Mastodawn

Dutch students create modular electric car "you can repair yourself"

https://lazysoci.al/post/40677034

Dutch students create modular electric car "you can repair yourself" - lazysoci.al

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24122615 [https://beehaw.org/post/24122615] > > A team of students from the Eindhoven University of Technology has built a prototype electric car with a built-in toolbox and components that can be easily repaired or replaced without specialist knowledge. > > > > The university’s TU/ecomotive group, which focuses on developing concepts for future sustainable vehicles, describes its ARIA concept as “a modular electric city car that you can repair yourself”. > > > > ARIA, which stands for Anyone Repairs It Anywhere, is constructed using standardised components including a battery, body panels and internal electronic elements that can be easily removed and replaced if a fault occurs. > > > > With assistance from an instruction manual and a diagnostics app that provides detailed information about the car’s status, users should be able to carry out their own maintenance using only the tools in the car’s built-in toolbox, the TU/ecomotive team claimed.

Lemmyoutofhere Jan 8

We have customers that can’t figure out how to turn their headlights on, or fill the washer fluid. “Repair yourself” needs to be a pretty low bar.

Boomer Humor Doomergod Jan 8

People like that are why I support public transit and walkable cities.

Cars are appliances to them, and since they’re most of the car market most cars suck.

By getting people off the road who don’t want to be there the demands of the car market will change and maybe we’ll have cool cars again.

Plus we can increase driving license and maintenance requirements so that people know to stay in the right lane and don’t have parts falling off their cars.

And since we need fewer roads we can build them better and maybe, in some places, we can have no speed limits.

SaveTheTuaHawk Jan 8

Plus we can increase driving license and maintenance requirements so that people know to stay in the right lane and don’t have parts falling off their cars.

Most of the world has annual safety inspections. Not North America.

wizardbeard Jan 8

Depends where you’re talking about. Unfortunately most of the US states haven’t figured out how to make going to the DMV (department of motor vehicles) not suck tremendously and how to keep it from taking up most of a day, so many places only do those checks whenever you have to renew the license plate tag/registration, and it’s done at the DMV itself. Usually once every couple of years.

Some states allow those inspections to be done by other approved locations. Different states have different timings on how often it’s required, and they all have differences as to what is actually tested and what is passing and failing.

Boomer Humor Doomergod Jan 8

My state DMV is great at customer service but terrible at roads.

Where in North America are there no inspections? I can’t renew my registration without the car going through inspection and I assumed inspections were required everywhere.

Lemmyoutofhere Jan 8

Most places in North America. Most places here in Canada only have inspections where the vehicle changes owners. In Quebec, the inspection is only done when you buy a car from a dealer or used car garage, does not apply on private sales. Some seriously sketchy cars in Quebec.

Boomer Humor Doomergod Jan 8

Damn Canada you scary.

Lemmyoutofhere Jan 8

Yup, you can thank our Conservative premiers for scrapping any kind of regular mechanical or emissions inspections.

SaveTheTuaHawk Jan 8

The voters thank them by giving them full power majorities.

Lemmyoutofhere Jan 8

Unfortunately, cheap bribes work.

DarkSirrush Jan 9

In BC you only need a regular inspection if your vehicle is for commercial use, or business use over 8000kg.

Other than that, you only need an inspection if you purchased it over 6 months ago in another province… And that’s mainly Alberta’s fault.

captainlezbian Jan 8

I never had to get an inspection in ohio

SaveTheTuaHawk Jan 8

Where in North America are there no inspections?

Ontario. And no visible licence validation either. Doug Ford put all the drunks and uninsured losers back on roads.

MonkeyTown Jan 8

I’ve never had to get a vehicle inspected in Wisconsin as far as I can recall. There are some areas that do emissions testing but that’s about it.

California has inspections never.

Georgia has no inspections. If you live in the greater metro Atlanta area there is an annual emissions test to make sure you’re not making too much smog, but they don’t check the rest of the vehicle.

As far as I know, Pennsylvania & New York have annual vehicle inspections. Hang on a sec. Okay, Wikipedia says 14 states have annual inspections. More than I thought. en.wikipedia.org/…/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit…

Vehicle inspection in the United States - Wikipedia

Kentucky…

Boomer Humor Doomergod Jan 8

We have annual inspections in my state and I still got a lug nut chucked into my windshield.

Lemmyoutofhere Jan 8

Utopia.

