[ringoism]

Originally Posted by srini1785

I am not sure if that is the case. True , a motor needs a controller with some serious electronics but it also eliminates a lot of other sensors like AFR sensor, Pressure sensors etc. We should also keep in mind that EV's would eliminate clutch , conventional gear boxes , cooling circuit ( i.e for the engine). Turbo charger, Oil circulation pump and associated circuits , fuel injection circuit, exhaust gas pipes , catalytic converters just to name a few that i know of. Now that is a lot of things gone and i am assuming that they had some level of electronics associated with them too. Yes, there would be additions too like battery monitoring circuits, battery cooling circuits, electronic fuses, a few volt / ammeters and also an ECU but in terms of complexity it would not be so much of a maze as compared to the present ICE engine. An electrical motor is a pretty straight forward animal ,a rotor , a stator and thats it.This is talking only about the engine . The body electronics is still going to remain the same and a few crazed technocrats like Elon Musk are going to make life even more complex by making electronic door handles that jams and yeah your In car entertainment systems is still not going to function even in an EV but that's a different topic.

I have a friend working at a company who re-manufactures heavy-truck turbochargers for the U.S. market. The turbos themselves now have 3-5 sensors in them, and the entire engine/drivetrain over twenty. Making IC engines - especially diesels - clean is becoming ever more difficult. He claims the engines themselves also last only about 1/2 as long as they used to between rebuilds. Just getting overstressed in the interest of extreme efficiency/cleanliness. Way back, a million miles was commonplace.

Once (and if) we have really good batteries and recharging infrastructure, it seems electric is just going to simplify a lot of things.

I'm thinking the past couple weeks of an electric scooter conversion for local use. And I have two friends working on similar projects.

Musk is a madman. Interesting, brilliant, impressive - but mad. I can't imagine what kind of nightmare a 15-year-old Tesla is going to be. Good as they are, probably a very dangerous ride as an aged machine. Sensors and electronics have their lifespans, and there are so damn many of them...

But we are supposed to dispose the car and buy a new one when the batteries get old, I suppose???

My 1988 E32 BMW was a great car but for the TWELVE on-board control-modules... which created headaches for all owners and drove the pre-owned values from the $50,000 original price to about an eighth of that over a decade. Whereas the lowly 3-series, with its old cable-operated HVAC vents, and lacking amenities like single-pushbutton-per-driver-auto-adjusted, motor-driven seats/mirrors/headrests (seriously), and the continually cantankerous automatic climate control, and all the other crap - that 3-series, which had cost a fraction of that new, as a ten-year-old sold for about the same as the 7-series. And my E32 was nothing compared to all the new stuff with BCM's, yaw/pitch/traction-control, etc, etc...

We really do not need all this complexity, and I wish the manufacturers (and consumers?) understood that.

-Eric

[Sutripta]

I think we are mixing up cost to repair with reliability.

Sutripta