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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of smells....

One good thing about driving an EV is that weird oil or hot coolant smells are from someone else's car (and not a problem with your car)

(although yes technically many EVs have coolant loops)

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As an aside, I'd like to mention that like 9 times out of 10 if you are driving down the road in an ICE vehicle and smell weird oil or hot coolant smells you are smelling someone else's car. The wind blows away a lot of your own stink before it gets to you. I learned to ignore anything that didn't smell 1) when I was stopped, and 2) more than once in totally different locations. After trying to track down smells that I thought were mine and were invariably from someone else nearby.

I’ve driven an EV for 5 years now, and I still occasionally think it’s something wrong with my car, instinctively lol

As the fleet of EV's age, I'm sure we'll see equivalents...

"The high voltage wires were just dragging on the street sparking, presumably with all the safety features disabled"

"They were driving with a 10 gallon coolant tank on the roof, presumably because the coolant loop had a big leak and needed continuous topping up".

Are those even user serviceable? So, it won't stop everyone but it will stop most of them.

It isn't until it is. Manuals will appear, guides will show up online, shadetree mechanics will get better at electronics(they used to be experts in carburetors after all), software will be cracked if necessary.

You're not allowed to drive cars like that in a functional society. When you go for your compulsory car checkup it wouldn't pass the required safety standards.

while I agree, there's many places where the compulsory car checkup is tied to your relationship with the mechanic. I don't think my parents ever had a "valid" car but the certificate always was. It never felt wrong (although I think it is) but more like mutual aid or service.

There’s also the fact that nearly 1/4 US states require no emissions or safety checks whatsoever [1]. So everything is valid by default and realistically the only thing stopping you from driving a literal rust bucket, with tailpipe dragging, poor combustion, or modified emissions filtering (like modifying your truck so you can roll coal down Main Street) is it a cop feels like pulling you over for it

[1]: https://goodcar.com/car-ownership/vehicle-inspections-by-sta...

What is allowed and what actually happens are two very different things, my friend.

In the neighbourhood I live, there's a guy who visits someone here several times per week. His headlights are broken, the tires are worn smooth, the exhaust is loud beyond all reason. Given the general state of the vehicle, I don't have high hopes for the brakes.

I reported it to the police. I'm really not the type of person to do that, but this is worse than anything I've seen. Of course nothing happened. I didn't even get a reply. They don't give a shit. Some day that guy is going to rear-end my car and break my neck because his brake lines finally gave out.

Also, the compulsory car inspections only work for honest people. People with illegal mods will put back the stock parts for the inspection, and switch them back after. I'm not gonna say the inspections are worthless, but it does make a lot of money for the state and the private actors who run the inspection centres.

EDIT to add: They made a law recently that the inspector has to take a photo of the car inside the inspection centre, because there was so much fraud happening with vehicles just being "inspected" on paper.

What I think is missing today is a way to challenge someone else's car. A few independent reports should force an early checkup, and if passed soon after the accusation, the accusers should get their own just to have something at stake.

It's missing because letting the minority of Karens harass everyone like that would cause the political will for the inspection programs to evaporate instantly.

Second, places with high touch governments already lose out on business due to registration arbitrage. Your proposal would dump gas on that fire.

A functioning bureaucracy can handle false reports. If someone has a habit of making false reports, they'd be ignored or even punished themselves.

I think the point they're making is that the ICE cars that OP is complaining about also aren't supposed to be driven in a functional society. The difference is that mostly wealthy people can afford EVs: https://ampo.org/electric-vehicles-are-out-of-reach-for-most... thus they stay maintained and have a polished image.

I think they are more accessible now than when that article was written. My wife and I bought a mid-trim Hyundai Kona Electric for under $35,000. Besides, lots of people buy used cars, and there are crazy deals on used EVs. I've seen Bolts go for under $15,000. 2 year old ID.4s are selling for under $20,000 in my area. You may not find a $5,000 beater, but EVs are penetrating further into the middle of the market now.

There are also lower ongoing costs for maintenance and fuel.

There is still the secondary wealth filter of having a place to park and charge, of course.

Most EVs have lockouts that will be very hard to bypass for things like this.

It’s more ‘I could have replaced a few cells in my battery pack, but the car bricked itself when I opened the pack! Assholes!’.

Notably many recent ICE cars aren’t much better.

Where I live there are yearly check ups that you need to do, or you simply cant legally drive your car

Unlikely. Many of these sensors are mostly CAN-based, rather than hardwired. It would be a time consuming enterprise to custom bake a solution for each vehicle model to fake out protection systems. For better or worse EVs are substantially more difficult to modify than typical ICE.

Only takes 1 person to make a "safety system faker: Makes car run even with faults" which is a $20 thing you can buy from aliexpress and can be clipped anywhere onto the canbus - just two wires to hook into.

It then runs code which auto detects the car model (fairly easy from the messages on the bus), and has a database of the messages to send/inhibit to change the behaviour in the desired way.

Because so many cars use electronics that are common across a whole manufacturer of cars - ie. all GM cars, or all cars with a Bosche ECU - there won't be awful lot of work making it compatible with hundreds of models of car.

Such devices already exist for faking data for engine tuning, and for faking 'zero faults, all monitors pass' to pass government tests.

You basically get internal faults and cable faults with HV stuff. A box reporting that the AC compressor motor winding isn't shorted isn't going to make the compressor work with a shorted winding. ECU probably wouldn't disengage the powertrain for that though.

And then things like battery temperature warnings will quickly turn into real failures.

And then the next generation or 2 of stuff is going to at least attempt to implement cybersecurity features that greatly complicate tampering at the message level.

If your high voltage line is conducting enough to the ground that it's sparking, your vehicle isn't going to work. Electricity follows the path of least resistance and a path to ground is a lot lower resistance than a motor coil.

EVs eliminate a lot of polluting failure states of ICE vehicles. There just simply aren't that many things to burn or leak and still have a functioning vehicle.

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