I've put a Nissan Leaf on a bench before and run it just like you did and would never do it again.
This approach is so much harder than it seems.
"once everything works then it'll be straightforward to remove what's left and dramatically reduce the rats nest qualities of this setup"
We thought the same initially, it turns out the system depends on many more components than you would think.
I imagined the EV system to be like an onion where you can take layers off, not so!It is much more like an egg, once you smash it, you have a few shards that you can re-use but you end up with a mess due to high connectivity between systems. (Leaf refused to turn on without original power steering and wipers connected).
Surprisingly what is more straightforward is putting together your own drivetrain with something like https://openinverter.org and building it back up from first principles. Or you isolate the inverter and motor and make them believe they are still in the original vehicle by replaying CAN messages, ZombieVerter is a project with that approach. Both of these are open source projects.
Appreciate the heads-up from someone who has been there before! Like you I was a bit surprised by how much the integration bled across subsystems. I like the egg analogy.
> isolate the inverter and motor and make them believe they are still in the original vehicle by replaying CAN messages, ZombieVerter is a project with that approach
For sure, great tips. This is what I've been working towards - at the time of that post I was spoofing the minimum number of CAN messages (still quite a lot), but in the months since I've been gradually replacing modules with spoofed signals by reversing them one at a time. Some of the follow-up blog posts have details about this.
I'm approaching the point of only needing the original motor stack (inverter, charger, etc), the original BMS, and all other modules spoofed out via CAN messages and a few discrete wired signals. The OEM BMS might turn out to be too hard to re-integrate once the battery pack gets split apart, but can cross that bridge when I come to it.
More blog posts (and open hardware & software) to come, I hope!
There is a linked update (this one is months old) about how much wiring he's been able to remove, and how few modules he has left on the bench. Looks like different OEMs have taken different routes regarding how interconnected everything is - fortunately for OP, it looks like Hyundai is less of an interconnected mess
Sounds like the early* days of software engineering, where everything was a big bowl of spaghetti you would never untangle again, compared to modular applications that you have nowadays.
*rumor has it, that most of the software out there is still written like that.
In software engineering, we only ever maintain processes, not artifacts. Software modularity when it exists is usually extremely coarse and rigid when compared to the malleability of electro-mechanical systems.
Got a bug to fix or a feature to implement on a program? Modify the source code, run the build system, use the newly built artifact and discard the old one. Lose this process and you're screwed because the tooling for modifying an extant program is still in the Dark Ages. It's not just about proprietary software that has reached its end of support, given enough time almost any source code tree will bitrot past the point where rebuilding it will require a major overhaul.
When you need to fix or customize a physical artifact like a coffee machine, you usually don't go inside the factory to change the blueprints and manufacture a new one. You just modify the one you have with standardized tools. It also doesn't matter how old the artifact is, even if it's decades out of production it can still usually be disassembled and put back together as if it was fresh out of the assembly line.
The more software bleeds into electro-mechanical systems, the less repairable, versatile and hackable they become.
Since Visual Studio is Windows only, the straightforward solution that I used was to install an old version in a Hyper-V virtual machine.
Then it's a multi-step process where the project is upgraded inside the VM with an ancient VS copy as "far as it'll go", then copied out to the external environment with VS 2022 that also has the 2016 and 2019 "Build Tools" installed. Then the projects can be upgraded to "current day".
In some cases I just gave up and created new empty projects with identical names and GUIDs, then copy-pasted the code files across. It can be simpler and faster.
> Sounds like the early days of software engineering
Sounds much more like they are trying to work with a production system without the source code, the debugers, the compilers, the datasheets, and the documentation.
Plus many of the things they want go directly against the wishes and good judgement of the engineers who made the system. They want to start the car without the steering component. I bet that someone at the manufacturer spent extra energy that you can’t do that. Why? Because under production circumstances if the steering components are not answering that means that something is terribly wrong with the car and it would be dangerous to turn on and accelerate.
Same with the keyless entry component. I bet that there were at least an effort done to make circumventing that hard.
I thought early code was carefully validated on paper with flowcharts and review by someone else before you were allowed anywhere near an expensive CPU cycle.
History doesn't repeat, it rhymes; and it kind of goes in phases or epochs. As Derrida was wont to point out, we show up in the middle of things, just flippantly speaking a language and carrying on as though the language was something we were born with and it's been the same forever because we only know our own "forever".
I popped my cherry on VAX silicon, where stack frames were baked into the silicon. This meant that regardless of language, the stack architecture was a target for the compiler not something it constructed. I fell into the middle of things: VAX silicon was new, and people wrote in e.g. COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, C because they'd successfully done so before and had libraries and practices which had stood the test of time and had made the jump to successfully infect a new species of silicon.
The successful colonizer libraries and practices had certain rules. "You can't manage heap in BASIC" for example, or that modular compilation units all had to be written in the same language. This is not and never was strictly true, and the people writing code knew it; but it was true enough for code which jumped silicon.
I on the other hand knew about the silicon stack, and could implicitly understand some of the more esoteric compiler pragmas for dealing with that stack (intended for cross-language linking support) and so by disabling certain linker checks and abusing compiler pragmas I could do e.g. memory management in BASIC by isolating the compilation unit where "memory is an array" from the one where "a memory address is an integer" and explicitly telling different lies with compiler pragmas in each.
Fast forward a few years and everybody had learned HTML and then I'm confronted with somebody wanting me to fix a steaming basket of soup machine gun sprayed into different files all with "(c) Macromedia" in them. "Where's your no-code tool which generated this?" I innocently ask. "Wuuut?" is the response. Yea well when you find it, let me know. Let's just say the people who have to fix things like that probably get paid good money and the solves they come up with are comparatively fragile, that code will not (and did not) survive; any more than my silicon-aware hacks (which I was paid quite well for) for VAX will work on modern silicon. Where's all of that shitty VB Wizard code spew? Thankfully gone.
Some of these integrations will not be fixable, but some of the subsystems will survive, and it might be simply because there is no security and it's possible to replay CANbus reliably as a result.
Your hypothesis is basically correct. Since the motor is under no load, it will appear to spin out of control even with the smallest torque application, but in reality the torque being applied is very small… probably around 5Nm.
Trust me if it was truly spinning out of control with no load you’d know… it would reach max speed in 0.1 seconds and probably start tearing through the floor.
Most likely what’s happening is that the creep torque is applying a constant small torque and the wheel sensors are reading 0 continuously, so it continues to apply a constant small torque.
I appreciate the insight from someone who's worked on this kind of thing formally, thanks.
> Most likely what’s happening is that the creep torque is applying a constant small torque and the wheel sensors are reading 0 continuously, so it continues to apply a constant small torque.
This was also my hypothesis at the time of the post. Turned out it's less constrained than this, a fully operational car with the drive wheels off the ground will also run away to high rpm (even in Neutral): https://www.projectgus.com/2024/04/unremarkable/#on-car-test...
There's still minimal torque, as you say, so a small press on the car's brake pedal is all it takes to stop. However I think if a driveshaft broke on a real car then it'd be spinning fast for a minute or two... It kind of makes sense that the control loop is tuned for a heavy car with a fixed drive ratio, though.
I am still hopeful there will be a way to stop this behaviour via a control signal (rather than pulling the safety interlock and slamming the contactors open). Have left the problem aside until I have a mechanical brake to use for testing! If that doesn't work out then it's still usable I think, provided any EV conversion is single speed fixed gear just like the Kona.
