It's especially bad when you consider one of the main selling points of an EV is simplicity and reliability. Or at least that's one of the main arguments I've heard over the years (there are lots of other reasons obviously).
Not to mention that nobody makes an EV that isn't chock full of bespoke electronics. Eventually the sheer number of components and MTBF will just start biting you in the ass all the time.
"An EV drivetrain is extremely simple and reliable"
I don't know why it is so popular to repeat this over and over because it seems palpably ridiculous to me.
Everybody has plenty of experience with electrically powered appliances, and many if not most of them only last a few years. I'm not suggesting this is inherent, just that there is no reason to consider them simpler or necessarily more reliable.
If there were washing machines or smartphones that you could expect to last decades, then I would find the idea of EVs being super reliable more plausible.
I mean I just want an EV because it’s more practical for city usage unless you do long trips. It’s more of a failure of automakers to make a basic EV that can be easily fixed and has a basic button based control system with CarPlay/AA instead of their own BS tech.
Unless EV door handles and airbags are that much more complicated, I must be missing something. The problems with EVs are support infrastructure and profitability, NOT reliability and complexity.
Needless to say this doesn't make much sense. There are so many confounding factors in the business of electric cars it's silly to take one company's failure as evidence that a particular subset of their technology is bad.
The market decided that emissions and safety were particularly important. But it never decided that simplicity and repairability weren't important. Turns out there was just more money to be made by slowly eroding those qualities.
Theoretically EVs should be the solution. They're remarkably simple compared to their gas counterparts. But manufacturers aren't just going to give up the golden goose. They market EVs as complex, technological marvels when the only real marvel is our ability to produce efficient, low weight, high capacity batteries at scale. They do everything they can to stifle independent repair behind the scenes, and we just accept it because at this point the frog has been well and truly boiled.
The endless stream of EV pr pretending EV's are the inevitable future is getting pretty annoying. Used car sales are at an all time high in the US. power grids in most western countries and certainly in the USA are incapable of supporting a massive wave of EV's even if government sweeteners and ICE poison pills force 'adoption'.
Cars today are far too tech heavy. People want simple, robust and long lived vehicles with far fewer bells and whistles. When you look back even 25 years it's very revealing how simple and longer lived they were.
It's too bad, I hoped EVs were one thing everyone could agree on. Maybe because it's good for the environment. Or because it's good for energy independence.
It is janky as hell, but it sounds like EV owners are making their lives more difficult in just slightly different ways from how you're making your life more difficult :)
Well, yes but then also newcomers to car design world make tons of design mistakes that seems clever at the start but do bite back later.
For most folks buying a car these days, if they choose EV its not due to environmental concerns, not primarily or secondarily, at least I don't know single one person among EV owners. They just want a reliable car, and 130 years of fine tuning combustion engines can end up more reliable in say 15 years than shiny unproven electric design (single case 1 but I can provide such - my previous bmw e46 vs tesla model s of my colleague, or model 3 of another colleague).
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