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BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive

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Re: BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive

#241

Post by taneq »

lazide wrote: post #228
jacquesm wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is insane. It's a fuse. They must have some stats on how often those things need replacing and it should have been accessible. The customer has - when they buy the car - absolutely no way of knowing what kind of surprises like this there are hidden in the vehicle and besides, it kills the second hand market so you can only trade your vehicle to a BMW dealership where they can absorb those costs for a fraction…

Fuses are not items that should be replaced normally - they are self-destroying emergency protections for the electrical system. If it is protecting that end users can plug arbitrary loads into, that is one thing - but this doesn’t sound like that? Why did that fuse blow? Because if that is not addressed, it’s likely to just blow again.

Yep, might be there was a known issue that was addressed, at which put in a new one. But just replacing a fuse (or, simultaneously worse and better, just resetting a breaker) without further investigation is just kicking a very spicy can down the road.

I had a doozy of a trip issue on one project, a motor would occasionally (not always, no real pattern, hot/cold/etc. didn’t matter) trip the breaker, requiring a sparky to come out and open up the panel to reset it. We tried a bunch of things, megger-ing the motor, testing peak startup current on each phase with a fancy meter, checking phase-to-neutral current (Larger than you’d think! But this was normal, apparently.)

Everything was normal. In the end all we could think something was weird about the contactor. They took it out (I was off site at the time) and took it down to the substation to test it out.

With three phases connected to the contactor (and nothing connected on the other side) they energised the coil, and with an almighty bang it tripped the main incomer and took the entire sub offline.

Turns out there was a manufacturing defect in the contactor and sometimes for a millisecond, if the phase of the moon was right, it dead shorted two phases.

So there, even when you know everything, you don’t know everything.

Re: BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive

#242

Post by bradfa »

lazide wrote: post #228
jacquesm wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is insane. It's a fuse. They must have some stats on how often those things need replacing and it should have been accessible. The customer has - when they buy the car - absolutely no way of knowing what kind of surprises like this there are hidden in the vehicle and besides, it kills the second hand market so you can only trade your vehicle to a BMW dealership where they can absorb those costs for a fraction…

Fuses are not items that should be replaced normally - they are self-destroying emergency protections for the electrical system. If it is protecting that end users can plug arbitrary loads into, that is one thing - but this doesn’t sound like that? Why did that fuse blow? Because if that is not addressed, it’s likely to just blow again.

This fuse blows because a crash was detected and it is to protect the people inside the car and rescuers. The article argument is that it can blow even for small crashes where no damage to the battery occurs but rehabilitating the vehicle still incurs an outrageous cost. This is not a simple over current protection fuse.

$1000 for the module with the fuse seems ok to me. Another $3000 to link the module to the vehicle is the outrageous part.

Re: BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive

#243

Post by kristjank »

>Lot of vehicles designed and produced in Europe — ICE, PHEV, and EV — have effectively become a missleading ECO exercise. Vehicles marketed as “CO₂-friendly” end up producing massive CO₂ footprints through forced services, throw-away components, high failure rates and unnecessary parts manufacturing cycles, overcomplicated service procedures, far larger than what the public is told. If we are destroying our ICE automotive industry based on EURO norms, who is calculating real ECO footprint of replacement part manucfacturing, unecessary servicing and real waste cost?

>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.

Re: BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive

#244

Post by kristjank »

lazide wrote: post #228
jacquesm wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is insane. It's a fuse. They must have some stats on how often those things need replacing and it should have been accessible. The customer has - when they buy the car - absolutely no way of knowing what kind of surprises like this there are hidden in the vehicle and besides, it kills the second hand market so you can only trade your vehicle to a BMW dealership where they can absorb those costs for a fraction…

Fuses are not items that should be replaced normally - they are self-destroying emergency protections for the electrical system. If it is protecting that end users can plug arbitrary loads into, that is one thing - but this doesn’t sound like that? Why did that fuse blow? Because if that is not addressed, it’s likely to just blow again.

Fuses are necessary on any electrical system, and especially in a car, which is an electrical shitshow (floating ground, high-voltage and high-frequency interference), fuses blow all the time. Granted, usually on a well-maintained and new car it happens very rarely, but saying that it's a catastrophic and concerning event is dumb.