If you have any other insights on this then I'd be very interested to hear them, though.
It won’t happen on a real car because the speed probably comes from the ABS wheel speed sensors, and in that case they would read the correct speed of the wheels (unless the motor shaft is proper broken).
If the ABS is properly plugged in it will detect a fault with the sensors (which probably causes the creep to stop) however it won’t detect a mechanical fault with the encoder wheel (such as sensor not bolted to wheel) — such a fault is indistinguishable from the wheel not spinning, thus zero speed.
I think you were emulating the ABS module right? In that case, the spinning out of control is actually probably your fault. If you had not emulated this, the system would realise there is an ABS fault (from the messages not being present) and not use the ABS reported speed. It might even fall back to motor speed automatically.
Re: shaft scenario, if the motor shaft is broken the safety risk is pretty minimal because the torque wont actually cause the car to move.
Funnily enough I noticed recently that Japanese and Korean engineers usually argue against using checksums and random magic rolling bytes on these messages (“it will never happen”), in contrast Euro engineers use them everywhere. In this case the Euro method although more complex would have let the system know you are spoofing the ABS and no such motion would have happened.
My European car (2013 Volvo) had no checksum or even identifier for the firmware as I found out when my car would just randomly cut all power at speed.
I brought it back to the dealership and they found it had a completely different car’s update (2017 different model) installed!
> I think you were emulating the ABS module right? In that case, the spinning out of control is actually probably your fault. If you had not emulated this, the system would realise there is an ABS fault (from the messages not being present) and not use the ABS reported speed. It might even fall back to motor speed automatically.
That's a reasonable expectation, and this got left out of the follow-up post I linked, but in the "full car with wheels off the ground" tests we actually tried unplugging the brake module of an otherwise working car and it didn't change anything (including the gradual constant rpm increase in Neutral). If anything the behaviour might have gotten a little more aggressive with the brake module missing.
Have now observed similar behaviour for all three of "spoofed brake messages with 0 wheel speeds and emulated checksums", "fully operational car with wheels off the ground", and "car with wheels off the ground and ABS/brake module unplugged". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Re: shaft scenario, if the motor shaft is broken the safety risk is pretty minimal because the torque wont actually cause the car to move.
>
> I guess this is what they arrived to in the FMEA.
Fair enough, that makes sense. I guess if that's the case then the other behaviour is outside of the scope of what they need to care about.
If you're interested then click the link in my first reply (which is to a newer post). The first video shows the working car reaching 8000rpm (about 80km/h) around six seconds after the accelerator was released. The second video shows the speed creeping steadily from 38km/h to 44km/h (~2600rpm) after switching to Neutral (before we got nervous again and touched the brake).
(I don't really understand it, but I also haven't managed to think of a safety issue here for normal car use: the broken driveshaft is just a bit scary as the motor spins unloaded at >10,000rpm for a while. The only other time this seems likely to happen is if a mechanic puts the car in Drive on a hoist, and it'll stop as soon as they tap the brake.)
> I think you were emulating the ABS module right? In that case, the spinning out of control is actually probably your fault. If you had not emulated this, the system would realise there is an ABS fault (from the messages not being present) and not use the ABS reported speed. It might even fall back to motor speed automatically.
If the ABS unit getting stuck causes that kind of acceleration then I'm going to point most of the fault at the control logic.
Not really.. it will only be applying 5Nm or so which is such a small amount of torque that you could likely stop the wheel with your hand (equivalent to holding up 500g object with 1m ruler)
He is spoofing an ABS message from a working vehicle that says “no faults present” on a vehicle that is clearly full of faults.
ABS are usually ASIL D rated (ISO 26262) which means they have an on board watchdog, redundant processor with voting system, etc. so this failure mode (locked up and still sending) is considered impossible by design.
sure, but I would think some special case when we expect car to have 0 speed to not request any torque from its motor.
IMO three is no case where car should request any torque when been in neutral
> Not really.. it will only be applying 5Nm or so which is such a small amount of torque that you could likely stop the wheel with your hand (equivalent to holding up 500g object with 1m ruler)
It's good that it's small but I'm still not thrilled about this control loop.
> He is spoofing an ABS message from a working vehicle that says “no faults present” on a vehicle that is clearly full of faults.
My point is that the same messages would happen if you had a fully working vehicle and then the ABS unit locked up in a way that didn't interrupt sending.
Please explain how that is a "no". You just described a situation where it would be doing both when it's not supposed to. In the analogy, the thruster is supposed to turn off once it starts spinning, but it doesn't.
The entire reason this mechanism exists is that resistance can be significantly nonzero and needs to be adjusted for. It's just doing the adjustment in a flawed way.
Sorry if it sounded dismissive, but, I mean, modern motor control formulae[1][2] don't have a term for RPM. Motor controller derives new output state from just torque and instantaneous state of the motor, RPM is somewhat externally controlled unless that version of formula is in use. Hence the capsule analogy: F=ma for constant F means a > 0 and (rotational)velocity monotonically increases.
It doesn't make instinctive sense to me too that motor people haven't been thinking RPM-first for some time, but apparently they're not.
> Motor controller derives new output state from just torque and instantaneous state of the motor
And the way it makes the motor state advance causes acceleration. It doesn't matter what variable goes into the formula, especially since you can convert freely. I'm pointing at the output and what I find scary about it. What comes first doesn't matter, I'd have the same issue even if I'm looking at the control formula from a jerk-first perspective.
And I don't really see the value of the "against nothing" analogy because the reason it's increasing torque is because it thinks there's resistance.
I have experienced a spurious ABS activation while braking from highway speed on an offramp. It was terrifying, and would have led to a crash had there been any traffic when I rolled through the stop sign at the bottom with the ABS still chattering.
We don’t implement stuff like this because it would go off when you’re going down a slight incline for example, and the more bandaids you slap on it to get it to work, the more complex testing the failure scenario would be.
Tangent: creep is an artifact of how an idling ICE interacts with a torque converter. Simulating it on EVs seems like a mistake to me, serving only to make them feel more familiar to a subset of first-time EV drivers.
Creep is needed for tight parking, for example when you'd like to move the car 10 cm forward. To simulate driving without it, turn on auto-hold and use only accelerator and brake for parking -- tight spots become extremely hard.
The automatic transmissions for all recent Subarus appear to use torque converters, which would normally have creep. Modern torque converters are much more advanced than older ones, so I'm not surprised the option exists to disable it. All models except the BRZ use a CVT with fake gears, which I find distasteful.
Heh, I will see your “distasteful” adjective and raise you “nauseating”. I got a newish Subaru as a rental a couple of months ago and found both city and highway driving left me feeling slightly disoriented all the time.
This shows why BYD developed their "e-axle" system.[1] The drive axle, differential, and motor are an integrated unit. There's an electronics box that connects the battery, the e-axle, and the charging port. It's controlled over CANbus. So there's a coherent standalone component BYD can reuse in many different vehicles. Which they are doing, and clobbering Detroit on price.
If you read the earlier articles in this series you'll see that the motor, diff, motor controller, charge controller and inverter are all on a single 'stack', treated as a single unit in the car. This module is used in the Hyundai Kona, Kia e-Niro and Soul EV.
Modular car design is nothing new and almost all carmakers thesedays do this.
There's an e-axle repair kit from Germany.[1] This kit is for a Schaeffler e-axle, and contains all the bearings and seals. If you have to take the axle apart to replace any of those, you may as well replace all of them.
