[arxari]

Wonder if there are electric cars that can at least a little bit compare to the modavility/reparability of older fossil fuel powered cars. I'm not that into cars myself but from what I've learned from a friend it seems like they really just don't compare in that regard.

I still find it unfortunate that while they semi address the fuel problem electric cars still contribute just as much to plastic pollution because they still use tires.

[WorldMaker]

Modability and repairability aren't exactly apples-to-apples between fossil fuel cars and electric cars.

There's a great potential for modability as electric cars are essentially software-defined cars. If you can get low level enough in the software there's a huge capability to change all sorts of interesting characteristics of how the pedals respond and even sometimes down what each wheel is doing in a particular moment. However, most manufacturers for safety and other reasons are generally going to want to lock down low level access to the software.

If you want to watch highly skilled people explore the modability space of EVs in real time, there's a lot of neat stuff going on in Formula E, the electric relative to Formula 1. Formula E is still using "standard cars" across all of the teams, so a lot of the "game" of that sport is live and often real time software tuning. Including some of it is directly gamified at this point, such as a portion of the car's battery is reserved for special "speed boosts" that unlock with audience participation or other goals/milestones.

Repairability is a more complicated comparison. EVs generally have fewer easy to repair parts, but partly because EVs generally have a lot fewer parts period. A typical electric motor is "solid state". It is magnets and high voltage wires. There's nothing to lubricate. We don't generally classify it as having moving parts subject to wear down over time. Electric motors and EV batteries are generally "replace, don't try to repair" parts should the worst happen to them. Not that there wouldn't be ways to repair them in place, but a lot of those techniques won't be "industry standardized" and it will take different skills than traditional mechanics are used to.

But at the same time, there's no fuel injection system or exhaust or catalytic converter to ever need repair. There's often no transmission or clutch; if there are physical gears there are often fewer of them. Electric motors support regenerative braking (running the motor in "reverse" and converting speed back to battery energy), so the physical brakes on electric cars generally see a lot less wear and tear of the same number of years than a fossil fuel car, so often need to be repaired less often.

Electric cars are most associated with the shift to screen-based dashboards and related cabin changes, but those changes are happening industry-wide at this point and the repairability of those components is shifting as they become "standard" features across many models of an automaker.