future possibility.
We need a Framework for EVs perhaps to get this going.
The EV I want is a simple super reliable easily repairable one.
I personally went for the Nissan Leaf in lieu of this because it’s basically a Nissan Versa with a motor and batteries where the engine and gas tank go. Not good for road trips but a nice city car and decently repairable. (I have an older ICE for road trips that I don’t drive much otherwise.)
> EVs could be a gigantic step down in complexity but that doesn’t benefit their manufacturers. It would risk making them a commodity that can be assembled from parts like an old school PC.
But the step down in complexity also makes it easier to become a manufacturer, and as battery costs come down this is likely to happen.
At which point a startup with no other way to distinguish themselves can start selling highly repairable electric cars. Customers figure out that these have a lower ownership cost (whether or not they do the repairs themselves) and start preferring them. The incumbents then follow suit or lose the market.
The main reason this doesn't happen for phones is that the market is so consolidated. The main SoCs are made by only a small handful of companies who don't publish documentation, and producing a competitive one is capital-intensive because of the constraints of the form factor. But even there it may not be permanent -- what's going to happen to phones once there is a fully-documented RISC-V SoC on the market that has tolerable performance and power consumption?
It's not the best example unfortunately. People do build custom headers by cutting and welding various pipes using off-the-shelf tools. Welp, ICE is an old tech (from 18c), so it doesn't take dark magic to fix a whole ICE car mechanically. The real deal breaker is electric controllers w/ proprietary software.
That's assuming you need the controller to do the exact same thing in the exact same way as the OEM one. But in many cases people are replacing it because they want it to do something different anyway.
And these functions are in many cases quite simple. You replace the controller for the door locks. It operates a solenoid that locks and unlocks the doors. Maybe they no longer function by calling the call center to have them unlock your car, but maybe you don't want that anyway. They still function if you press a button on your key fob.
Seriously, I've read that some EV makers require that two persons be present when working on the HV system, the second one on watch with a pull-up hook in case the first one seizes up touching some 400 or 800 V DC part.
There are a very few private tesla repair garages that do know how to repair some things. They seem to be run by former tesla repairmen. They have been able to salvage a lot of dead cars. They seem to be mostly in california.
Go to service.tesla.com, login with a free account, you can access all repair information and service manuals for free. You absolutely can download a manual, buy some parts, and DIY
Perhaps you could buy the preassembled chassis and modify the rest of the car as you'd like.
Maybe you could tear down the whole thing and rebuild it.
In theory this should be super accessible. You might see a whole community spring up over it. It's potentially a huge market ranging from teenagers to retirees. Lots of people love cars and modifying them.
There might be lots of companies that get in on the action and build a full ecosystem of compatible parts.
It'd be really neat.