The ford transit custom PHEV costs £4500 to replace the timing belt. Access issues mean dropping the hybrid battery and parts of the sub frame. Compare with the mk8 transit, i've done the wet belt myself on that and it requires no special tools (well, i bought a specific crank pulley puller for £20) and can be done in a day on the driveway. I believe in some markets the replacement schedule is down to 6 years for the new phev due to all the wet belt failures on older models.

So far my favourite brand to work on has been Mazda, the engineering is very thoughtfully done with consideration for repairs.

I hear a lot of praise for toyota but it's from people who haven't worked on a car themselves rather than mechanics and they must be talking about toyotas from a bygone era because i'm not impressed with a 2019 corolla engineering at all, specifically various parts of the electrical system. I believe that was the most popular car in the world at that time.

Tesla is remarkably well done. Simplicity is under rated. So much so i bought one with the intention to keep for a looooong time.

I sold my bmw after 15 years of multiple bmws because their design is so poor for maintenance. I had cooling system problems that required hours of labor to get to just to replace a plastic part that cost $5 where an aluminum one would cost $7.

It seems to me that bmw was designing for best case scenarios where everything goes perfectly. And since it’s supposed to go perfectly who cares if it’s $5000 to fix because it will “never break.”

Reminds me of Rube Goldberg software designs where 9 things have to happen in sequence for success.

The idea of rubust design that assumes everything breaks and you can still operate is one I value. I look for car companies (and everything I suppose) following this principle.

PHEVs are great, I've driven two in the past 6 years, but in most cases, you're one airbag deployment away from a very, costly repair and in 99% of cases, a totaled car.

They have over-engineered the everything, because that is what BMW does. That is what they have been about for the last thirty years.

Even 25 years ago working on German vehicles compared to the Japanese counter-parts was a harrowing endeavor.

Germans are excellent at making cool flashy features...that rely on 16 moving parts that cost $700 each, and need to remove the engine exhaust manifold to access one screw to release part #15.

They get a 10 for "Wow!" factor, a 0 for "well thought out", and a 10 for "extremely over complicated". Unsurprisingly this mindset has carried over into EVs now too.

Spare parts were small, cheap, and easily accessible too (atleast for my toyota)

I dread being forced to upgrade, not out of disdain for the environment, but the fact that I will spend more money, on a less reliable, less "mine" car, and more something big daddy government wants.

A battery pack for a Model 3 is $10K. So even if the whole car is only worth $20K, it's still worth keeping on the road.

The Porsche Taycan battery pack is $70K. The moment you have any issue at all with it, the car will be considered totaled.

>We saw this years ago on diesel and petrol cars: DPF failures, EGR valves, high-pressure pumps, timing belts running in oil, low quality automatic transmissions, and lubrication system defects. Everyone calculates the CO₂ footprint of a moving vehicle — nobody calculates the CO₂ footprint of a vehicle that is constantly broken and creating waste.

Extremely well put.

The most expensive tooling was the two floor jacks I purchased to make the process easier. The software needed was available from the manufacturer for a reasonable fee. The battery pack itself was surprisingly modular and simple to dismantle for repair.

I don't many things GM has done, but (at least back in 2010) they did a good job of letting owners do their own work.

Cars of a past generation were able to be owner-maintained (or understood), and therefore the owner had some interest in knowing that it was easy to maintain and would buy (at least partly) on that premise. Something that was a nightmare to maintain would not be so easily bought because the owners would soon realize how hard they were to fix.

Now, with a car that is so complicated, the owner is far distant from being the fixer of it until years later seeing a surprise repair bill. Even the maintainers are not even directly knowledgeable about the design and how to repair. And the information about its maintainability is a low factor on the buying considerations list. But by then you've already given the company the money and incentive to keep on building this way. And rarely (or extremely/too "laggily" does that information feed back).

It seems to me enterprise software systems have this problem as well.

I get that from a safety point of view, certain things should be checked and / or replaced after a crash, especially when volatiles like batteries or fuel tanks are involved. But they shouldn't cost thousands.

I think it might be the ev equivalent of a wear item like a water pump or alternator on an ice vehicle.

PHEVs are complicated tech so I figured I would choose one with a proven design (Prius -> Prius Prime -> RAV4 Prime).

Given that speed and alcohol are the top two causes of traffic deaths, mandatory SAE J3016 Level 4 self-driving would prevent a lot of deaths. But of course, it will make the price of a "safe" automobile many times the annual income of 99% of North American and EU drivers.

