Fixing car and e-bike batteries saves money and resources, but challenges are holding back the industry
I swear, everyone on Lemmy have their heads shoved so far up their asses about how everyone should go full internal combustion and that they’re great and have lower maintenance costs just down vote me to hell when I bring anything like this up. I know the tech and work on vehicles and combustion engines. It’s dumb to buy a $40,000 vehicle with a 300 pound engine, 200 pound transmission, mechanically complex 4 wheel drive system with upwards of 3 independently locking differentials. The resale value when the head gaskets is blown is next to nothing, and the great 5 year 60,000 mile power train warranty doesn’t even cover the average mileage people drive in 8 years. It only requires you mosty pay off the average loan length for a new vehicle. My Tesla costs 13 cents to drive about 4 miles, where the equivalent combustion car, with 400 horsepower and 400 foot pounds of torque, costs upwards of a dollar to drive the same. The high strung powerplants in performance cars require regular, expensive, maintenance, and if you actually push them will blow up in under 10,000 miles. An LS3 crate motor costs more than the car is worth and that doesn’t even include the transmission or any of the other drivetrain components. No one should buy and keep a combustion engine for more than 10 years or you risk “being the bag holder” and stuck with a cancer emitting 4,000 pound paperweight.
You can buy a model 3 that goes 0-60 in 3.1 seconds, right now, on their website under 40k after tax rebate. Go look. Under existing inventory. All prices exclude the 7500 credit.
Are you claiming GM never made a lemon? That no car, ever, in the history of their company, was sold with a bad motor?
And stop it. You’re comparing the cost of a new battery now vs what the cost of a used battery will be in 8 years. Claiming that technology doesn’t get cheaper is absurd. You can buy a used Nissan leaf battery for $3,700.
https://www.partrequest.com/catalog/electric-vehicle-batteries/nissan/nissan-leaf
I mean, I’m all for EV, but my car is over fifteen years old and still cranks every single time. Gets almost 40 to the gallon. Yeah, the resale is shit, but if I drive it until the wheels fall off, I don’t have to worry about that.
Their argument was valid other than their martyr complex
It really isn’t.
The whole point of the crate motor vs battery pack was it’s ridiculous to compare the cost of a new battery vs a used engine. If you blow an engine in a regular car it’s replaced with s used one, even if it’s covered by warranty. Used battery packs will get cheaper with time, especially 8 years from now when the warranty on a new EV is done.
Good for you that your car hasn’t broken yet. I have a friend who got a bad transmission in her Subaru, it was replaced after something like 500 miles. Are you claiming that every new ICE vehicle that had ever been sold have had 100% working drive trains for the entirety of the restraint period?
Or are you comparing your anecdotal experience with a FUD news story about one person who had a lemon of a vehicle that happened to be electric
You should see what happens to actual mpg in the rain vs in the dry. Its almost like MPG can vary wildly dependent on environment and situation
Yeah the whole range issue is dumb to me. You can recharge it so what’s the issue? I recharge mine on long trips and stop to eat at the same time. Who are all these people that want to sit in a car for over 400 miles without stopping? That sounds worse lol I always stopped with my case car to eat or pee anyways. If I stay 30 min to an hour I can get fully charged too.
Also the benefits of never needing to stop to charge or fuel when I’m just driving around town. I can go all over and not need to charge my car for a few days. Then I do it when I sleep.
Also single pedal driving was new to me and I love that! It is so much more responsive if I want to stop I just stop going lol I love it. It has crazy torque too and makes a fun spaceship sound when I drive around.
Depends on where you live and where you plan to go with it. Our EV at current range is fine to get to the nearby large city in the summer over a fairly long stretch of highway. In winter it would probably be doable but at the least it impact our stopping/charging schedule. At 70% range it might not be doable at all in winter and we’d have to be careful in summer. Governments pushing EVs absolutely should be pushing a reasonable recycle/replacement cycle for batteries and the infrastructure to support that.
Total failure due to dead shorts in too many cells has been happening around the 14 to 18 year area. That’s when you decide to sell it for $3,000 or pay $15,000 to install another battery.
If I get to 14 to 18 years on a car without every having to replace an engine, transmission, it never gets in a crash that writes it off entirely, and its still worth $3k at the end I consider that a win.
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.”
Jacking Up a Car Is Dangerous. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway
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.
Acetylene and oxygen is also explosive, but you’re still allowed to have it and use it. Battery acid is extremely corrosive and poisonous. Gasoline is extremely flammable. A garage is filled with dangers. If you can’t service a lithium-ion battery in a safe way, you shouldn’t do it, just like you shouldn’t service your brakes if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Lol. A single gallon of gasoline contains approximately 34khw of energy. An EV with ~300 miles of range, will have a battery with between 80 and 100 khw. Or the same potential energy as about 3 gallons of gas.
People are familiar with gas, so it seems safe. But every gas tank is a literal bomb, and that’s just for a car. I have no idea how big the storage tanks at gas stations are, but I’m assuming there’s enough explosive in there to level a couple hundred square feet if one of those goes.
Have you ever attached jumper cables to a dead lead-acid battery?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–acid_battery#Risk_of_explosion
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.
Lead-acid batteries also present a risk of explosion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–acid_battery#Risk_of_explosion
That’s why you attach jumper cables to the dead battery first.
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.
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.
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.
It’s up and running for the Powerwall, on some grids anyway (it works in my state - but depends on having an agreement with the grid).
The thing is there needs to be coordination between your battery and the grid - you don’t to drain your battery every night, they only last about 4,000 cycles.
If every home in the state had a Powerwall, then maybe it could help provide baseload power but the reality right now is all it can do is help with temporary disruptions, for example keeping the grid up when a cloud passes over a major solar farm.
They’re in the planning stages of doing Vehicle to Grid or V2G power. Right now though, it’s just for standalone batteries. This isn’t just Tesla by the way - when it comes it’ll likely be for most EVs.
I’ve got enough subscriptions in my life. 50 euros a month would be 6000 euros after 10 years (figure a couple years more than the 8-year warranty in the US) that could be put towards a refurbished battery if the car needed one at that point. The reality is, on a 10-year-old car, a little range degradation isn’t a huge deal, especially if that car is being driven around town and can be charged nightly. I’d rather own the things I buy, and not pay to be tied into yet another monthly bill.
We have an BMW i3. 8 years old. Battery is fine. But car is written off now because the inverter failed. 11k€ repair. Worst part is that due to BMW software locks it’s almost impossible for third party repair to work on the car. Any replaced part needs to be “blessed” by BMW.
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
LMAO
