Which was also true of ICE cars. The Model T Ford had a major design flaw: everyone could work on it easily, parts were plentiful, and there was no reason to buy a replacement once you had it. In fact, there’s enough of them still running, with an associated parts market, that you could still daily one if you wanted to.
So much so that TFLClassics on YouTube in Colorado bought a well maintained model T and drove it to the nearest dealership and had mechanics there change the oil and take it for a spin just the other week.
Wear and tear doesn’t kill a car; rust does.
Climate change is getting rid of snow. No more salted roads. Cars will last forever
You know humidity causes rust too, right? And rain. Lol
Back in the day you could buy whole (but small) parts, cut away the rusy one and solder in the new one (paint with anti rust paint). Did it on my cheap ass volvo 142 :-)
Maybe you can’t do that any more because of complex crumple zones, but I bet we can do better. A car shouldn’t just have a life span of 6-10 years.
A car shouldn’t just have a life span of 6-10 years.
They don’t.
My current daily driver is 18 years old. I expect at least another 10 barring an accident, maybe 30 more years as a spare vehicle. It got a new transmission at 200,000 miles. Engine seems like it’ll make it to at least 400k. A replacement is $1500, far less than a new car.
Most cars in my family (approximately 30 cars) are between ten and thirty years old.
I’ve had 3 cars since 1996, all bought used, and I traveled for work with one. One car I sold to a family member, and it’s still being driven.
It’s people that choose to not drive cars this long.
You can still do that. They’re called body repair panels. They are usually plain metal. You have to cut out the old, weld in the new, grind them flat, prime and paint them. This isn’t cost efficient if your car is worth less than the paint you’d need. The parts usually are around $100-$300 bucks (if you don’t need OEM parts) but the labor is expensive. And if you do it for cheap it will look like crap.
If you do it for cheap it sure will look like crap.
Source: me doing it in the nineties without really knowing welding :-D
Same goes for light bulbs
Well yes, but the light would be very dim, if we are talking about incandescent bulbs.
Technology connections had an episode about it.
LED bulbs last pretty much forever.
Yeah I’ve only ever had one LED bulb die, and I think that was because it was faulty in some way. I’ve had a much better experience with them compared to CFLs.
Usually it’s a badly designed heat sink that’s meant to cause an eventual short so that it has to be replaced. Or just shoddy low material builds. LEDs really can last an obscene amount of time and they don’t die another part does.
I’ve had lots of led bulbs die. I think it’s because I bought them at the dollar store.
And finding quality ones that will last a long time is more difficult than you might think.
Many of them are made cheaply.
They get dimmer over time. And they do it gradually so you don’t notice it until you buy a new one and realize how dim the old one was
Most LEDs run on DC, and the built-in transformer is the most likely component to fail. If the LED is failing and getting dimmer, it’s most likely due to poor heat dissipation.
If we had little 12v adapters and separate LED modules, you could reduce waste by only replacing the part that fails, and manufacturers would have greater incentive to improve build quality. Instead, we get cheaply manufactured bulb-shaped disposable units that need to be thrown away when one part fails.
Honestly considering going to DC lighting after my solar conversion completes at my house for this reason
I have some dc lighting in my basement. It’s great, but there aren’t as many options out there and electricians don’t want to touch it.
Electricians don’t want to touch DC circuits because it is illegal to mix low voltage DC and high voltage AC circuits. At least it’s illegal in Europe. You need to rebuild your walls to ensure separate and independent wiring channels. And that’s a very expensive nightmare.
It’s a lot cheaper to buy Philips bulbs instead.
Yeah, I definitely get it. It would be illegal to mix low and line voltage in the USA, too.
I ended up running the cabling myself, all class two circuits powering 12 24vdc spots. The nice bit is that they are all addressable RGBW spots, so I can control them all individually or as groups. And it’s all automated. The downside is that I’ll probably have to remove them if we ever sell this house, because nobody but me understands how it works.
I was looking at rv lighting as some options over wise just doing custom jobs (LEDs in whatever fixtures I think look nice). It helps like domes, reccesed, and ambiant lighting I think.
Oh yeah electricians are allergic to DC lol (I used to be one, and yeah that was big knowledge gap in codes, breakers, etc).
Yeah. Its about 50/50 for the ones who failed me. Gets too hot and burn out or the power supply fails. More prevalent in the compact formats like spots and g8 or g4.
Last nearly forever? That needs to be broken down into details. Aren’t batteries for EV limited to about 10 years of use? And they’re a costly replacement?