Re: BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive

#245

Post by lazide »

kristjank wrote: post #244
lazide wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuses are not items that should be replaced normally - they are self-destroying emergency protections for the electrical system. If it is protecting that end users can plug arbitrary loads into, that is one thing - but this doesn’t sound like that? Why did that fuse blow? Because if that is not addressed, it’s likely to just blow again.

Fuses are necessary on any electrical system, and especially in a car, which is an electrical shitshow (floating ground, high-voltage and high-frequency interference), fuses blow all the time. Granted, usually on a well-maintained and new car it happens very rarely, but saying that it's a catastrophic and concerning event is dumb.

What sort of cars do you drive?

I’ve never had a fuse blow on a car less than 20 years old, and then it was due to shorts due to damaged insulation and bad grounds due to corrosion, which are legit problems that need to be corrected.

Also, unlike breakers, fuses are generally immune to issues with HF interference and the like - they work through basic thermoelectric effects which iron out all but the most extreme issues. If you’re moving multiple amps in a situation described as ‘RF’, or ‘high frequency’ in a DC system that’s not just noise!

That’s a real problem that needs fixing!

Not fixing the underlying problem behind a blown fuse (or constantly tripping breaker) is how your car (or house or whatever) burns to the ground.

Or you have a Lucas, in which case my condolences.

Re: BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive

#246

Post by kristjank »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #200
close04 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people need a recommendation for something more current, from people who work on these modern cars daily. The reputation of 25+ year old models can be misleading. Another source of good recommendations could be insurance companies. Cars with low reliability or very expensive fixes probably need more expensive insurance. But I don't know if this data is public or if you can tell apart the reliability from the rep…

If you're in Europe, you can consider Dacia. A lot of their stuff is old Renault parts that they've bought a license to use/manufacture. Get a pre-2023 model with the 1.6 non-turbo non-hybrid petrol engine - it's actually a Nissan HR16DE, which has been in use since 2004. Very reliable and low complexity.

And parts are ridiculously cheap and widely junkyard-available.

Re: BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive

#247

Post by kristjank »

TylerE wrote: post #226
lionkor wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people need a recommendation for something more current Bless them, I would rather buy 10 shitboxes than one modern car (and that cost is about the same).

I’d rather not die in a very survivable crash.

Crash safety has become grossly exagerrated because the standards have been sharply rising last few years. Most 15yo cars will keep you safe just fine in a median crash.

Re: BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive

#248

Post by TylerE »

kristjank wrote: post #247
TylerE wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather not die in a very survivable crash.

Crash safety has become grossly exagerrated because the standards have been sharply rising last few years. Most 15yo cars will keep you safe just fine in a median crash.

A 15 year old car currently is going for 5 figures - not a shitbox. Not unless it’s a shelll of rust held together by bondo. Then your crash standards or whatever year are meaningless as the chassis may have 25% or less of its design strength.

Re: BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive

#249

Post by ch_sm »

iSnow wrote: post #207
richx wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am affacted by this as well: the rear knuckle uniball bearing was broken after 3 years (Achsschenkel). Many MY here in Europe have this issue, due to bad parts or too hard suspension. But there are two other things that make it a bit unfair for Tesla in comparison to other brands: Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten breaks - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regene…

>Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten breaks - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking Huh? Every EV uses recuperative braking, how is this special to Tesla?

> Huh? Every EV uses recuperative braking, how is this special to Tesla?

It‘s not. But there are some newer EVs (e.g. Mercedes and VW) that track brake usage and will periodically switch to using the disk brakes when there‘s danger of corrosion.

Re: BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive

#250

Post by kristjank »

TylerE wrote: post #248
kristjank wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crash safety has become grossly exagerrated because the standards have been sharply rising last few years. Most 15yo cars will keep you safe just fine in a median crash.

A 15 year old car currently is going for 5 figures - not a shitbox. Not unless it’s a shelll of rust held together by bondo. Then your crash standards or whatever year are meaningless as the chassis may have 25% or less of its design strength.

Sorry for asking, are you in the USA? That might explain the 5 figures thing.
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