DarkSirrush Jan 8

Not really - being easy to repair also means that its easier for shops to repair, which is becoming a problem lately as companies are purposefully making it harder to service EV’s outside of their designated facilities.

Lemmyoutofhere Jan 9

Good point.

I once had a car where you couldn’t change a frickin’ lightbulb without dismantling half the motor. Nowadays “repair yourself” really has a very low bar.

The driver’s side lightbulb on my wife’s Kia Soul is largely blocked by internal components. I found some instructions explaining how to remove the front bumper for access. Fortunately some guy on YouTube made a video showing a better way. Need to make some marks on parts so you can line them up properly when putting it back but with some tight contortions it was possible and only took a couple minutes.

A lot of modern car headlights are LED which you shouldn’t need to change like old bulbs. At least not often.

But if you do, it’s $100+ instead of $10

Yeah it’s a whole assembly instead of just a bulb. Interior lighting is mostly like that too now. Ceiling fans and whatnot have assemblies rather than bulbs now. That said I have never had one of these that needs replacing. When I was a kid, replacing a lightbulb was a regular task. I think car lighting going this direction is probably fine as long as it’s not crazy expensive and requiring a dealer computer to connect to the ECU.

SaveTheTuaHawk Jan 8

I worked a summer in a garage. I lost count of the number of “strange noise like something rolling around the truck” orders, resolved by removing the thing rolling around the trunk. I was 17, amazed these people had jobs and money to buy cars.

SlateEV is self-repairable. It’s one of those things super popular on Reddit, but no one in the real world knows which end of a screwdriver to hold.

Lemmyoutofhere Jan 8

Yup. We get cars towed in because they ran out of gas.

Ok, but what is “no information” supposed to mean? Why does it not say “empty”?

Lemmyoutofhere Jan 8

It has a normal gas gauge, plus underneath the gauge, it shows the mileage till absolutely empty. When you hit 0 km remaining, it will switch to three dashes, indicating you are absolutely, completely empty, as in out of gas typically in less than a km. The gauge was reading empty, and underneath was showing the three dashes. That is what the customer interpreted as “no information”.

AIN’T GOT NO GAS IN IT

General Motors: *purchases all related IP, disappears it forever*

General Motors: Oh! Sorry squire! I’ve scratched the record

RagingRobot Jan 8

The should create a system of interchangeable parts! A breakthrough

captainlezbian Jan 8

I want one

CallMeAnAI Jan 8

Call me when it passes safety and has a price.

This stuff is cool, this thing looks great, it’s non viable though.

That’s not the point of the car. From the article:

The designers hope that the project will encourage policymakers to improve Right to Repair directives, while providing a case study for automotive manufacturers to follow when designing future EVs.

perestroika Jan 8

I would buy it. :)

Story: I drive a Mitsubishi electric car of generation 0 (MIEV). They have a typical error: a high voltage comparator on the motor controller breaks, stopping the car. The fix involves 1 resistor, and works (you just need dwarves with titanium hands to reach the correct part in less than a whole day). The resistor costs cents. Authorized representatives propose swapping in a 5000 euro motor controller (the remaining value of the car is about 1000 euros).

Easy maintenance is an absolute requirement. Otherwise expensive cars become junk.

It’s absolutely absurd that that isn’t the norm.

David_Eight Jan 8

Across all industries. Look at a company like Framework, there’s no reason everything can’t be made like this.

Introducing the Framework Desktop and newest Framework Laptop 13

Choose between our latest Framework Laptop 13 powered by Ryzen™ AI 300 Series processors or our brand new Framework Desktop with Ryzen™ AI Max Series processors.

Framework

hex123456 Jan 8

If the parts are easy to remove then are they easy to steal? Is this the next generation of the Chevette?

David_Eight Jan 8

Normal ICE cars have parts that are easy to remove, is this any different?

hex123456 Jan 8

Easy with a bit of know how and tools. Likely this is no different to thieves. Maybe makes the pool of potential thieves larger if they make it more user friendly to do. Similar to how opening a PC is easier than opening a Mac.

My Nissan Leaf is currently bricked because a charging station sent the wrong communication messages (or the right messages in the wrong order, still don’t know exactly what happened).

The car thinks there is a cable still plugged in (when there isn’t), so it won’t go into drive. It also won’t recognise a new cable being plugged in, so it won’t charge. It doesn’t think there is a charging session ongoing, so there is no way to stop it. There are no fault codes and no errors. The car is behaving perfectly normally except that it won’t start.

