The Righteous EV Owners Who Won't Let Their Broken Cars Die(www.wired.com)
11 pointsby quapster4 hours ago3 comments
  • mitchbob2 hours ago
    > What he found was less an amateur car club than a volunteer-run multinational automotive company in the making. As many owners saw it, Fisker had built a flawed vehicle and then abandoned them when they needed help. If the company wouldn’t be making good on years of software updates and replacement parts, then they would push the code and source the parts themselves. This was about more than an electric car, or a hobby, or even a community. It was about taking back control of an economy run by rent-seeking tech companies that will jack up prices until the day they drop you.

    https://archive.ph/2026.02.24-110624/https://www.wired.com/s...

  • jmclnx2 hours ago
    This the thing I do not understand about modern EVs. Based upon articles I read, maintenance of EVs are far more expensive that fossil fuel vehicles. Maintenance is a big part of cost of ownership .

    100+ years ago, Electric Vehicles back the were correctly touted as having far less maintenance that fossil fuel vehicles.

    Here is the thing, Items EVs do not have/need:

    1. No Transmission

    2. Oil Changes

    3. No radiator

    4. No exhaust or catalytic converter.

    5. There are other things not in EVs that need regular maintenance.

    So to me, maintenance should be much less for EVs, 100+ years ago the only drawback was range, and that has been solved with modern EVs.

    • SR2Z10 minutes ago
      The elephant in the room when talking about EV repair costs is Tesla's gigapress that they use for the Model 3/Y.

      It's excellent and cheap (at least it is now after thousands of customers have been used as guinea pigs and sold cars with wildly defective underpinnings) but it does mean that virtually any damage to the casting will total the car since it's not practical to replace or repair it.

      Given that the majority of EVs on the road in the US are one of those two models, it really does spike average EV repair costs.

    • georgeburdellan hour ago
      I think it's just lack of ecosystem of the underlying parts and the inability of manufacturers to design for such an ecosystem. I have an EV and I can't even change the 12V battery on my own because it's some weird proprietary L-shaped thing.
    • ebiesteran hour ago
      The number of maintenance items are fewer.

      The cost of those remaining maintenance items are the issue. That said, it's a reasonable hypothesis to say that this is an economies of scale issue.

      (Also, as I understand it, tires are used up more quickly on EVs still, but tire companies are learning to adapt to EVs so that may not be as true today.)

      • whatevaa18 minutes ago
        It's an issue of planned obsolescence. Manufacturers and dealers benefit from more expensive repairs.
    • cherry_tree3 minutes ago
      What articles have said that ev maintenance is more expensive? I’m a former mechanic and have owned only EVs for 6+ years and have spent much less time/money on my EVs than on previous ICE vehicles, so I’m interested in what costs they had for the EVs.
  • nofunsir3 hours ago
    Paywall site purposefully trying to crash browser tabs of adblock users.
    • metalmanan hour ago
      it's not on purpose,I run a browser with no java scriot, cookies, or dom, and it loads perfectly, but encounter many sites that will doom loop if they encounter partial permissions, for which I have another browser version, and if that does not work, I teather my phone to a computer and use a browser there. I can state that there are many sites that just load for me, and for which I am making no active attempt to bypass any "paywall", which I only become aware of through comments such as yours, though I will add that the way some sites render under the settings I have, makes me strongly suspect that some clever person is having fun at my expense.