EVs are at their heart really simple machines. You have a battery, a battery controller, some kind of thermal management for the battery (can be passive but active is better), and an electric motor that isn’t much more complex than the one in your vacuum cleaner. All these parts are readily available, so you can easily convert an ICE car to an EV with parts you can buy yourself. For some popular cars there are even kits available these days, and conversions of old-timers are really taking off. If there’s a kit with clear instructions a conversion can sometimes even be done in a single day.
An ICE car is literally orders of magnitude more complex. There are far more parts, far more computers to control all those parts (in a modern car that is), far more cabling to connect all these computers and far more opportunities for things to go wrong. ICE cars even spontaneously catch fire more often because of all the cabling and complexity.
You’re probably thinking of a few specific brands, like Tesla, that are very hostile towards self-servicing, and in those specific cases you are right. But most EVs from established car manufacturers are just as proprietary or non-proprietary as their ICE brethren, just with less complexity and less parts. And of course older cars that don’t have any computers in them are immune to this specific kind of complexity as well.
A highly complex system with support systems to prevent it from literally blowing up (mmmmm tasty lithium)
A battery management system
A seriously complex piece of model specific code that is usually proprietary and has hardware level bricking fuses (so fuck you if it has a fault)
And also, all the other management shit like regen braking and what have you.
You’re doing a “reduction”. If you reduce literally anything to such high abstraction it seems simple. Yes, quantum physics is also " just " an observation of a continuous system, nothing to it mate
ICE cars can be completely reassembled with a couple of wrenches. The most proprietary thing in the whole system is the ECU, and you can swap that and whatever if you wish to do so.
I’m going to humbly disagree with your premise. Ice engines only seem simpler because we’ve been doing it for so long that it seems normal, but the concept is insane when broken down. This is a machine which translates thousands of tiny explosions into smooth rotation at the wheels. An electric motor only has one moving part, and no metal on metal contact except for the bearings.
Electric vehicles still have to adhere to the parts and documentation availability standards of ice engines, it just feels different because you’re talking about primarily electronics parts rather than something that a machinist could make for you like we’re currently used to. It’s true that you can’t troubleshoot an electric vehicle without a multimeter, and a code reader, but you also can’t fix an ice engine without wrenches, a variety of consumable fluids, proprietary gaskets and fittings, etc.
Additionally, ice vehicles subjectively have a more open source feel to them because of the complexity inherent to the design. You can add power or change the dynamics of the car by modifying the intake, exhaust, valve profile, spark timing, and a million other things, but that’s because all those are factors in the way that it works. An electric motor doesn’t have any of that, and unless you want to modify the power going into the motor in a way that it was not designed to handle, there’s really nothing that can be changed due to the simplicity.
vivendi@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
90% of your power train is proprietary electronics that are designed to be opaque and break of you try and “tamper” with them
Most of an ICE car is tangible, rather widely replicable, blocks of metallic alloys
Overspark@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
EVs are at their heart really simple machines. You have a battery, a battery controller, some kind of thermal management for the battery (can be passive but active is better), and an electric motor that isn’t much more complex than the one in your vacuum cleaner. All these parts are readily available, so you can easily convert an ICE car to an EV with parts you can buy yourself. For some popular cars there are even kits available these days, and conversions of old-timers are really taking off. If there’s a kit with clear instructions a conversion can sometimes even be done in a single day.
An ICE car is literally orders of magnitude more complex. There are far more parts, far more computers to control all those parts (in a modern car that is), far more cabling to connect all these computers and far more opportunities for things to go wrong. ICE cars even spontaneously catch fire more often because of all the cabling and complexity.
You’re probably thinking of a few specific brands, like Tesla, that are very hostile towards self-servicing, and in those specific cases you are right. But most EVs from established car manufacturers are just as proprietary or non-proprietary as their ICE brethren, just with less complexity and less parts. And of course older cars that don’t have any computers in them are immune to this specific kind of complexity as well.
vivendi@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
A highly complex system with support systems to prevent it from literally blowing up (mmmmm tasty lithium)
A seriously complex piece of model specific code that is usually proprietary and has hardware level bricking fuses (so fuck you if it has a fault)
And also, all the other management shit like regen braking and what have you.
You’re doing a “reduction”. If you reduce literally anything to such high abstraction it seems simple. Yes, quantum physics is also " just " an observation of a continuous system, nothing to it mate
ICE cars can be completely reassembled with a couple of wrenches. The most proprietary thing in the whole system is the ECU, and you can swap that and whatever if you wish to do so.
stoicmaverick@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m going to humbly disagree with your premise. Ice engines only seem simpler because we’ve been doing it for so long that it seems normal, but the concept is insane when broken down. This is a machine which translates thousands of tiny explosions into smooth rotation at the wheels. An electric motor only has one moving part, and no metal on metal contact except for the bearings.
Electric vehicles still have to adhere to the parts and documentation availability standards of ice engines, it just feels different because you’re talking about primarily electronics parts rather than something that a machinist could make for you like we’re currently used to. It’s true that you can’t troubleshoot an electric vehicle without a multimeter, and a code reader, but you also can’t fix an ice engine without wrenches, a variety of consumable fluids, proprietary gaskets and fittings, etc.
Additionally, ice vehicles subjectively have a more open source feel to them because of the complexity inherent to the design. You can add power or change the dynamics of the car by modifying the intake, exhaust, valve profile, spark timing, and a million other things, but that’s because all those are factors in the way that it works. An electric motor doesn’t have any of that, and unless you want to modify the power going into the motor in a way that it was not designed to handle, there’s really nothing that can be changed due to the simplicity.