cross-posted from: 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.
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.
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.
Good point.
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.
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”?
It did show empty. 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”.
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.
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.