A good solution would be to make EV batteries easily swappable instead of “charge stations”…
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https://www.piped.video/watch?v=hNZy603as5w
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Swappable batteries are a giant headache, charging is better.
Batteries are lasting longer and longer, LFP are already able to last 20 times as long as typical lithium ion, while using less cobalt.
Modern EV tech is still relatively new. It took combustion cars a long time to get to present day longevity and efficiency. EVs will catch up.
Not really. They’re quite popular in Asian countries.
There’s a couple thousand in China for Nio, but they haven’t really taken off anywhere else.
By contrast there’s over 1.8 million public EV chargers in China alone.
Batteries are heavy, which makes them hard to move and requires secure attachment to the vehicle. EV chargers have no moving parts and require much less maintenance.
The thing is you don’t need heavy batteries if you can swap them every 100-150km or so.
150km of range usually requires about 200kg of lithium ion batteries. More for larger vehicles.
What’s wrong with charging? At 350KW you can get 150km of range in 5 minutes.
Not if your car is a small one ala Fiat 500E. And bigger cars should not exist.
The Fiat 500e’s battery weighs 295kg.
I think we will stick with built-in batteries rather than any kind of swapping. I always thought the battery swapping idea was neat, but the real world cares about money more than anything.
To have ubiquitous battery swapping stations would be a huge amount of infrastructure. But to have ubiquitous vehicle charging you basically just have to run wires to existing parking spots.
That is combined with the fact that I think batteries, especially LFP batteries, have a lot more cycles in their lifetime than your 10 year estimate would suggest. I’ve read 4000 cycles for LFP in a few places. That’s more than a decade even if you fully charge and discharge the battery every single day. Drive a more realistic number of miles/kms per day and then the chronological age of the battery might be more important than how many cycles are on it.
In April, a group of people in a red Tesla driving through the Moroccan desert were glued to the odometer on the car’s giant touch screen. “Two million, Hans! Two million,” exclaimed the front-seat passenger to the owner and driver, Hansjörg von Gemmingen-Hornberg.
Ah, it’s gonna be one of those fluffy wanker articles.
Also paywalled.
So lame.
This is basically like saying combustion vehicles could last nearly forever if you replaced the engine every now and then
I mean…they can, you just refresh the motor. Tons of ICE vehicles out there with 400-500k miles on them. Hell most semi trucks have millions of miles on them.
I am thinking of doing that when my civic should be legally declared dead. With the insanity that is new car prices and insurance for new cars plus the vanished used car market it just isn’t worth it. I want an EV but things have to go back to normal before that happens
It’s easy to do, and engines don’t cost much on ebay.
Fortunately Honda makes vehicles that are very durable, so it’s not like everything dies at the same age of the engine.
A rebuild every x00,000 miles on a Toyota sounds nicer than paying the price of a new pilot every 100,000 miles tbh. Computers don’t last though and emissions have made it a huge pain to fix on older cars. Nothing against emissions it’s a necessary evil.
New pilot? I dunno what any of this means
Seriously, no one is going to mention “Right To Repair”? If this was law, and companies had to divulge how there stuff worked and was assembled, as well as sell parts, things would last longer. If every trade zone had a repairablity index, competition would make things last longer still.
States have had no trouble passing and enforcing IP law that allows companies to get away with this. Reverse engineering would be the norm for closed source anything to the point it would be made irrelevant if companies didn’t have the overwhelming weight of the legal system on their side to shut down anyone who dares try open up access to their designs.
Right to repair is great, but we are fighting against the entire weight of the entrenched ruling class to get it passed. It’s going to take a lot of activism, and even then it’s almost certainly going to be watered down and cater to large corporations when it does pass. We need to keep the pressure on them.
It’s going to take effective strategy, because a linear attack on a stronger adversary is worse than waiting.
I think the EU will be first to role it out at and scale. Like USB-C device power standardization.
If this was law, and companies had to divulge how there stuff worked and was assembled, as well as sell parts, things would last longer.
I’m all for it but I think you’re being a bit too optimistic. If we had the right to repair then the prices of repair kits and materials is going to go up most likely. I can think of a few other ways they can make that system obnoxious too.
It’s like everything else. Yeah, the general systems in place could be greatly improved but ultimately the majority of the issues lie with the people at the top who refuse to let us have good things. No matter what laws are passed they will find a way to profit at any cost. The shareholders behind massive corporations are the first priority because no solution we create will work as efficiently as it can unless they are out of the picture.
Regulations can work. Latest is EU’s USB-C phone/laptop/tablet standardization. It’s great! No more crazy range of different laptop power supplies.