Third party E-axles are mostly for trucks, where power trains and truck bodies come from different manufacturers. Heavy trucks can be maintained for decades, and that market wants repair parts available. For a car, the powertrain bearings tend to outlast the useful life of most cars.
>Which they are doing, and clobbering Detroit on price.
Let's be real, their prices are lower because Chinese labor is cheaper. US companies have to pay US rates and import as much as they can rather than having it all made in the US.
I'm sure that's a factor, but probably not for long - Chinese wages are on the rise along with China's economy, still a long way from US wages but they doubled in the past decade according to [0].
But one thing that's hard to deny is that US and European car manufacturers are still building on top of previous iterations of their vehicles, swapping out a ICE with an electric system but keeping the existing systems, frankensteining the two together. The article itself makes note of it:
> More than five separate CAN buses, ten or more kilograms of low voltage wiring, probably over one hundred electronic modules (most with their own CPU and firmware), etc.
I don't know cars, granted, nor legislation, but surely a car engineered from scratch would be much simpler and thus cheaper to build? How does Tesla do this?
> But one thing that's hard to deny is that US and European car manufacturers are still building on top of previous iterations of their vehicles, swapping out a ICE with an electric system but keeping the existing systems, frankensteining the two together. The article itself makes note of it:
Worth noting that the car in the article isn't from a US or European car manufacturer, though Hyundai is certainly fairly well-established at this point.
But also, a lot of the stuff going on/wiring+subsystem count is not solely a factor of "making a motor assembly from scratch". For instance the steering wheel lock sensors in the article. Or all the safety-related sensors and subsystems, let alone all the infotainment stuff and related "features" in a modern car... Is BYD doing any better at reducing all that sprawl?
As for the engineering costs: I think reusing existing designs is a way of cutting costs for US companies. Chinese companies and Tesla designed very different stuff from scratch because they had no choice I think. Remember, existing designs are proven over potentially decades, comply with various laws, etc.
And as now Tesla has moved past that early 'greenfielding' stage, their situation has changed to be dramatically more similar to the 'legacy' car makers. And suddenly, Tesla sees that their supposedly superior quirky approaches to carmaking generally are probably going to 'solidify' into systems eerily similar to the legacy ones.
Whoever was dismissive of the legacy car makers was also assuming decades of innovations in maintainability planning and reuse logic in one of the most highly competitive industries. Turns out, Tesla - even though the shook up the legacy contenders early on - is losing a lot of the advantages quicker that they have imagined to stay. Hardly a surprise to anyone who understands that millions of highly skilled engineers in the car industries aren't exactly less competent than the average Tesla engineer.
It seems to me that Tesla still makes the best functioning EV if you overlook their warts like being all proprietary, difficult to repair, and so on. Even the best EV sucks compared to an ICE car, and that is reflected in demand. Furthermore, Tesla is essentially competing with China, which they rely upon for many components and which seeks to cut them out of the domestic market. I don't think any Chinese EV is actually better than a Tesla but it is cheaper for various reasons, and that can cut into their market share. Remember, the Chinese government is investing heavily in EV tech and they basically force their citizens to buy the things regardless of how good they actually are. It would be foolish to think that they will always suck compared to Tesla. The Chinese government is willing to lose money to put every Western manufacturing company out of business. You can't compete with that, their protectionist policies, or even their cheap labor, without serious protectionism of your own.
They are genuinely more efficient as a result of ingenuity and intense competition. In addition to that, they have the entire supply chain on the continent and have become incredibly vertically integrated.
I know someone will chime in and talk about subsidies and IP theft, and while that may be true, the Chinese manufacturers are also incredibly willing to take risks and innovate, and that seems to be a reality that we do not want to confront in the west.
They are fairly efficient but we used to be efficient too. We simply cannot compete on cost because wages are so low there. Even if we had 100% automation we could not do it.
Let me put it another way. It is literally cheaper to ship basic materials like wood to China and have them send us back popsicle sticks. Does that sound like a cutting-edge efficiency problem, or is it a wage problem?? The same can be said about all kinds of things from food to pig iron. We're not talking about tech in any sense. The US mastered every single industry it sent to China with great efficiency, but the exchange rate situation and low wages there make it very difficult for a US company to compete.
Also, China protects its markets much better than we do. In order to sell in China you have to set up a 51% Chinese-owned outfit just to do that. Meanwhile they dump all their products on the world market with very few reciprocal relationships. Imagine how different things would be if we required Chinese companies to do the 51% US-owned franchise thing here. We could even require them to build factories here. Of course, there is no point doing that. If they did it, the goods would be just as expensive as 100% American companies. That's why we don't bother. They on the other hand do it mainly to swipe whatever knowledge they can from foreign companies. I've seen many accounts of this from US companies. You can get the Chinese to make lots of things, but if you send your design there then you risk knockoffs putting you out of business in only a few years.
How do you explain the fact that car manufacturers can and do build plants in Mexico and use cheap labour there, but still can’t compete with Chinese manufacturers?
Labour cost isn’t the problem, the problem is that US innovation has stagnated and now his to rely on protectionism to compete.
I feel like I just enumerated several ways that China is overwhelmingly cheaper than practically any other advanced economy. But I will try to spell it out even more.
Labor is almost certainly not as cheap in Mexico as it is in China. China still enjoys benefits of "developing nation" status despite being very advanced when it comes to manufacturing. There are many variables when it comes to productivity such as the amount of investment, the size of the workforce, and government subsidies. If you believe in specialization, then having a much larger population to work (as also consume the product) is a big advantage. The Chinese government is heavily involved with its domestic businesses, from literally owning them to spying on their behalf, to putting up roadblocks for any competition. Mexico might be as advanced as China if we had outsourced everything to them instead of China, but I'm sure that did not make sense when we started doing it and it probably still does not.
There's nothing magic about China. It's just got lots of people and cheap labor, and a bunch of policies that are unfair to the rest of the world. They have a head start of about 30+ years on Mexico and other competition. The US and euro nations have let everything basically rot for 30+ years instead as everything got shipped to China. It's not that we can't do anything that they can do in principle, but it takes time and investment and the result is hard-pressed to make enough money due to the fact China can do it cheaper. In most cases Western manufacturing was better than Chinese for the longest time, but we basically taught them all our trade secrets without them sharing back any knowledge. We don't have a large pool of workers with manufacturing experience as they do, because of the outsourcing.
We have some subsidies, but they pale in comparison to what China does and come with random obligations like quotas per ethnicity or sexual orientation. TSMC complained about this stuff recently. They got billions of dollars in subsidies but still struggle to hire the right people locally in the US.
It takes decades for some of these industries to build up, even going back to the university training pipeline. The idea of pushing a "service economy" is a costly mistake that nearly all Western countries fell into. At some point, China and other manufacturing-based nations will refuse to take worthless Western currencies in exchange for their goods. That is, unless we have something real to offer in exchange.
Price of labor is part of it, but it's mostly the batteries. China is basically the only country that makes LFP batteries in high volume. That may be gradually changing (some big patents expired not long ago), but it'll take time for other countries to ramp up their production if they can even be bothered to.
We could make more batteries in the US too but higher wages and environmental regulations put us at a disadvantage. The same applies to practically anything you can think of.
One would think. But there's a track record of failure outside Asia.
American Battery Factory seems to be good at press releases but not at shipping product.[1]
Tesla had severe problems with in-house battery production. Mostly they packaged Panasonic and CATL cells.
