Fixing car and e-bike batteries saves money and resources, but challenges are holding back the industry
Jacking Up a Car Is Dangerous. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway
M.O.N.E.Y.
Yep. Other than thrill seekers, the only reason any business does something is for the money. If you can go, “Hey, you don’t need to spend $12k on a new battery pack! Bring it down to Bubba’s Batteries Bazaar and we can fix it for less!”, you will get business.
Yeah, thats pretty much it. Doesnt VW repair or recycle their own batteries?
I suppose jacking off a car is also dangerous.
Depends. Are you a dragon?
Wasnt there subreddits for that?
Not that I know of.
There is dragonsfuckingcars.
You wouldn’t download a car… And if you did, you wouldn’t jack off a car…
Eh. That’s not really comparable to lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are similar to bombs in that they’re highly dense stores of energy. If something goes wrong and that energy storage medium gets exposed to air, or there’s a failure in a charging safety mechanism, that’s a chemical fire at best, explosion at worse, but no matter what, it’s extremely toxic.
A car sitting 6 feet in the air is also a highly dense storage of energy that could be released at any moment. I do get your point, but there are ways to mitigate the dangers associated with working on a pack, and they’re not as volatile as you think. Being exposed to air isn’t going to cause a cell to explode as the lithium is mixed with other chemicals inside the cell to make it fairly inert. The danger comes from short circuits, whether it be a puncture or bridging contacts with something conductive.
The whole repair thing should made super easy if we want EVs to succeed.
- Make all batteries use an easily swappable set of standard cell sizes.
- Make battery controllers standardised and swappable.
- …. Er… that’s it.
But that will never happen because the EV manufacturers couldn’t charge ridiculous amounts of money for proprietary batteries.
That why we need regulators. The market doesn’t magically deal with “Tragedy of the Commons”.
no that’s communism
No one lives in completely unregulated capitalism. Well, not willingly anyway. That kind of anarchy happens when countries collapse. But normally you quickly get a drug/war lord taking over setting their own (unfair) laws & regulation.
It’s a constant battle of over/under regulation, regulatory capture, etc. But that’s how it should be in a dynamic world.
God forbid that they concentrate on the quality of the basic vehicle instead.
But you know gubmint regjuleshons are stifling innovation.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again allow… cars with CATL or Nio battery swap cassettes into the US… It is so dumb that there are different battery setups for every manufacturer … In a Nio I can swap batteries for less than a pack of beer… Why not do that instead of this current BS system where you have only one pack and once that is done it is $10k
Looks like for some Ioniq 5’s it’s 60k - more than a new car.
I also saw that video (note $60k CAD about $42k USD). Hyundai is really going to need to figure things out if they expect Ioniq 5 sales to continue because insurers aren’t going to keep paying out $60k every time someone drives over some road debris and customers aren’t going to be happy about insanely high insurance bills or paying more than the MSRP of their brand new car to replace a single component.
I wonder if the prices are due to Hyundai having supply chain issues and designating every pack toward new vehicles.
I heard NIO has this technology already and are looking to standardise it.
This was posted to one of the communities I sub to a day ago: https://spectrum.ieee.org/flow-battery-2666672335
This would probably be the best option if it takes off.
Is it money? I bet it’s money
Mostly it’s money for the consumer. I have a Prius so it might be a little different. But when the hybrid battery goes out costs something like $7,000 to have it replaced. A mechanic in town will repair it for $1000.
Now my car isn’t worth $7000 so if I had to replace the battery then I would just get a new car and this one might end up in the scrap heap. In getting it repaired I have gotten something like 6 more years out of it, at least, and that’s a pretty significant environmental savings.
And that’s essentially what the article is saying.
A battery that is utter trash for driving purposes still has tons of life left for other uses.
So it is about money.
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Interesting.
First of all apparently ublock, no script, or some combination of my add-ons kept me from seeing the message and I’m able to view the entire article.
Even more interesting is this text at the end of the article-
This story was originally published by Grist, a nonprofit media organization covering climate, justice, and solutions.
So this source basically spun an article from Grist and put it behind their paywall.
Following the link from Scientific American, the first line of the Grist article is-
This story was co-published with WIRED.
It’s clowns the whole way down, yaaaaar.
We should all strive for this level of rigor when understanding sources of articles online.
The world would be so much better.
Worked fine for me! I’m not a subscriber to SA.
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Manufacturers will keep making their cars hard to repair cos they want all the money of the customers in original replacement parts. Their cars are specially designed to only be repaired by their own technicians, they want the whole business you know.
Unless it’s a Nissan, then forget a repair – it’s an all out replacement every time. Don’t buy a Leaf.
ChrisFix did it on a Toyota: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAHaYXBFnJo
Because that’s literally a mechanic’s job.
Danger, Danger, High Voltage!
Although it annoys me that mechanics consider even 400V “high” voltage. HV is supposed to be 1,000V, minimum.
400V is dangerous though. The traditional 12V is not.
Absolutely, but 400V isn’t as dangerous as 1,000V. IEC standards have already established all of this, above 1,000V is HV, below 50V is ELV and generally safe. Automotives have come in and labelled anything above like 24V as “HV”, which is just silly.
I loved how Renault solved this for the Twizzy (and other cars). You bought the car. You leased the battery for something like 50 euros a month. (Probably more now).
Sure, that sounds expensive, but I suspect it worked out less than replacing the battery after a decade.
Suspect it also helped resale value. The most expensive repair to worry about for a second hand buyer, is the battery. Making that a lease removes that worry entirely. You know exactly how much it’s going to cost.
Of course, having to pay that monthly lease fee for the battery, does make it more obvious that electric cars aren’t necessarily that much cheaper to run than an ICE.
whatever happened to Teslas distributed powergrid? Now that was a game changer, offloading the cost of the battery entirely could have made EVs actually affordable.
EVs are still much cheaper to run than ICEs though. Yes the battery is an expensive replacement but maintenance is still much cheaper because they don’t have gearboxes, clutches, turbo chargers, catalytic converters, particulate filters, spark plugs, engine oil, timing belts, head gaskets, cylinders, exhausts, etc. etc.
It’s cheaper, but not that much cheaper. Anecdotally, my current car is 8 years old and has cost me roughly 400 euros a year in repairs and servicing. Manual gearbox is fine and should outlast the car.
Also, if I do a simulation for extended warranty and servicing (8 years/210k km) on the manufacturers website for a petrol car and for an equivalent electric car, the difference is roughly 600 euros per year. I suspect that’ll be down to the battery. Traditional car the costs are spread over a longer period. Electric the battery or whatever sneaks up on you. The whole thing becomes doubly annoying when you factor in high electricity prices, meaning (sometimes) fuel costs are lower than electricity costs.
To be clear, electric is the future, it’s a good thing they’ll be banning the sale of new ICE cars here in the foreseeable future, and an electric car almost certainly is cheaper to run. It’s just not _that _much cheaper. I assume prices will come down when they’re forced to start making more of them and competing with the Chinese.
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What I seem to see most on Lemmy is split 50/50 between “EVs are way worse than cars because they are heavy and have tires and tire particulates are FAR worse than tailpipe emissions, and ICE vehicles weigh nothing and don’t have tires anyway” and “EVs are cars and cars are the devil - if you don’t live in a city center and use a bike exclusively you might as well be slaughtering children by the hundreds, because there is literally no moral difference.”
LMAO