Nissan has no idea what the problem is. Multiple experts has tried with success to find anything wrong. It’s been 3 months and the best option so far is to start replacing modules (for more than the value of the car) until we accidentally replace the correct module.

The vast majority of the problems we’re having is caused by a lack of information and communication from Nissan. They don’t provide circuit diagrams, or diagnostic manuals, and they don’t even permit people to buy the diagnostic tools they use.

An open source, repairable car would be really nice about now.

𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠 Jan 8

It’s sounds bizarre to me that this couldn’t be resolved by rebooting.

Then again, how do you reboot a car exactly? It’s not “off” even when the car is not started I suppose.

Lemmyoutofhere Jan 9

You perform a battery reset of the low voltage system. Disconnect HV system, disconnect the 12V battery then short the positive and negative battery cables together for about half an hour. Then reattach 12V battery, and then turn HV system back on.

MonkderVierte Jan 9

then short the positive and negative battery cables together for about half an hour.

Uh, on the pcb side, to discharge condensers & co. Not on the battery side.

You don’t need to disconnect the HV. Electronics are all run on 12V.

I’ve tried disconnecting the 12V battery. I believe the technicians have tried disconnecting the 12V and HV batteries at the same time. All factory reset buttons have been pressed. We’ve tried plugging in a CHAdeMO and type 1 cable at the same time.

I’m also very surprised that something like this could be software related and persist across power failures/reboots.

ironhydroxide Jan 9

It depends on where the variable for this is stored.

In ram then a reboot will fix it. But it looks like for some reason the engineer put it on non volatile memory.

dejected_warp_core Jan 9

There’s some complex mechanical interlocks involved in charging circuitry too. You can hear these beefy solenoids clunk on/off when plugging in a charging cable. A stuck solenoid could be implicated too, as some safety detection circuitry might check those to see if the car is currently in a charging configuration. That goes especially since moving parts are typically more likely to fail before anything else. Although, I’d be stunned if that wasn’t already considered.

Not solenoids, contactors technically.

TrackinDaKraken Jan 9

The shotgun approach to repair is a tried and trued method of wasting money.

evenglow Jan 10

Or making money. Depends on which end you are on.

mrgoosmoos Jan 9

shit like this is exactly why I won’t buy a newer car, even an economical option like the Leaf

I want simplicity and reliability and repairability. these incredibly complex modern vehicles don’t have that

and it’s not like I’ll be buying them ten years down the road when there are no options left - I will find something that meets my criteria, and I will pay more for it. black box cars do not make good used vehicles, and they will be priced accordingly by knowledgeable buyers

dejected_warp_core Jan 9

As a Leaf owner, this terrifies me. Do you have any details about that charging station, like what brand it was?

And just shooting from the hip here: I’ve noticed that a lot of folks that upgrade cars to electric using parts from crashed vehicles, know their way around production EV guts pretty darn well. Engaging with a local shop that does that work might be worthwhile, seeing as how (I assume) the dealer is getting nowhere by following the book.

I’ve been helping a startup company test their prototype V2G charger for a while, so they gave me one of the first production units at a discount. The prototype worked; it was the production unit that caused the problem. We still don’t know what is different between the prototype and production units that could have caused this. All sales have been halted until this is can be fixed.

I’m keeping the company anonymous for now at their request. There is no risk to any other cars, they really don’t want bad PR from this, and they have taken responsibility for my car.

I have heard (with no evidence) that both Wallbox and Kempower had the same issue when first releasing their chargers, so it sounds to me like Nissan haven’t properly implemented the CHAdeMO standard, and companies are having to modify their chargers to fix Nissan’s mistake. All of this is just my speculation.

I shall pass on your suggestion. They may not have thought to reach out to hobbyists for help.

a_non_monotonic_function Jan 10

If they have zero ability to debug the fuckers with multiple of them bricked then this is good information for all of us.

Nissan is clearly too stupid to buy from.

Are there plans to produce ARIA commercially? (All i saw in the article is about the prototype) Looks like a DIY Honda CR-Z, in a good way.

There was a cool Sono Sion project, a smallish boxy EV that comes with a repair manual, solar panels for topping off the battery, and power-sharing mechanic to power another EV or a home. But they either ran out of money or could not set up manufacturing.

The main reason I am not buying into electric vehicles is the state of reliability and repairability and the immense black box which those vehicles are nowadays. What I would like to see is pretty much exactly that prototype as a commercially available and street legal product. Where everything can be modified and improved or repaired by anyone. Just like in the “good old days”…