But the battery plant may be past that point, finally.[2]
The only European company that makes LFE batteries in quantity is in Serbia, and they're still in the sample stage.[3]
These new plants are starting to make a product Asian plants have been producing for years. All the big Asian makers are frantically trying to get the next generation, solid state battery production to work. Some of them have semi-solid state batteries working. Factorial in the US is trying to do that, too.
Chinese batteries are all over the place in terms of quality. Just because Tesla had problems does not mean those problems are insurmountable. They most likely would have been figured out all problems if they did not have the option to just buy batteries elsewhere. Chinese battery companies benefit from cheap labor, lax environmental regulations, and government subsidies. I think other countries aren't making many EV batteries for the same reason they aren't making much of anything else: because it isn't possible for them to compete with China on cost (yet).
Their prices are lower because China went all-in on EVs in 2010 (as a country, not just their car companies), whereas US companies are still flirting with ICE and hybrids in 2024, and woe betide any US politician who advocates making it harder to register an ICE vehicle.
Labor prices matter, but 14 years of dithering matters more.
ICE and hybrids are still essential. Toyota estimated that EVs were going to be unsuitable for 75% of the US market. They aren't idiots. The car companies are making what people actually need. We don't have charging or electric infrastructure to support everyone having an EV, and there are many fire safety issues yet to be resolved for that to work.
We don't even produce enough electricity for EVs, and now we are trying to power AI data centers poised to take even more power. It's not just a distribution problem, or a charging facility problem. It is an electricity production problem. The problem of producing power and distributing it alone will likely take 10-20 years to solve. Charging infrastructure is a different beast because it generates huge loads on the power grid in short bursts. Many big charging stations run massive diesel generators and/or have HUGE batteries on site to handle this load. Then there is the fire hazards, toxic mining for batteries, chemical pollution from batteries, and the long charge times. A lot of people live in apartments where home charging will never be feasible. On top of all of this, smart chargers are being designed to "handle" grid issues by turning off charging or even sending your electricity back into the grid which will leave you wondering "Why can't I use my car? It's been on the charger a stupid amount of time now..."
In summary, I won't be hopping on the EV bandwagon. The Toyota CEO is right. They have nothing against EVs and would make them if it made sense. Trying to ram EVs down people's throats will waste a lot of money and cause lots of problems. A hybrid is something that actually does work for many people. Hydrogen would also be superior, if they can get the kinks out. Toyota is a pioneer in hydrogen power too.
> A lot of people live in apartments where home charging will never be feasible
People in apartments usually have an assigned parking space, often covered. All you need to provide is a 240v outlet like a clothes dryer uses. Car owners can bring their own chargers.
It's more accurate to write that a lot of apartment complexes have simply not tried to install charging because most of their tenants don't have electric cars.
>People in apartments usually have an assigned parking space, often covered. All you need to provide is a 240v outlet like a clothes dryer uses. Car owners can bring their own chargers.
That sounds like rich apartments. Most apartments I've seen don't have assigned parking, or adequate parking for guests. Covered parking is extra, even in the hottest parts of the US. Tenants don't have anywhere to plug in. Don't take my word for it. Go take a tour of basic apartments in your area with a realtor and see how many of them can support more than like 5 EV cars. I think you will find that all of them cannot support mass adoption of EVs.
You're talking about installing megawatts worth of cabling for EVs that nobody wants as if it's already done or trivial to do. Even if you did it, the additional fire hazard is nothing to scoff at. State Farm (the insurance company) decided that EV charging was too dangerous for its parking garages. Who are we to tell them that they are wrong about the risks?
You might be somewhat right about this being a chicken/egg problem. It goes all the way back to the power plants that cannot produce enough power for EVs. This conversion to EVs, if it ever happens, will need decades to unfold. It could easily be disrupted by developments in synthetic chemical power such as hydrogen. In any case, whining about manufacturers and consumers not going in directions that don't work for them is a non-starter. EVs are at present luxury items that only work for people who can shape their lives around charging requirements.
The UAW puts it at 5-8%. Other sources put it higher, up to about 15%. But that's for combustion vehicles -- most sources put the labor component of EV's at 40-60% of that of combustion vehicles.
It generally includes the labor for sub-assemblies, but not for components. Components are sourced globally, so manufacturers in different countries should not be paying substantially different prices for components. Certainly sometimes they do, but that's generally a tariff issue, not a labor issue.
Not an expert, this is just based on most of an hour of random Googling.
A high school teacher once told me that the most expensive part of a car is healthcare and pension costs. Road and Track reported on this a little while ago, no idea what the situation is today.
Although this may be true (I haven't found much to the contrary in a few minutes of searching", "raw materials" also involve labor. Facilities in the US are bound to cost more as well because property is so much more expensive. US auto workers and engineers make easily 10x as much as Chinese counterparts.
Yes I realized that $300 was the base. But "much more" is like $1000 per month so optimistically about $6 per hour.
A while back I heard Boeing had aerospace engineers working abroad (I think in India) for $9/hr. That is probably a good salary for that part of the world. But in the US the same job might pay $100 per hour. Then we also have a different work culture than elsewhere. If you pay foreigners "good money" they might be working at all hours, but US workers demand a reasonable balance.
The biggest factor is how complacent these car companies have been for years to throw away all the quality and prestige associated with their brand name, and the lead they had over Tesla and other ev focused companies.
It is hilarious how bad offerings from Audi/bmv (VW is too shit to compare) compared to Tesla simply because the dinosaurs didn't wanna reimagine their build process. They actually can't even if they want to; unions have them by the throat.
And Chinese companies have the benefit of watching Tesla, learning (and stealing) from Tesla and others + lower wages.
Legacy automakers can't even compete with Tesla; how will they compete with Chinese ones?
BYD et al got massive support from the Chinese government in the past, but most of that support is gone now, and little of what is left applies to exports. The US government's $7500 rebate is larger than what BYD gets per car.
It's easier to register an EV in China than an ICE car, among other things - for instance, ICE cars must be left idle on a specific day of the week (determined from the car's license plate number), whereas EVs can be used the full 7 days a week.
That’s not support from the chinese government, that’s just good climate policy. Sucks that EVs in the US are held back by the government’s poor climate policy.
I heard a similar story from a coworker. They were interfacing with a car via CAN. They had an engineer from the manufacturer telling them the details of the message they should be sending to demand a certain speed. Turns out the description wasn’t quite right. The message ID was correct, but not the endianness of the speed demand signal.
Thus when they tried to test it they thought they requested a stately 5m/s, but the vehicle thought they were asking it to exceed the speed of sound. Which of course it wasn’t designed to be able to do, but it still tried.
That’s why i prefer to have nice hardware e-stops on prototype vehicles.
"According to the NTSB's preliminary report, customers in the accident area received gas from a low-pressure (0.5 psi) distribution network which, in turn, was fed from a high-pressure (75 psi) main pipeline via regulators controlled by sensors measuring pressure in the low-pressure pipes. At the time of the accident, workers were replacing some of the low-pressure piping, but the procedure set out by Columbia Gas for doing this failed to include transfer of a regulator's pressure sensor from the old, disused piping to the new. As a result, when the old pipe was depressurized, the regulator sensed zero pressure on the low-pressure side and opened completely, feeding the main pipeline's full pressure into the local distribution network."
Interesting that they only had a single regulator, if overpressure is that dangerous, I would expect them to have multiple regulators in sequence or a blowout valve to dump excess pressure.
