EVs do tend to be totaled in a significant event due to unknown battery condition.
E-brake
- Thread starter J Alynn
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Is that unique to Tesla or all EVs? Part of the reason I went with VW’s MEB platform is because it /looked/ more repairable should I need it. So far I haven’t had to do much of anything with the car but just in case.
Unless I remember to activate the parking brake, the pawl allows the Lightning or Mustang to rock back and forth.
I suspect your intuition is not unfounded. Tesla goes to great lengths to design for manufacturability, sacrificing repairability. I expect mature car companies have a little more balance. I’m hoping scout will lean towards reapairability more than most, otherwise folks on this forum will be giving Jamie an earful.
All that said, because the battery is such a big part of things, money and space wise, and it’s hard to verify its condition after some damage (you can’t just eyeball it and tell if it’s safe), it probably does make EVs more likely to be totaled from an insurance perspective, if nothing else.
Last time I had to go to a collision replace the lot was just full of teslas. It was kinda weird.I suspect your intuition is not unfounded. Tesla goes to great lengths to design for manufacturability, sacrificing repairability. I expect mature car companies have a little more balance. I’m hoping scout will lean towards reapairability more than most, otherwise folks on this forum will be giving Jamie an earful.
All that said, because the battery is such a big part of things, money and space wise, and it’s hard to verify its condition after some damage (you can’t just eyeball it and tell if it’s safe), it probably does make EVs more likely to be totaled from an insurance perspective, if nothing else.
There is a Tesla & Rivian approved collision/Repair shop not far from our home. They have so many Teslas in for work that they are parking them outside their fenced in lot because the lot is full.
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They did say we can replace 80% of the parts in our driveway, but what is in that last 20% remains to be seen.I suspect your intuition is not unfounded. Tesla goes to great lengths to design for manufacturability, sacrificing repairability. I expect mature car companies have a little more balance. I’m hoping scout will lean towards reapairability more than most, otherwise folks on this forum will be giving Jamie an earful.
All that said, because the battery is such a big part of things, money and space wise, and it’s hard to verify its condition after some damage (you can’t just eyeball it and tell if it’s safe), it probably does make EVs more likely to be totaled from an insurance perspective, if nothing else.
BMW has a Park Brake button. It locks the rear brakes.
I’m not sure but probably. As far as I know it doesn’t have anything to do with the electric motors.
It depends on the car and the insurance companies. A lot of insurance companies right now will "total" an EV if they think the battery has been compromised in any way just because they aren't aware of repair options and don't want to take on the risk it won't be repairable so they take the option that saves them the most time and money and reduces their own risk. There's a YouTube channel called "Rich Rebuilds" where he takes written Teslas and other EVs and he brings them back to life. He's very entertaining and it's clear from his content that a lot of written-off EVs are actually quite repairable. I think with time insurance companies will become more comfortable and informed as to what can be fixed and what can't when it comes to battery packs. For now they're just overly cautious and err on the side that lowers their risk of expensive repairs.
GM has built a very modular EV platform with their Ultium design. I think in the future those will be very repairable as they can replace entire modules easily. Right now people looking to convert cars look for wrecked Teslas for their modules but in the future they'll likely be looking for Ultium cars because they'll be easier to work with.
Fun story. My dad has an old Nissan Leaf 2017 which he bought for around 8k. He doesn’t drive it a lot, and the 12v died last week. When this happens the car looks completely dead, and my Dad thought it was an issue with the 8 year old EV battery.
He called around to five Nissan service centers and three of them told him he would probably have to replace the EV battery for 15k. The fifth one was a guy who suggested he measure the voltage on the 12v and see what happens if he charges that up.
So that’s what he did - he measured it at 11.3 (or something sort of low) and then trickle charged the 12v until the input amps dropped to zero. The car came back to life like a charm.
I took away a few lessons from this:
1. make sure your 12v is kept charged and in good condition for even an EV.
2. The EV batteries can last… a … long time
3. Right now some service centers may be looking for cars with trivial issues that may make the EV /look/ like a loss, so they can turn it around and sell it to people like my dad for 8k
4. Always have a multimeter and battery charger on hand.
In the Tesla there is an electric motor that closes the rear friction caliper (Telsa's are all disc brakes). In the event of an emergency, you press and hold the park button and it will engage the ebrake.
A major issue with brand-T and other “giga-casting” companies is that the reason for modularity was ignored by “disrupters” who don’t tend to understand what they’re disrupting.
Parts that are bolted together have bolts or rivets for very good reasons. Those bolts/rivets are not just for taking the vehicle apart. They’re also indicators of the stresses/strains that the parts have experienced. Each bolt is engineered to fail under a particular minimum level of stress or to allow a certain amount of strain before failure. If your entire car is made of one or two big cast part(s), a “little” accident will transmit a lot of stress into the vehicle's safety structure with no good way of determining whether the cast part has been subjected to stresses or strains that are too large to safely ignore. To determine that, they need to be analyzed under x-ray or other remote sensing, which requires removal from the vehicle entirely. That’s costly. So insurance just looks at the damage done to the exterior and determines that they cannot certify the safety structure is still in good condition so they total the vehicle. And then they raise the rates on everyone. Sure, it’s cheap(er) to manufacture, but they don’t actually reduce the purchase price of the vehicle and extra cost is paid by the buyer in higher insurance and higher repair costs.
Parts that are bolted together have bolts or rivets for very good reasons. Those bolts/rivets are not just for taking the vehicle apart. They’re also indicators of the stresses/strains that the parts have experienced. Each bolt is engineered to fail under a particular minimum level of stress or to allow a certain amount of strain before failure. If your entire car is made of one or two big cast part(s), a “little” accident will transmit a lot of stress into the vehicle's safety structure with no good way of determining whether the cast part has been subjected to stresses or strains that are too large to safely ignore. To determine that, they need to be analyzed under x-ray or other remote sensing, which requires removal from the vehicle entirely. That’s costly. So insurance just looks at the damage done to the exterior and determines that they cannot certify the safety structure is still in good condition so they total the vehicle. And then they raise the rates on everyone. Sure, it’s cheap(er) to manufacture, but they don’t actually reduce the purchase price of the vehicle and extra cost is paid by the buyer in higher insurance and higher repair costs.
That’s cool. Hope Scout does similar and tells us that so we know how to deal in an emergency
That’s my concern. I want things to be obvious in an emergency. And if there are things that are different emergency procedures in a Scout give us a laminated one pager, like a quick start guide, but for emergencies.
You won't need that... You will simply type or say "Quick start" or "Emergency" and the appropriate page of the owners manual will magically appear on your big center screen.
That’s amazing. But what if there’s something really wrong and the screen doesn’t work. I still like old school. Ha!
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