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Electric cars will be cheaper to make than gas vehicles but with much higher repair and insurance costs
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this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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I don't think theyre being used as an example at all. A lot of these first generation platforms are still just trying to figure stuff out, and unless they all glob onto an existing platform, they'll never deviate from one another. Competition is good, especially to drive innovation in the early days of new fields of products like these. Most of the bigger companies have opened their platforms or pieces thereof, but that doesn't need to mean open-source. We should rely on legislature and right to repair to reign some of the anti-competitive bullshit they all pull in though, I do agree with that.
Sorry but there just isn't that much to figure out. Cars have had electric motors and batteries for as long as cars have had motors (literally - early cars didn't have a combustion engine).
You take an ordinary car, bolt a big ass motor and battery to it somewhere, and you're done. Nothing innovative needs to happen and there should be no repairability compromises. If anything they should be easier to repair.
Tesla's obsession with complex body parts is inexcusable. I used to work in the car crash insurance industry - we put Tesla in the same category as Bugatti/McLaren/etc. They're that expensive to repair... and unlike those supercars, nobody is going to be willing to spend the money get a Model 3 back to show room condition.
Get yourself in a minor fender bender like the one below and your insurance company is going to buy you a new car (the owner of this car was given a $45,000 repair quote):
With a conventional car, those panels would have likely been plastic (cheap to replace) or else metal but simple designs that can be bent back into shape by someone who knows how to use a panel beating hammer. What you don't see on the photo is all the weld joints that have been stressed and failed on the Tesla. It can potentially be months of work to get that car fixed and the insurance company doesn't want to provide a hire car for all that time - so they just pay out the value of the car and leave you to buy a new one.
Friend...it's not as easy as you think. If you imagine every step of the way from pressing a pedal to what happens on the drive platform, it is absolutely NOT simple whatsoever. It's not just "go" and "stop", it's a dozen steps of software on an RTOS moving so fast as to be imperceptible as a normal physical pedal interaction would, controlling multiple motors at once, synchronizing power, rotations, and detecting traction, and that's just pressing the acceleration pedal. All the other safety systems engaged in the process of they exist are very sophisticated. All of this then culminates in an experience that hopefully eulmulates what you describe, but it is certainly NOT just strapping some different motors to the same kind of car. Don't even get me started on the platform suspension automations and efficiency systems.
You're just not very well read on the subject, so you might want to go catch up before you keep spouting this nonsense and looking kind of ill-informed.
All this to say though, I am NOT sticking up for Tesla. I'm sticking up for the progress in the industry. Yeah, some shit needs to get figured out for sure, but that doesn't mean people should stick with the old way of doing that "same old bullshit" until it gets figured out in a lab somewhere. Progress needs to get made, and this is how it's shaking out.
To your point about that wreck, that sure looks like it wasn't the Tesla drivers fault, so it shouldn't impact them.