After the accident, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law to require a licensed professional engineers stamp on all gas infrastructure designs of this type
But the recommendations to the gas company included:
> Review and ensure that all records and documentation of your natural gas systems are traceable, reliable, and complete. (P-18-7) (Urgent)
> Apply management of change process to all changes to adequately identify system threats that could result in a common mode failure. (P-18-8) (Urgent)
> Develop and implement control procedures during modifications to gas mains to
mitigate the risks identified during management of change operations. Gas main
pressures should be continually monitored during these modifications and assets
should be placed at critical locations to immediately shut down the system if
abnormal operations are detected. (P-18-9) (Urgent)
Edit to add:
This page has currently working links to the specific recommendations:
Well, my reading is that the corrective action was less "add redundant safeties" and more "have sufficient process controls in place to ensure you don't break the feedback loop during pipeline work".
One potential problem with a pressure relief valve as a safety is that it could turn into a flare/blowtorch if there is an ignition source nearby, which constrains where it can be located (and requires ongoing maintenance to ensure vegetation/etc., doesn't build up where it could get torched).
If you're just talking about when something in a feedback loop gets disconnected (causing the output of the error amplifier to go to an extreme), you can do this with cruise control and a manual transmission (at least on some cars). Engage cruise control on the highway, then pop the car out of gear without using the clutch (so cruise control doesn't disengage). As the car's speed drops, the cruise control applies ever more throttle making the RPM shoot up. I've also done this going downhill with the car naturally gaining speed (and RPM going to idle).
Huh. I've owned a few manual-transmission cars over the years and they all disallowed this trick -- pressing the clutch would disengage cruise control just like a tap on the brakes.
Yeah, pressing the clutch will do that. But you can pop the car out of gear without pressing the clutch. (IIUC) the synchros provide some positive holding force that holds the transmission in gear, but you can overcome it. Also that force goes down with the amount of torque being transferred through the transmission, so you can make it easier by playing with the gas pedal a bit.
Yup. EStop saved is from the fence when a programmer learned that there are "low active" signals on an ECU he war trying to convince to follow our acceleration CAN signals. Adrenaline time...
> That’s why i prefer to have nice hardware e-stops on prototype vehicles.
Yeah, I kind of wonder if lawsuits/regulation might be the way to get those.
Because there will always be some sort of cost with that kind of thing.
I'm pretty sure a major reason garage doors have limit and occlusion sensors is because of regulation. (and even those suck - it is common for garage doors to incorrectly sense occlusion in bright sunlight)
> I kind of wonder if lawsuits/regulation might be the way to get those.
I’m talking about prototype cars. The solution there to have an e-stop is to ask your technicians to put it on. No lawsuit or regulation is necessary for that.
If you are thinking about mandating e-stops on production vehicles then I don’t think that is the right thing to do. It is a complicated analysis but it boils down to that the cases where it would help should be vanishingly small, and even in those people not trained for it would forget to use them.
> there will always be some sort of cost with that kind of thing
Absolutely. And the cost of the switch is not the major component. Where i work forgetting to reset the e-stop is so common that it is the first thing we ask about when something is weird. And the people forgetting them are skilled engineers with known prototype cars. I imagine the cost of support/service calls would be huge in prod.
> So the controller only ever increased the torque request, or kept it at the same level. Even when I simulated pressing the brake it was like "Nothing needs to change, we're not even moving!"
So wheel speed sensors drop out and the car will accelerate uncontrollably? I love EVs, but with all this complexity I wish there's some kind of mechanical disconnect or a big red STOP button somewhere.
This is a video of a driverless car getting rear-ended, and doing who-knows-what damage to its electronics; it then goes rogue at max speed through the streets smooshing whatever is in its path:
I am completely ignorant of all things automotive. I was under the impression that any relatively recent (15 or so years) ICE car also operates by way of a car computer, and that stepping on the gas pedal is just a way to politely instruct the computer that you would like it to apply throttle. And that for even more recent cars this also applies to braking (since the newer cars can brake automatically). Have I got it all wrong?
If not, what's stopping a "traditional" (ICE) car from (mis)behaving in a similar fashion in some catastrophic circumstance that would damage its computer?
You’re sort of right in your assumption but there’s a lot of context missing.
First, the time period is more like 30 years for cars having engine control units (ecu), but most car up until 10 years ago or so had hard physically wired throttles where you stepping on the throttle pulled a physical cable. If that cable doesn’t get pulled the engine doesn’t get enough air to go really fast no matter what the ecu tries to do. More recent cars have fly by wire throttles meaning they are like electric cars in that sense.
An ecu has a far more complicated control algorithm than a electric motor controller. If it were suddenly damaged it’s more like that the engine would fail to run at all then run out of control because the ecu needs to control the airflow, fuel and spark position for the engine to run, if any of those fail to work, or stop firing at the right the exact time they are required the engine will just stop or run very poorly. I actually think this is true of electric vehicles too, it’s far more likely to stop the motor working than to have it run out of control, unless a wheel speed sensor is damaged or something.
A petrol car can be placed into neutral if all else fails, the engine will run out of control but the car wont. Also the gearbox controller is typically a different computer from the ecu.
The brakes on any car should be able to over power the engine. This is not a challenge for 99% of petrol cars because the torque they output is tiny compared to what a brake system can apply to the wheels. If you slam on the brakes the engine doesn’t even come close. Idk about other countries but in Australia this also applies to electric cars that are road legal, it’s a requirement.
the ecu is usually located in the passenger cabin or sometimes next to the battery quite deep inside the engine bay.
The only thing that would cause a petrol engine to really go out of control would be if it was fly by wire throttle and that throttle position sensor was broken in the particular way that it’s reading as full throttle. Idk if manufacturers do this but it wouldn’t be hard to design a fly by wire throttle that when it fails the ecu will see it as closed not open.
Anyway I don’t think it’s much of a concern for electric cars either tbh.
> most car up until 10 years ago or so had hard physically wired throttles where you stepping on the throttle pulled a physical cable.
More like 25 years ago, at least in France. The 2001 Renault Clio 2 I'm driving has throttle-by-wire, the newest car I personally know of with a mechanical throttle is a 1998 Peugeot 205, the last model year of a car that debuted in 1982. I doubt any European car manufactured after 2001 has a mechanical throttle, if only because of European emission standards.
> The only thing that would cause a petrol engine to really go out of control would be if it was fly by wire throttle and that throttle position sensor was broken in the particular way that it’s reading as full throttle. Idk if manufacturers do this but it wouldn’t be hard to design a fly by wire throttle that when it fails the ecu will see it as closed not open.
On the Clio 2 car, there are two redundant linear potentiometer tracks. If the dual measurements don't match or if either sensor is disconnected, the ECU will default back to a slightly higher than idle throttle.
I once had a diesel engine runaway (google it, the engine ran on its own oil at some insane rpm). I put it in neutral until the engine seized. Scary stuff
The correct course of action is stuffing up the air intake to suffocate the combustion, if this is still a viable option. Otherwise, depart from the vehicle and be ready to call the fire department.
I should have done that, hoping to stall the engine. I panicked and really didn’t know what to do. The noise and MASSIVE cloud of black smoke pouring out the back were terrifying. Not a great first drive after an engine swap.
Brakes are not usually "by-wire" on a car that is able to automatically brake. The brake pedal is still physically connected to the brakes.
Same for the steering. BMW for example has a method where the steering wheel is physically connected but the computer can add corrections to it via a clever set of gears. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_steering
If the computer (or electric steering motor) fails the steering wheel still works.
