While this is a good step forward, it feels like complaining about the 0.025% of plastic from straws in the ocean while ignoring the 75% of plastic from fishing nets.
I own a 2020 Kona EV. The battery cannot be upgraded. Eventually, I'll have to replace the entire car to get a longer range. BEVs should be mandated to have upgradable batteries and modular interfaces so that the shell can continue to be reused, the batteries (and BMS) upgraded, and old batteries easily recycled.
Useful life of most of the cars is on par with their battery longevity, as long as you have proper thermal management and your usage patterns are not outliers.
Focusing on being able to upgrade battery (and to be clear - upgrade, not replaced/repair) is solving 1% problem.
Cars have basically unlimited useful life because every component (arguably with the exception of the frame) can be repaired. It's surprisingly affordable to rebuild an engine and make it as good as new. I can buy a car made in the 50s today, that's a 70 year old car. And I can keep servicing it and keep it going for another 70 years.
The main enemy of cars is rust, but for that there are cost effective mitigations now. The real reason people ditch cars is always they get tired of the old car and want something more modern, not because the car is at the end of its "useful life".
Batteries are not like that. They actually have a useful life that degrades over time, which makes them non-servicable.
What I would like to see is serviceable batteries, where you can replace individual damaged cells and keep the battery going. Everyone would benefit from that, especially the used EV market, which would help stem the massive depreciation hits EV buyers are facing now.
Given the huge environmental cost involved in manufacturing a car, 20 years seems fair.
I’m still driving a 26-year old Nissan Micra – though it’s now on its last legs: the Irish climate isn’t kind to steel and we’ve had to have the under-carriage re-welded three times in the past five years. :(
EV batteries are expected to offer about 60-70% of capacity at 20 years. I think that's really good compared to general wear and tear of the car.
But let's go back to the original point, about being able to UPGRADE (not repair/replace) battery in the car. 20 years old car is worth like $1k-2k, which is fraction of the cost of the new battery.
While it's cool thing to do for hobbyists, it makes 0 economical sense.
What an old car is worth depends on many factors, but age is not the most important one. The average age of passenger cars on the road in the U.S. is 14 years old -- I think 14.5 years now. I don't think we have data on average appraised value of passenger cars on the road, but I would guess it would be in the range of 10-15K.
Why not ask me my motivations instead of assuming them?
I'm not fine with the range; I bought an EV to stop burning fossil fuels, my 24-year-old RAV4 was on its last leg, and there was a $6K bonus for trade-ins (my RAV4 would have been about $5k in parts).
Because I want to explore the interior of BC, drive across Canada on fewer charges, visit family, go on road trips, etc. Just yesterday I spent 30 minutes trying to charge my Kona. It's a long and boring story, but suffice to say our charging infrastructure here sucks, and is not as simple, quick, or convenient as "tap-to-pay" (with a credit card) at petrol stations.
> Should I be able to eventually replace gas tank with the larger one in my ICE vehicle?
FWIW, that is actually a thing you can do. It is mostly done for SUVs and pickups since the primary use case for the extra range is off-pavement driving and the upgrade is simpler.
Yes, which is why they are replacable, and Hyundai is bound by law to keep making batteries for OP's Kona for a good while even after the production stops.
Unfortunately Hyundai is not required by law to keep making batteries. They are only legally required to provide for warranty support for up to 10 years after a car is made. Usually that means you keep making parts, but I'm not sure how this works with EVs.
But the window is 10 years. After that, you rely on market forces -- if there is a profit to be made from making the part, then it is made. Heavily cars rely on aftermarket parts, but the question of a battery is a bit different.
Again, we need open source cars, with open source designs, so that batteries can be repaired, upgraded, and replaced by an aftermarket. I keep pushing this and hope I'm not being tedious, but people are underestimating the risk to the consumer.
That will probably come when EV marketshare is higher and innovation plateaus. I definitely appreciate the phone thing as someone typing from an iPhone SE. I also think phone batteries degrade faster than cars, right? I think my phone is from 2022 and I’m definitely starting to feel it.
I don't see how that's even remotely comparable. It's not like you can replace the battery in your phone with a larger one. You will be able to buy a new battery for your car, that's already guaranteed in the EU - but it will be the same capacity as what you got.
