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”.
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.
Most of the world has annual safety inspections. Not North America.
We have annual inspections in my state and I still got a lug nut chucked into my windshield.
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.
Kentucky…
Most places in North America. Most places here in Canada only have inspections when 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.
Damn Canada you scary.
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.
Yup, you can thank our Conservative premiers for scrapping any kind of regular mechanical or emissions inspections.
The voters thank them by giving them full power majorities.
Unfortunately, cheap bribes work.
Ontario. And no visible licence validation either. Doug Ford put all the drunks and uninsured losers back on roads.
California has inspections never.
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.
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, only Pennsylvania & New York have annual vehicle inspections. Hang on a sec. Okay, Wikipedia says 14 states have annual inspections. More than I thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_United_States
I never had to get an inspection in ohio
Also you can basically do whatever you want in New Hampshire, they’re nuts over there
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.
My state DMV is great at customer service but terrible at roads.
Utopia.
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.