Especially since each link to Xitter forwards a couple times to itself and messes the browser history… One popular option is to use the Nitter instance xcancel.com
> So wheel speed sensors drop out and the car will accelerate uncontrollably?
No, I don't think any of my bench tests suggest that for this car. The torque is minimal throughout, so if the motor was pushing an actual car then it might not move at all. If it did move, even a light touch on the (mechanical) brake pedal would stop it.
My problem is that I had a bench setup with no load on the motor and no mechanical brake. I could have pulled the safety interlock (all EVs have these for emergency first responders) but this stops the motor at all costs - wasn't sure of potential damage to the motor controller circuitry from back EMF.
If the wheel speed sensors drop out they put nothing on the CAN bus, not a "0 speed" message. I think it's pretty safe to assume the controller logic here has a fairly strict timeout on how often it wants to see wheel speed messages.
There are some parts of engineering in safety systems where you have a single thing that could go wrong that would have serious consequences, and the result of the FMEA is that "it has to not do that".
Detectability is one dimension of an error, and "bad wheel speed" has decent detectability I reckon - either through redundancy, grey codes, index pulse checking, bound checking.
Also the issue experienced in the post wasn't an issue with a sensor per se.
However, most relevant regulation (IEC61508, ISO26262, DO-178X) requires that systems controlling machines in automotive, rail or aerospace have a possibility of dangerous faults lower than 10^-9 (over the expected lifespan).
Many critical control systems like this are formally verified and/or extremely well-tested and have redundancy in both software and hardware.
It's not unthinkable that whatever transducer takes rotation and turns it into a signal which is processed by an MCU and translated into CAN messages could get stuck producing one signal and trigger such a scenario without the car's control system needing to be on a bench.
Huh. It just occurred to me that our EV has no mechanical mitigation at all. No physical handbrake, no clutch, no mechanical key to power off the engine. I'm not sure how to feel about this.
'Michael Barr of the Barr Group testified[30] that NASA had not been able to complete its examination of Toyota's ETCS and that Toyota did not follow best practices for real time life-critical software, and that a single bit flip which can be caused by cosmic rays could cause unintended acceleration. "
Yeah, maybe not particular to EVs. I do remember wondering back during the Toyota "uncontrolled acceleration" epidemic why people wouldn't just put the cars in neutral
Because the vast majority of people driving cars don't have enough of a mental model of the vehicle systems to consider such a thing, especially in a panic situation such as unintended acceleration.
If you've driven rattletrap manuals for most of your life, and have worked on cars, rebuilt engines, replaced clutches, rewired things that failed, yeah. That's an obvious conclusion, and I expect some people without doing that will have enough sense of what's going on to consider a drop to neutral (and letting the rev limiter handle keeping the engine intact).
But go ask most people, even in technical fields, about the details of a car, and you'll struggle to get much beyond "I press the gas and it goes." You run into this constantly if you're a "car guy" and people ask you questions about why their car isn't going. "It turns over but doesn't start!" can mean anything from "the lights are barely on and nothing happens" to "the starter relay clicks but nothing happens" to what I would consider that to mean, "the engine is rotating under the starter's power but is not engaging in sustained internal combustion."
Neutral isn't a thing most people even think about, unfortunately. Park, Drive, Reverse, and some oddball other positions that you don't want to end up in accidentally. Yes, they're useful, and yes, they solve problems, but it's not something that a lot of people would consider. Neither do they seem to consider "Stand on the brakes until the car comes to a stop. No, really, stand on them!" - because I've yet to meet a moderately well maintained vehicle that can't come to a stop with the gas floored and the brakes applied firmly (yes, I've tried, it's a standard test of mine after brake work). But if you only apply partial brake pressure, or have a vacuum brake booster, you only get a few attempts before the booster has lost vacuum (won't get any more, because wide open throttle), and if you've heated up your brakes trying without succeeding, you may very well have no usable brakes left. Passenger car brakes are adequate, but you can easily overheat them and fade them if you try, or boil the fluid, or... etc. Again, not something you'll find many people aware of these days.
I wish it were different, but "magic box I put gas into and it goes" is closer to the reality of how many people consider cars these days.
Even people who know about the solution might find it drops out of their brain in a moment of panic.
I locked myself out of my house recently, and it was only after scaling to the 1st floor, breaking in through an open window, and breaking through a locked interior door (the house had been secured as I was going on a trip, and the only things I forgot were my keys and that window), that I remembered that there was a spare key in my car (which was open). This moment of clarity coincided with the stress going away.
> Even people who know about the solution might find it drops out of their brain in a moment of panic.
I agree. During a period of huge storms in my region I kept mentally preparing for getting caught in a flood: engage first gear, press the gas and go, slow and steady.
Then my fears materialized and as soon as the flood started pushing my car, I pressed the clutch and engaged the second.
Thankfully I realized it fast enough, kept pressing the gas and engaged back the 1st, so my mental training may have helped, but that was a close call.
Again, it depends a lot on your experience with vehicles. I expect someone who had driven a manual for a long while (or even learned on one but hadn't driven one recently) would be radically more likely to come to "Oh, select neutral" as a solution than someone who has only ever driven automatics. "Neutral" is far more part of "life with a manual" than it is with automatics - I would be willing to bet that a substantial fraction of automatic transmissions have never been deliberately put in neutral.
My daily driver has an archaic manual sequential transmission (2005 Ural - sidecar motorcycle sort of thing), and I select neutral at every stoplight I'm likely to be at for a while to avoid wearing the clutch bearings. Also, I have to most of the way double clutch my shifts on that bike (pause in the false neutral between gears) to avoid too much clashing. If I had a runaway throttle condition (certainly possible), I have at least three instant methods I'd use (kill switch, clutch, and rock it into a false neutral). But I've spent most of my driving career with such things, and vehicles that don't have those are a bit of a novelty to me.
Also my Toyota Auris Hybrid has a weird kind of joystick for changing gear and putting it into neutral position requires holding that position for some time. Gave me an unpleasant (but luckily harmless) event in a car wash where you're required to have power on but use neutral position with automatic gearing.
That works until it doesn’t. When my poorly adjusted and full of mud parking brake finally failed The weight of my Jeep overcame engine compression and rolled the engine over while it was in first. It got going surprisingly fast until it smacked into a rock wall and flipped the Jeep on its side.
This was in remote Uganda.
Reverse is troublesome, because if it does roll the engine over it will turn the engine backwards. While that shouldn’t cause damage, it’s still not great. I actually felt it doing so once while sitting in the drivers seat. I could feel it turning over one cylinder at a time , one every 5 seconds or so.
Using the terrain is my preferred option, but then I didn’t have that choice
I don't think there's any particular problem with rotating the engine in reverse while it's off, but on most manual transmissions that I'm aware of, first and reverse ratios are pretty similar, so likely not much to be gained.
No actually, first gear low range 4x4 would be better - and that’s what I do now.
Think of how much effort it takes to pedal a bike from standstill in 1st gear vs the highest gear. The force required is the same if it’s being applied to the wheel and turning your legs (the engine)
This is why I'm so glad I have a manual transmission with a physical ignition key.
Car starts accelerating out of control? You have several options that you can try in no particular order (except the first one, which should always be tried first).
Lift your primary foot to confirm you're not accidentally pressing the accelerator instead of the brake (this is surprisingly common). Dump the clutch with the other foot at the same time.