I don't know why is this even an argument really, like.....in a petrol car, do you expect to be able to fit it with a bigger fuel tank after 10 years? or a more powerful engine? Until very recently even software updates to the infotainment weren't really a thing, if you wanted a newer interface you had to change the entire car(I'm not saying this was a good thing, just that generally the expectation is that the product will work the way it was when you bought it).
> It's not like you can replace the battery in your phone with a larger one.
That was totally a thing for phones in the past. Depending on the model you could get a larger pack that had a bulge on the back of the device to have extra battery time. There was a similar thing with a number of laptops.
I do agree its kind of a questionable thing on something like a car. I imagine packaging concerns would really get in the way of adding a bit extra.
Disagree. I want a replaceable battery in my phone. They can get to extensible memory next. And it's not because you don't care about something that you should remove this freedom from me. And don't tell me that the market will self regulate in the best interests of the consumer or other nonsense like that.
I want replaceable CPU and memory in my phone as well. I demand the government force device manufacturers to use socketed CPUs using standardized sockets and SO-DIMM memory. And it's not because you don't care about something that you should remove this freedom from me.
Fairphones absolutely do not have a socketed CPU and user replaceable memory. Each generation has one mainboard with soldered components, which I don't see listed as a part to replace on their site.
It's not for me at least. Nobody can prove their inner intent to you but most people will know from themselves that their actions are sometimes misunderstood (especially when something worked/came out badly) but that they genuinely mean well
> Partitioning and recycling of uranium, plutonium, and minor actinide content of used nuclear fuel can dramatically reduce this number to around 300 years.
One reason new plastic is so cheap is that we wanted the other parts of the oil to run automobiles and planes. So if we stop doing that suddenly recycling the plastic makes more sense too...
Related: My FOSS tool allows uploading PDF files to a private server for annotating within a browser. Annotations are saved server-side in JSON format, which can be viewed and modified by anyone with the URL.
> LLMs are not actually doing a great job of translating ideas into tangibly useful software
Here is the source code for a greenfield, zero-dependency, 100% pure PHP raw Git repository viewer made for self-hosted or shared environments that is 99.9% vibe-coded and has had ~10k hits and ~7k viewers of late, with 0 errors reported in the logs over the last 24 hours:
Frankly, I created dozen of such projects in the last weeks. Recently I just deleted them all. I feel like there's no point. I cancelled my Claude subscription, too.
I got back learning from books and use LLMs for "review my code in depth and show me its weak points" occasionally.
It's using a mature data model from an existing framework (git), and it's essentially a simpler clone of other similar projects.
That's brownfield to me. Greenfield would develop a completely new system. This is a utility for an existing system, one whose design is clearly a copy of existing utilities. Both of those make this brownfield.
I'm building something from scratch, with no existing code base, and no requirement to integrate with or extend an existing implementation. The only constraint is Git's raw file format. Brownfield, to me, means constraints from existing software. It gets a little fuzzy, but no existing code base was used, no existing architectural constraints were imposed, and I was free to design the implementation from scratch; a greenfield implementation of a legacy protocol.
How many apps must people put on their phones, or payment cards people must carry, to pay to charge their vehicles with the convenience of a petrol station?
"Use the Electrify Canada mobile app to schedule your home charging and find a public charging station. Sign up for an account to enjoy exclusive, members-only public charging features and pricing."
I have owned an EV for a few years and a PHEV before that. Public charged primarily for a full year before switching to home charging and I've done multiple 500+ mile road trips. I've charged at EA, Tesla, EVgo, IONNA, MB-HPC, Pilot, Rivian, Red E, Nouria[ChargePoint activated], and those are just the DC Fast Chargers I remember off the top of my head.
Tesla and ChargePoint are the only ones that require an app. For those, my car's app can activate them if I don't want to download them.
Of course, I'm referring to the United States, I have not done a lot of charging in Canada.
The linage can be traced back to Basile Bouchon's paper tape invention in 1725. The article doesn't mention the role of punched cards in The Holocaust, though, which my blog post goes into:
There's still some work to do on the rendering side of model objects. Developing the syntax highlighting rules for 40 languages and file formats in about 10 minutes was amazing to see.
Edit, great example. What is your long term maintenance strategy, do you keep the original prompts around so you can refine them later or do you dig into the source?
I own a 2020 Kona EV. The battery cannot be upgraded. Eventually, I'll have to replace the entire car to get a longer range. BEVs should be mandated to have upgradable batteries and modular interfaces so that the shell can continue to be reused, the batteries (and BMS) upgraded, and old batteries easily recycled.
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