511–520 of 548 posts
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You'll most likely be overpaying for overall package, not get the advanced software and will be forced to pay insane yearly service fee. Then there's whole long term thing - very little spare parts availability cuz most EVs are niche models, some already ceased to exist, service tools not available or insanely overpriced. Some like Kia/Hyundai are notoriously unreliable to begin with.
BYD? Hyundai unreliable?
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>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. If the car has 10 places where the manufacturer saves 2 dollars, that is 20 dollars a car. At around 2.5 Million cars shipped each year that is 50 Million Euros each year profit for BMW. The entire car industry is extremely cost sensitive, especially right now, with so…
A car (especially ICE but even EVs) consists of tens of thousands of components. People like to point at things in cars and say "why did they save five cents there? And 10 cents here?", and the simple reason is if you bump all these components up one "quality level", if you will, that's thousands of bucks just in material costs. The twenty dollars of per-car savings are not profit , they're unit cost savings, which w…
Why not? If you pay the suppliers 20 dollars less for those parts for each car, that is pure profit.
Keep in mind that cars are priced and developed for specific market segments. Cars aren't developed and then a price is decided based on what the components cost. Also keep in mind that some of the most exclusive and luxurious cars in the world (Lamborghini and Bugatti) share parts with some of the most mundane mass produced cars from VW.
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> BMW refuses to provide training access for ISTA usage Refusing access to training isn't a BoM issue by any means. Neither is a repair process that's so error prone that it can do even more damage to the car. We are surrounded by evidence that manufacturers in every field are taking decisions that are hostile towards their customers in the chase for profits. With the rise of EVs with far fewer moving parts needing c…
I likely did not communicate clearly enough: it is tricky because of organizational reasons, not technical. There are many trade-offs that have to be made and it involves different business units with their own targets and incentives. To take a few examples from the article with likely causes (note I don't work for BMW, so this is pure speculation based on my own experience): > BMW has over-engineered the diagnostic…
When a system “malfunctions” only to the benefit of one side it’s not “an issue” as much as design.
Why don’t you run the same careful reasoning against any hostile action from any big tech company and see how it sounds? All the actions of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon are just the result of unfortunate misalignment between teams.
If a flipped coin always lands how the person flipping wants it to land, it’s loaded, not misalignment between hand and coin.
I’ve seen how the sausage is made in corporations with more money and higher stakes than BMW. Once you get off the ground and see more of the bigger picture, you can’t unsee the hostile decisions that are compartmentalized from the people who just see the tiny bit in front of them and it’s easier to sell them that they aren’t doing anything wrong and it’s not a problem.
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> Yes, as changing a tire is completely the same tool-and-knowledge level than repairing a EV Battery. I think you are intentionally misrepresenting this and moving the goalposts to make your point. GP blamed safety and liability for the way the process looks like, not the complexity of the task. When it comes to safety you bet that an improperly installed or inspected wheel or tire can be dangerous. A short internet…
> I think you are intentionally misrepresenting this and moving the goalposts to make your point. GP blamed safety and liability for the way the process looks like, not the complexity of the task. When it comes to safety you bet that an improperly installed or inspected wheel or tire can be dangerous. Sorry that you feel that way, it was not my intention. But improperly installed or inspected wheel or tire is A LOT l…
BMW has manufactured engines and cars for over a century and historically they were relatively easy to fix by anyone. Their image in the press never suffered because of bad unofficial repairs.
All of this is trying to find a retroactive explanation that fits the result when the real reason is staring you in the face: they make money by making the owner entirely dependent on BMW as much as possible.
Your explanations are flimsy and disproven by data or history.
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BYD? Hyundai unreliable?
Hyundai, reliable?
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You also lose the ability to pull over virtually anywhere and refill your tank in five minutes, as well as the maintenance benefits that come from a decades-old design versus whatever software horrors are lurking in your car. To top that all off, in parts of CA electricity is now 50c/kWh, which makes it roughly equally expensive to charge an EV as it is to buy a tank of gas. I love electric cars, but there is a gap b…
The only reason to think an ICE vehicle doesn't have software horrors is if the vehicle in question is itself decades old. Practically every software horror of an EV is going to be found in modern ICE vehicles as well. In fact some of them have more horrors than some EVs. Subscription seat warmers anyone?
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Depends on the brand and the model, there is a trend towards higher voltages because that implies lower currents and wiring is heavy and expensive. It started out with (nominally, voltage can rise and fall based on charge levels) (30S) 144V packs, (96S) 352V is very common and there are (192S) packs that do 704V (but that are marketed as 400V and 800V respectively). You don't want to get zapped by any of these, it's…
Yikes, that sounds dangerous. I'd personally prefer e.g. 48V even if that meant some more losses and/or thicker cables.
You’d need to use silver plated copper buss bar as conductors, 150kW @ 48VDC is 3125 Amps. I’m not familiar with DC ampacity tables, but you’d need (9) 3” conduits each containing (3) #500 MCM conductors for a three-phase 3125A alternating current circuit. One foot of #500MCM copper weighs 1.5 lbs, so each foot would have 27 times 1.5 lbs or 40.5 lbs per foot.
150kW @ 400V is 375A, a single set of #500MCM can carry the current, 4.5 lbs per foot.
The risk of being shocked by 400VDC while using the car is essentially 0, so they use higher voltage to save on conductor material.
There’s no way in hell I’d ever open up an EV battery myself and I know enough to do it safely. DC is incredibly scary, make sure to discharge your start/run caps if you replace them yourself!
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No it's not, only in a practical sense. If you truly had 'arm thick cables', you could definitely charge a 48V battery just as fast. Practically speaking, though, you don't do this because every becomes so unmanageable that you can't build a charger, bus bars, etc, that would be able to match the charging speed.
The problem isn't the cables in your car, it is the cable between the DC fast charger's transformer and your car. They are already thermally limited, which is why you need higher voltages to support faster charging.
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> It’s a fuse plus guarantee plus liability. This is BMW we're talking about. Their guarantees are worth absolutely nothing if my experience is anything to go by and them accepting liability is not something you should have to pay 4K for if other brands can do the same thing under $100.
They'll refuse warranty on the XDrive if you don't use approved brand and model of tyres so... my bet is on them wanting to extort all the precious money they can from their poor customers
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Porsche had a research program about a very reliable car in the 70s. It has some odd technical choices from today's perspective. https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/when-porsch... One would assume taxi companies etc would be willing to pay for cars that have high uptime and reliability. But I think they drive mostly the same stuff as regular people. At least one would assume they could get beefier suspen…
Galvanised bodyshells and panels has been a thing since the 80s, or indeed the 70s for Volvo and Saab.