Jacking Up a Car Is Dangerous. Here's Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway
M.O.N.E.Y.
Yep. Other than thrill seekers, the only reason any business does something is for the money. If you can go, "Hey, you don't need to spend $12k on a new battery pack! Bring it down to Bubba's Batteries Bazaar and we can fix it for less!", you will get business.
I suppose jacking off a car is also dangerous.
Depends. Are you a dragon?
You wouldn't download a car... And if you did, you wouldn't jack off a car...
Eh. That's not really comparable to lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are similar to bombs in that they're highly dense stores of energy. If something goes wrong and that energy storage medium gets exposed to air, or there's a failure in a charging safety mechanism, that's a chemical fire at best, explosion at worse, but no matter what, it's extremely toxic.
Acetylene and oxygen is also explosive, but you’re still allowed to have it and use it. Battery acid is extremely corrosive and poisonous. Gasoline is extremely flammable. A garage is filled with dangers. If you can’t service a lithium-ion battery in a safe way, you shouldn’t do it, just like you shouldn’t service your brakes if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Lol. A single gallon of gasoline contains approximately 34khw of energy. An EV with ~300 miles of range, will have a battery with between 80 and 100 khw. Or the same potential energy as about 3 gallons of gas.
People are familiar with gas, so it seems safe. But every gas tank is a literal bomb, and that's just for a car. I have no idea how big the storage tanks at gas stations are, but I'm assuming there's enough explosive in there to level a couple hundred square feet if one of those goes.
Lead-acid batteries also present a risk of explosion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93acid_battery#Risk_of_explosion
That's why you attach jumper cables to the dead battery first.
The whole repair thing should made super easy if we want EVs to succeed.
But that will never happen because the EV manufacturers couldn't charge ridiculous amounts of money for proprietary batteries.
That why we need regulators. The market doesn't magically deal with "Tragedy of the Commons".
God forbid that they concentrate on the quality of the basic vehicle instead.
Yup.. If you can't compete add tariffs.
Make all cars rechargeable with a single charging port. And that port should be USB-C
Can't wait for all power cables to just be USB-C. I dream for the day where I can charge my phone with the same plug my induction stove uses.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again allow.. cars with CATL or Nio battery swap cassettes into the US.. It is so dumb that there are different battery setups for every manufacturer .. In a Nio I can swap batteries for less than a pack of beer.. Why not do that instead of this current BS system where you have only one pack and once that is done it is $10k
I heard NIO has this technology already and are looking to standardise it.
Every EV has this already. What they don't have is a standard. Not shockingly, every EV manufacturer will argue why theirs should be the standard.
Is it money?
Is it money? I bet it's money
Mostly it's money for the consumer. I have a Prius so it might be a little different. But when the hybrid battery goes out costs something like $7,000 to have it replaced. A mechanic in town will repair it for $1000.
Now my car isn't worth $7000 so if I had to replace the battery then I would just get a new car and this one might end up in the scrap heap. In getting it repaired I have gotten something like 6 more years out of it, at least, and that's a pretty significant environmental savings.
And that's essentially what the article is saying.
A battery that is utter trash for driving purposes still has tons of life left for other uses.
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Interesting.
First of all apparently ublock, no script, or some combination of my add-ons kept me from seeing the message and I'm able to view the entire article.
Even more interesting is this text at the end of the article-
This story was originally published by Grist, a nonprofit media organization covering climate, justice, and solutions.
So this source basically spun an article from Grist and put it behind their paywall.
Following the link from Scientific American, the first line of the Grist article is-
This story was co-published with WIRED.
It's clowns the whole way down, yaaaaar.
Because that's literally a mechanic's job.
I loved how Renault solved this for the Twizzy (and other cars). You bought the car. You leased the battery for something like 50 euros a month. (Probably more now).
Sure, that sounds expensive, but I suspect it worked out less than replacing the battery after a decade.
Suspect it also helped resale value. The most expensive repair to worry about for a second hand buyer, is the battery. Making that a lease removes that worry entirely. You know exactly how much it's going to cost.
Of course, having to pay that monthly lease fee for the battery, does make it more obvious that electric cars aren't necessarily that much cheaper to run than an ICE.
I've got enough subscriptions in my life. 50 euros a month would be 6000 euros after 10 years (figure a couple years more than the 8-year warranty in the US) that could be put towards a refurbished battery if the car needed one at that point. The reality is, on a 10-year-old car, a little range degradation isn't a huge deal, especially if that car is being driven around town and can be charged nightly. I'd rather own the things I buy, and not pay to be tied into yet another monthly bill.
We have an BMW i3. 8 years old. Battery is fine. But car is written off now because the inverter failed. 11k€ repair. Worst part is that due to BMW software locks it’s almost impossible for third party repair to work on the car. Any replaced part needs to be “blessed” by BMW.
whatever happened to Teslas distributed powergrid? Now that was a game changer, offloading the cost of the battery entirely could have made EVs actually affordable.
Danger, Danger, High Voltage!
Although it annoys me that mechanics consider even 400V "high" voltage. HV is supposed to be 1,000V, minimum.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
