This is modestly interesting. My brother worked here before they had layoffs about two years ago, and had a generally favorable opinion of the company and leadership.
Fundamentally, while I think RJ seems like a sound businessman and technologist, and I like the company’s taste a bit, I will never be able to reconcile his views with mine. He very openly views cars as computers and software and services that happen to move you around, and I would like it to be a machine over which I have as minimal a relationship as possible with the manufacturer after I acquire the product.
Sadly that era of the vehicle industry is gone. Even if we completely forget electric vehicles, getting parts for any car is becoming harder, because the manufacturer is trying to sell you assembled bundles of things, rather than individual items.
But then we have electric cars. Swapping the battery in these is insanely costly, and if you need other repairs, brands like Tesla would purposefully go out of their way to ensure you only replace things at Tesla certified shops
I suppose I’m shilling here, but check out rockauto.com for car parts. They carry an insane number of car parts for basically wholesale prices. A lot of times you can still buy the individual parts instead of entire assemblies.
Funnily enough, the Rivian CEO talks about exactly that in this interview
In that scenario, we would be using one ECU to do everything I just described. In this case, it’s a much larger computer, but one computer. It’s a massive simplification for how we think about software development and also drives a lot of cost out of the vehicle because instead of 70 to 80 little boxes — little computer boxes with wiring and connectors and everything else — we have, in our case, seven.
So when one small thing stops working, you now have to buy their proprietary, expensive ECU instead of a cheap little microcontroller.
I have an 01’ Volvo. It has an alarm siren under the bumper. They put a nicad battery in the siren so that even if the main battery is cut the alarm can go off. This battery is prone to going bad, leaking out, and ruining the control board. This will cause the sunroof to not work. The rest of the car is still fine. You will get an error message about the security system, but the car will start. You just can’t use the sunroof.
If you catch the problem in time, you can cut the siren open and replace the battery, there is also some way to eliminate the alarm feature through reprogramming I think. I have also seen an aftermarket board that will take it’s place.
I just live without the sunroof as it’s not worth fixing.
If you make sure to not charge the battery to 100% all the time, the battery of an EV will easily last for 300,000 km. There will be a slight reduction of overall capacity, but nothing that will impact your day to day life (unless it consists of driving 24/7). Overall, EVs are way more robust than ICE cars.
But yeah, if you’re out of luck, then repairs are expensive because of the reasons you mentioned.
Ugg …no they are not. Stop this. They’re good for certain things, like smaller commutes and cheaper cost per mile, but they are not more robust, not by a long shot, 300k miles not km is normal for an ICE car and then some. I’ve got multiple cars with 300+k on the clock and I’d drive them across the nation tomorrow.
The average lifespan of a car is 200k miles, not 300k. While it’s not uncommon to see cars going higher than that, it’s rare to see them get to 300k. I’ve had 2 Toyotas that died between 230k and 260k. There are more citations in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity
Given that 300k km is ~186k miles, I think OP made a pretty reasonable comparison.
As for robustness, how do you even define that? Repair costs per year/mile? Frequency of repairs needed? In either case, there’s a much bigger gap between a Jeep and a Toyota than between ICE and BEV.
Sure but then you need to average in shit EVs if you’re going to lump in shit vehicles. You also need to take into account maintenance. A lot of cars are not properly maintained, so they end up dying before they should, and even then usually a motor rebuild and they’re back up and driving.
It sounds like you think if ever car was “properly maintained” it would last 300k+ miles. Are we talking about average use or the top 10m? You keep mixing statistics that mean different things, and adding in anecdotes to back them up.
The majority of vehicles can do 300k+ miles with proper maintenance easily. This isnt anecdotal evidence. This is just a fact. EVs are not doing 300k miles without replacing the batteries at least once, which is not cheap.
That’s a take I haven’t seen before, but I have to agree with it. I was looking forward to my next vehicle being an EV, hoping that would simplify the multitude of problems that I’ve been having with ICE cars (most notably, transmissions).
What are the options now, when both gas and electric cars are more computer than automobile?
I know that this exists, but does anyone have an estimate on the real price? How much a conversion kit costs + how much installation costs - how much you can get from the engine and parts that are removed? With the current cost of even used cars being fairly high, how worth it/reasonable is this really?
I’ve done stupid engine swaps. Unless your vehicle has a kit, no chance you get it done for under 20k. The amount of planning to get shit to fit must be hundreds of hours. If you want to figure out the engineering you’ll get in under 15k probably. I doubt it’ll ever be cost efficient to convert most models.