Even a FAANG HENRY who would buy a BMW i7 M70 won't be able to afford a "safe" automobile in a "safe" country.

A Waymoid is your future, first-worldians!

Articles like this confirm my opinion on the subject. What annoys me most is that we argued in favor of electric cars because of climate protection. I am in favor of climate protection, but when I read this article, I just feel like I'm being taken for a ride. Politicians should not have simply decided to phase out combustion engines. They should have imposed further constraints on the automotive industry with regard to low purchase costs, durability, reusability, and affordable maintenance.

Did anyone think politicians are there for a common good? They are there to turn us unto sheep to shear. Their primitive lies and propaganda and us being idiots are their main instrument

Its a DMCA DRM hellscape, full of equipment that was sold (with a state registration no less), and these car companies still maintain remote control and real ownership indefinitely.

Mercedes EQS won't "let" owners open the hood.

BMW "rented heated seats" bullshit.

GMC Hummer EV Requires dealer-level authentication to reset the 12V battery or perform certain repairs.

Tesla uses proprietary diagnostic tools and encrypted software.

Volvo has explored payment-based bricking.

Even the EFF warned about this 12 years ago in 2013 : https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-co...

Will I consider an EV? Sure. Am I going to place primary buying decision on reparability and full ownership? Damn straight I will. If that means I buy hybrids and/or ICE vehicles. I want something I can maintain without running to the vendor to ask permission, or even "giving" them the ability to say no.

> missleading

Please check spelling before posting

First people said "competition is coming" for about a decade. Now the competition has finally half arrived, but it's still so far behind. Perhaps the closest is BYD, but most BYD drivers would prefer to be driving a Tesla.

Capitalism fundamentally does not view human life as sacred. Or rather, it puts a finite value on human life. The bond between a mother and son is priceless, there is (in the case of a loving relationship) no price that either would put on the life of the other. That is to say, there is no amount of money that either would accept in exchange for the death of the other. As actuaries know, this is not true from a capitalist viewpoint. The value of a human life is frequently calculated by various means to be somewhere around 3.5 million dollars at birth. Which is to say, if a policy change costs an organization (private or public) over 3.5 million dollars to save one human life, it does not make financial sense. So when you look at a decision by an automaker to include a "safety" feature, you have to ask "did the amount of money that this costs the company work out in terms of human lives". In this case, BMW likely concluded that the financial damages of settling an insurance claim for a battery fire, and damage to their brand from the massive negative publicity of battery fires (see Tesla) would be more than the cost of implementing this "feature". This is also true from the legally mandated standpoint of crash safety features, which result in cars being much easier to total because of crumple zones. The cost of a $100k vehicle is much less than the cost of a $3.5 million human life. On the other hand, the carbon and pollution cost of replacing many $100k vehicles is borne by the public. An interesting view of this topic is summarized in the Wikipedia article "Value of Life" under the heading "Uses", which specifically covers the cost of implementing emissions regulation vs. the cost of the human lives that reduced emissions would save. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Uses

As has been pointed out many times, vehicles these days are cost engineered to last as long as the average buyer of a new vehicle will hold onto the car. Since BMW targets a luxury market, that lifetime is likely on the order of 4-5 years. A Toyota is probably closer to 10 years. Automakers do not (as far as I know) make a meaningful amount of money on the maintenance of used cars; OEM parts do not necessarily come directly from the automaker, but rather a company that contracts with them or a subsidiary whose financials are not counted as part of the manufacturer's bottom line. Therefore, in our modern era of late-stage capitalism, companies have no incentive to make cars that last longer, and complaints from customers who wish that their end-of-life cars were easier to repair will fall on deaf ears. Those of us who wish our cars were less "safe" in order to contribute less to the criminal waste of disposal of otherwise sound vehicles and carbon cost of making a new vehicle would do well to consider the financial calculations that went into those decisions. Is making batteries that are easy to fix but kill someone when improperly repaired in 1/1000 crashes more ethical than installing systems to prevent batteries from ever being misconfigured? Are there more BMW crashes than other brands due to the target demographic? Is the number of batteries that will be repaired improperly significant enough to cause a large number of battery fires? I don't know.

This is by no means an excuse of these practices, but merely an attempt to understand them. I would love to hear where my reasoning is flawed so I can better understand this. It certainly seems to me that the risk of a shade tree mechanic soldering a piece of wire into a BMW battery computer is astronomically low, but I have seen repairpeople of all shades do really stupid things to save money so probably not zero.