Some stuff is pretty much as I want already. Henry vacuum cleaners for example. Tough as nails and easy to get parts and help for. Framework laptop and fair phone aim to be good for repair and upgradablity.
France repairablity index can be rolled out further field.
Things used to be more repairable and last longer. We can reverse the trend down. No need to despair.
Here a link to bypass the paywall:
Electric motors can last a really long time, assuming no defects, they should outlast the battery by a Longshot.
That leaves the battery, and an LFP battery should also last a hell of a long time, probably a decent way into a million km before you have degraded to about 80%.
If you got those key items lasting, then it just depends on how well the rest of the car holds up, but replacing small parts while the motors and battery works is probably always going to be more cost effective.
The problem is the battery is a wildcard still.
We know how long those LFP batteries should last in a car, but they’re also pretty are in cars and we don’t have that real world data yet.
I also fear that OEMs will still gouge us on replacement batteries 15 - 20 years from now when costs are even lower and replacing the battery shouldn’t be so expensive.
There’s an old expression: Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.
If a car has a warranty of 10 years, it will last 11 years.
Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.
Oof.
In the defense of engineers, they are usually trying to optimize around a few more variables than ability to stand. Cost is a big one.
If a car has a warranty of 10 years, it will last 11 years.
…If it’s well engineered.
You don’t need to defend the engineers.
The expression is saying that engineers build bridges that are efficient and cost effective.
Although I do believe the full quote ends with “bridge that almost collapses”, which would make it more clear.
But battery cells don’t just fail after a specific time. Maybe a component in the battery will like a switch or gasket though.
Motors are highly resilient as well.
I’m not as sure about the motors, but I really am optimistic on the LFP batteries.
The battery doesn’t have to fail for the car to be useless. One of those circuit boards that holds it all together goes and it’s “whoops, we don’t make that any more”.
Sounds like we might need some new regulations around parts availability & stocking up before subcomponents go obsolete.
At some point it becomes an environmental thing just as much as a consumer protection thing.
So just like a regular car.
Indeed just like a regular car.
If cars lasted forever, they’d all go out of business within 20 years.
If the government regulates them*
Planned obsolence should be illegal
Won’t anybody think of the poor shareholders? Planned obsolescence is what keeps this whole system running.
I’m a shareholder of $AMD because they worked with Framework to release a modular laptop GPU
Support companies that support right to repair
This is why I want an Onvo with battery swap over a Tesla… Everyone makes fun of me for it, but nobody realizes that if you swap the battery about once a year, then you’re able to preserve the life of your vehicle.
Car manufacturers:
“Unlike gas-powered engines—which are made up of thousands of parts that shift against one other—a typical EV has only a few dozen moving parts. That means lessdamage and maintenance, making it easier and cheaper to keep a car on the road well past the approximately 200,000-mile average lifespan of a gas-powered vehicle. And EVs are only getting better. “There are certain technologies that are coming down the pipeline that will get us toward that million-mile EV,” Scott Moura, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley, told me. That many miles would cover the average American driver for 74 years. The first EV you buy could be the last car you ever need to purchase.“
No way a car would last me and my family 74 years. First year I owned my car I put on almost 35k. Was driving 100 miles back and forth to work at that time. We typically take a road trip from colorado to near Vermont every year for a vacation.
A lot of midwesterns will drive 14 hours to get some where
Sure, there’s always going to be outliers. Most people live and work in the same metropolitan area though - they’re not driving 50,000km+ a year. Besides, having a vehicle with 5 times the effective lifetime is going to be a big win regardless of how much you drive it.
At best case 60 miles an hour… Your commute was more than 90 mins? Ugh. That’s awful.
You weren’t clear if that was round trip or not, so possibly more than 180 mins? How did you find time to sleep!?
Round trip was 100 miles every day. This was rural Ohio driving to Columbus so it was not to bad 2 and 4 lane roads till you hit the city most of them time. If we got a lot of snowfall it could super suck but I was from NE Ohio so most of the time it was not that much white knuckle driving. You just listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts or call some friends on your hour or so drive home
In the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s not uncommon for people that work here but can’t afford to live here to have commutes of over an hour with good traffic (2+ hours with heavy traffic) each way. That’s the case in a few major metro areas in countries like the USA and Australia.
Yeah Bay Area and LA traffic is next level. My condolences to those souls who make that drive every day
Bad drivers like me can fix that by applying wear to bodywork. Normal driving wears the tires and all the gears, gaskets, and bearings in the system. But it can probably last 20 years.
Surely the free market and competition will deliver what customers want, right? … Right?!?