This is modestly interesting. My brother worked here before they had layoffs about two years ago, and had a generally favorable opinion of the company and leadership.
Fundamentally, while I think RJ seems like a sound businessman and technologist, and I like the company’s taste a bit, I will never be able to reconcile his views with mine. He very openly views cars as computers and software and services that happen to move you around, and I would like it to be a machine over which I have as minimal a relationship as possible with the manufacturer after I acquire the product.
Still, I wish them luck.
Yeah no my relationship with my vehicles manufacturer should pretty much be “PART BAD SEND NEW ONE.”
Sadly that era of the vehicle industry is gone. Even if we completely forget electric vehicles, getting parts for any car is becoming harder, because the manufacturer is trying to sell you assembled bundles of things, rather than individual items.
But then we have electric cars. Swapping the battery in these is insanely costly, and if you need other repairs, brands like Tesla would purposefully go out of their way to ensure you only replace things at Tesla certified shops
I suppose I’m shilling here, but check out rockauto.com for car parts. They carry an insane number of car parts for basically wholesale prices. A lot of times you can still buy the individual parts instead of entire assemblies.
Funnily enough, the Rivian CEO talks about exactly that in this interview
So when one small thing stops working, you now have to buy their proprietary, expensive ECU instead of a cheap little microcontroller.
I have an 01’ Volvo. It has an alarm siren under the bumper. They put a nicad battery in the siren so that even if the main battery is cut the alarm can go off. This battery is prone to going bad, leaking out, and ruining the control board. This will cause the sunroof to not work. The rest of the car is still fine. You will get an error message about the security system, but the car will start. You just can’t use the sunroof.
If you catch the problem in time, you can cut the siren open and replace the battery, there is also some way to eliminate the alarm feature through reprogramming I think. I have also seen an aftermarket board that will take it’s place.
I just live without the sunroof as it’s not worth fixing.
If you make sure to not charge the battery to 100% all the time, the battery of an EV will easily last for 300,000 km. There will be a slight reduction of overall capacity, but nothing that will impact your day to day life (unless it consists of driving 24/7). Overall, EVs are way more robust than ICE cars.
But yeah, if you’re out of luck, then repairs are expensive because of the reasons you mentioned.
Ugg …no they are not. Stop this. They’re good for certain things, like smaller commutes and cheaper cost per mile, but they are not more robust, not by a long shot, 300k miles not km is normal for an ICE car and then some. I’ve got multiple cars with 300+k on the clock and I’d drive them across the nation tomorrow.
The average lifespan of a car is 200k miles, not 300k. While it’s not uncommon to see cars going higher than that, it’s rare to see them get to 300k. I’ve had 2 Toyotas that died between 230k and 260k. There are more citations in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity
Given that 300k km is ~186k miles, I think OP made a pretty reasonable comparison.
As for robustness, how do you even define that? Repair costs per year/mile? Frequency of repairs needed? In either case, there’s a much bigger gap between a Jeep and a Toyota than between ICE and BEV.
Sure but then you need to average in shit EVs if you’re going to lump in shit vehicles. You also need to take into account maintenance. A lot of cars are not properly maintained, so they end up dying before they should, and even then usually a motor rebuild and they’re back up and driving.
It sounds like you think if ever car was “properly maintained” it would last 300k+ miles. Are we talking about average use or the top 10m? You keep mixing statistics that mean different things, and adding in anecdotes to back them up.
The majority of vehicles can do 300k+ miles with proper maintenance easily. This isnt anecdotal evidence. This is just a fact. EVs are not doing 300k miles without replacing the batteries at least once, which is not cheap.
That’s a take I haven’t seen before, but I have to agree with it. I was looking forward to my next vehicle being an EV, hoping that would simplify the multitude of problems that I’ve been having with ICE cars (most notably, transmissions).
What are the options now, when both gas and electric cars are more computer than automobile?
Ev conversion. You just get a new motor and batteries, everything else stays the same
I know that this exists, but does anyone have an estimate on the real price? How much a conversion kit costs + how much installation costs - how much you can get from the engine and parts that are removed? With the current cost of even used cars being fairly high, how worth it/reasonable is this really?
I’ve done stupid engine swaps. Unless your vehicle has a kit, no chance you get it done for under 20k. The amount of planning to get shit to fit must be hundreds of hours. If you want to figure out the engineering you’ll get in under 15k probably. I doubt it’ll ever be cost efficient to convert most models.