If the engine is still going nuts, shift to neutral and/or turn the ignition off (DON'T remove the key yet; that will lock the steering wheel, which is a bad idea when you're still moving). Coast to a stop somewhere safe; your brakes will also still work for a while. You won't have power steering, but you won't need it. Remove the key -- this WILL kill the engine (if you didn't already switch off). You're done.
My driving instructor did this to me in an empty supermarket car park. Then he did it again until I got the hang of it. It's a valuable learning experience.
I'm still not sure whether it applies to this case, but on the Prius at least, "neutral" is a software concept. There is no physical linkage from the drive mode selector ("gearshift") to anything mechanical, and there are no mechanical components that could uncouple the powerplant from the wheels. Putting the powertrain in neutral is accomplished by removing torque commands from the electric motors, at which time the engine and wheels can free-spin.
At the time this was in the news, I was never able to find a coherent explanation of whether any such bit-flip affecting some piece of software on some module, would also inhibit the interpretation and implementation of a neutral drive mode selection.
You need training to guarantee correct reaction when things go wrong.
Here's an anecdote: I used to drive a car with a standard transmission in Los Angeles. In quite a few places, the parking spots have a "trench" in the front for drainage. So, you can place your car in reverse, release the brake and have your car roll forward quite a bit (the trench makes an even stronger downward slope on a hill that is already pointing downward) before the clutch engages. A bit surprising but nothing that weird for someone who drives a stick.
Now, have that sequence happen to someone driving a car with an automatic transmission. They shifted to reverse, the car is rolling forward more than they expect and is on a hill, they hit the gas to arrest the roll, the transmission engages and the car shoots in reverse. Pray that there isn't anything close behind them or they're going to run over a pedestrian, put their car through a wall, etc.
2) Because the majority of the people who had "uncontrolled acceleration" were old.
The vast majority of the cases were very likely driver error by older drivers who had incorrect habits ingrained. Toyota probably would have won the case if this was the only issue.
Alas, Toyota lost the case because their processes for safety were such a complete shitshow that they were going to get destroyed in court.
EVs (and hybrids) solve that problem so elegantly.
They have so much torque at a standstill that hill assist is a given and going up or down a hill slowly forwards or reverse is not an issue. Absolute gamechanger.
Not sure what you mean by standard transmission, but in a manual you'd also have to use the parking brake while using the clutch to go up in reverse. Otherwise the motor would stall, or you'd roll forwards.
I feel like if you can't come up with the idea to try pushing in the clutch, shifting into neutral, turning off the key, or applying the handbrake within ten seconds you should have your license taken away. and if you design a car where those things wouldn't work you should go to prison.
I don't have a lot of experience with automatic shifting cars, but I believe that they still have neutral, keys, and handbrakes. If they don't then their designers should go to prison.
IIUC, flying orbital altitude over on this domain, treat as hallucinations:
High end brushless motors like EV traction motors are "vector" controlled and instructed by desired torque, not in sinusoidal phase shifts and desired RPM. Back EMF voltages are measured at output terminals of drivers, and errors between expected vs measured voltages is fed back to the driver thereby achieving requested torque, somewhat disconnected from RPM.
This means motor RPM always diverges into +/- infinity with any non-zero torque request under no-load condition.
There is another quirk of note, that some EV motors seem to jump into an open-loop mode when BEMF or rotor phase detection reports failure, and that might also result in unintended acceleration, but that's probably not it.
> the Hyundai Kona Electric is absurdly complicated. More than five separate CAN buses, ten or more kilograms of low voltage wiring, probably over one hundred electronic modules (most with their own CPU and firmware), etc.
ICE cars are more complex. You want an ECU and TCU separate because those are pretty critical to the cars not breaking, you have a separate system for 12v power to the battery and accessories, you want your steering gauge cluster/display separate so it can show critical information apart from the entertainment cluster, and so on.
With an electric car, the control of the motor is DEAD simple, and you already have your electrical power. You really need like 2 modules/computers at most. Motor controller that takes DC power and converts it to the phase power to drive the motor, and the "main" computer that includes a PDU and manages the systems of the car.
Optionally a 3d entertainment cluster, but honestly, you can just include a slot for a tablet with a USBc plug from the main computer, and an app, and that would be better than whatever manufacturers are doing now.
The removal of the parentheses in the title really changes the meaning... The original title focuses on the fact that they got the motor to turn, with the addendum that it turns too much. The HN title makes it sound like the article is about how the motor turns too much.
The constant 5 Nm torque is probably to prevent backlash in the driveline when setting off. Best to keep all the gears, shafts etc under a slight preload so they don't "clunk" when you start accelerating. Much easier on the components, and better comfort.
Seems only a matter of time until Chinese manufacturers start providing kits for EV conversions. Can they compete on price and convenience with equipment rescued from scrapped EVs? Would EV tariffs apply?
It's quite difficult to convert a combustion engine vehicle to an EV.
- EVs need significant volume for batteries. The only places available in a combustion vehicle are the engine bay and the gas tank. If you put batteries in the engine bay, you'll mess up the weight distribution. The volume occupied by the gas tank isn't nearly large enough to house a battery for decent range.
- The extra weight of the batteries requires changes to the suspension and tires.
- EV motors have lots of torque. If you use the original transmission, you'll need to limit torque based on which gear it's in. Any replacement transmission will need to be designed for that car chassis. It's not easily adapted to other models.
- Combustion vehicles are designed with an accessory belt in mind. The air conditioning, power steering, and many other components are run off of these belts. An EV motor doesn't spin while idling. These components will need another power source, or they'll have to be replaced with EV-specific components.
- Combustion vehicles use waste heat from the engine to heat the cabin. Unless you live in a mild climate, a retrofit will need electric heating coils (or a heat pump for maximum efficiency).
And after making all of these modifications, you'll need to deal with regulations around making sure the vehicle is street legal. Those can differ greatly based on the state and the model year of the vehicle you're converting. Considering all that, it's unlikely that you'd save money by converting an existing vehicle.
An EV kit car might make more sense, but the market for those is quite small.
There's already a small market for this in classic cars and they've worked most of these things out even to the point of installing heated seats, writing their own software, making and selling kits for common target cars etc.
It's just mostly based on salvaged Tesla motors and batteries as far as I can tell.
(I think Jaguar and Ford talked about selling EV crate engines for their older models but I've not heard about that for a while)
Classic cars don't make sense, though - if you're driving e.g. a Ford Model T, then you just objectively don't care about performance or cost effectiveness.
> EVs need significant volume for batteries. The only places available in a combustion vehicle are the engine bay and the gas tank. If you put batteries in the engine bay, you'll mess up the weight distribution. The volume occupied by the gas tank isn't nearly large enough to house a battery for decent range.
You're forgetting: exhaust and transmission tunnel (for RWD/AWD cars). Just those two areas alone are a substantial amount of space. Add in space in the sub-trunk area (that might have a spare tire, or just free space)... and you can cobble together quite a bit of capacity.
> EV motors have lots of torque. If you use the original transmission, you'll need to limit torque based on which gear it's in. Any replacement transmission will need to be designed for that car chassis. It's not easily adapted to other models.
Why would you use the existing transmission? Just use the transmission built into the EV motor... they all have them.
- battery significant volume: this depends on intended range, and if sulfur chemistries hit the market you can probably drop the required volume by 40-70%.
- extra weight: see above, and removing engine and other components
- yes the EV motor will need to be aware, that's a control issue not some physical issue
- another power source.... like, a battery bank?
- waste heat for AC: heat pumps
Yeah, I know I am massively handwaving. It's a really hard problem, but some EV retrofit for "incumbent" cars (eventually to be "classic") would save a lot of carbon.
But it's not going to happen, it's too labor and skill intensive. Capital hates everything that is labor/skill dependent. It might be able to be assembly lined to some degree: common car platforms of major manufactures would help. The engine lift isn't THAT bad for many platforms, the hood removal - bolt loosen - engine lift could be done in 3-4 "disassembly line" steps.
EV motors are pretty compact from what I can tell, so the engine compartment can probably accommodate enough high-density (sulfur chemistry in 5-8 years) batteries to get a 150-200 mile range.
The REALLY OPTIMAL conversion target should probably be a swapout with a hybrid drivetrain, if we could get a compact rotary recharge engine developed combined with a compact EV motor. The transmission interface is still a PITA, but the heat excess and other things might be conserved better, and there might be room left over for 50 miles of all-electric range.
That would deliver 90% all-electric trips in-city, regen braking, but keep ICE power for all the legacy accessories.
We should have been working collectively on hybrids within a couple years of the Prius being released in the late 1990s. We should have forced all auto manufacturers to have hybrids for all cars in 10 years (regen braking and city efficiency would have been 20% gas savings right there, maybe more).
Then 10 years after that have forced plugin hybrids with increasing thresholds for all-electric range.
Very nice. I really would like to get a replacement kit of my XC90 battery and electric engine. Especially one that doesn’t cost more than half of the remainder of the economic value of the car. This is my second second hand plug in hybrid that loses battery capacity rapidly and the battery is crazy expensive to replace. Moreover, newer generations have stronger electric motors giving wider range of use and better regen.
That would be a major operation, basically a rebuild of a car, plus you'd need all the relevant controls etc rewired too. It wouldn't be worth it, not when this same China is investing heavily in affordable EV mass production.
I've put a Nissan Leaf on a bench before and run it just like you did and would never do it again.
This approach is so much harder than it seems. "once everything works then it'll be straightforward to remove what's left and dramatically reduce the rats nest qualities of this setup" We thought the same initially, it turns out the system depends on many more components than you would think.
I imagined the EV system to be like an onion where you can take layers off, not so!It is much more like an egg, once you smash it, you have a few shards that you can re-use but you end up with a mess due to high connectivity between systems. (Leaf refused to turn on without original power steering and wipers connected).
Surprisingly what is more straightforward is putting together your own drivetrain with something like https://openinverter.org and building it back up from first principles. Or you isolate the inverter and motor and make them believe they are still in the original vehicle by replaying CAN messages, ZombieVerter is a project with that approach. Both of these are open source projects.
Happy tinkering!
Hi janosch,
Appreciate the heads-up from someone who has been there before! Like you I was a bit surprised by how much the integration bled across subsystems. I like the egg analogy.
> isolate the inverter and motor and make them believe they are still in the original vehicle by replaying CAN messages, ZombieVerter is a project with that approach
For sure, great tips. This is what I've been working towards - at the time of that post I was spoofing the minimum number of CAN messages (still quite a lot), but in the months since I've been gradually replacing modules with spoofed signals by reversing them one at a time. Some of the follow-up blog posts have details about this.
I'm approaching the point of only needing the original motor stack (inverter, charger, etc), the original BMS, and all other modules spoofed out via CAN messages and a few discrete wired signals. The OEM BMS might turn out to be too hard to re-integrate once the battery pack gets split apart, but can cross that bridge when I come to it.
More blog posts (and open hardware & software) to come, I hope!
There is a linked update (this one is months old) about how much wiring he's been able to remove, and how few modules he has left on the bench. Looks like different OEMs have taken different routes regarding how interconnected everything is - fortunately for OP, it looks like Hyundai is less of an interconnected mess
Sounds like the early* days of software engineering, where everything was a big bowl of spaghetti you would never untangle again, compared to modular applications that you have nowadays.
*rumor has it, that most of the software out there is still written like that.
In software engineering, we only ever maintain processes, not artifacts. Software modularity when it exists is usually extremely coarse and rigid when compared to the malleability of electro-mechanical systems.
Got a bug to fix or a feature to implement on a program? Modify the source code, run the build system, use the newly built artifact and discard the old one. Lose this process and you're screwed because the tooling for modifying an extant program is still in the Dark Ages. It's not just about proprietary software that has reached its end of support, given enough time almost any source code tree will bitrot past the point where rebuilding it will require a major overhaul.
When you need to fix or customize a physical artifact like a coffee machine, you usually don't go inside the factory to change the blueprints and manufacture a new one. You just modify the one you have with standardized tools. It also doesn't matter how old the artifact is, even if it's decades out of production it can still usually be disassembled and put back together as if it was fresh out of the assembly line.
The more software bleeds into electro-mechanical systems, the less repairable, versatile and hackable they become.
That's very insightful, and I just wish I had the ability to explain this to non-technical managers.
"But it was working!"
"Sure, 10 years ago, now I can't even find a version of Visual Studio that will install that can even open the project, let alone compile it."
And VS on an old laptop or Virtualbox might actually work, still. Good luck recreating some random services tangle from the year 2024 in 2034.
Since Visual Studio is Windows only, the straightforward solution that I used was to install an old version in a Hyper-V virtual machine.
Then it's a multi-step process where the project is upgraded inside the VM with an ancient VS copy as "far as it'll go", then copied out to the external environment with VS 2022 that also has the 2016 and 2019 "Build Tools" installed. Then the projects can be upgraded to "current day".
In some cases I just gave up and created new empty projects with identical names and GUIDs, then copy-pasted the code files across. It can be simpler and faster.
> Sounds like the early days of software engineering
Sounds much more like they are trying to work with a production system without the source code, the debugers, the compilers, the datasheets, and the documentation.
Plus many of the things they want go directly against the wishes and good judgement of the engineers who made the system. They want to start the car without the steering component. I bet that someone at the manufacturer spent extra energy that you can’t do that. Why? Because under production circumstances if the steering components are not answering that means that something is terribly wrong with the car and it would be dangerous to turn on and accelerate.
Same with the keyless entry component. I bet that there were at least an effort done to make circumventing that hard.
>> Plus many of the things they want go directly against the wishes and good judgement of the engineers who made the system.
Never attribute to intelligence what can easily be explained by good old stupidity.
I know the automotive industry from inside. It is a miracle that cars work at all.
I thought early code was carefully validated on paper with flowcharts and review by someone else before you were allowed anywhere near an expensive CPU cycle.
History doesn't repeat, it rhymes; and it kind of goes in phases or epochs. As Derrida was wont to point out, we show up in the middle of things, just flippantly speaking a language and carrying on as though the language was something we were born with and it's been the same forever because we only know our own "forever".
I popped my cherry on VAX silicon, where stack frames were baked into the silicon. This meant that regardless of language, the stack architecture was a target for the compiler not something it constructed. I fell into the middle of things: VAX silicon was new, and people wrote in e.g. COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, C because they'd successfully done so before and had libraries and practices which had stood the test of time and had made the jump to successfully infect a new species of silicon.
The successful colonizer libraries and practices had certain rules. "You can't manage heap in BASIC" for example, or that modular compilation units all had to be written in the same language. This is not and never was strictly true, and the people writing code knew it; but it was true enough for code which jumped silicon.
I on the other hand knew about the silicon stack, and could implicitly understand some of the more esoteric compiler pragmas for dealing with that stack (intended for cross-language linking support) and so by disabling certain linker checks and abusing compiler pragmas I could do e.g. memory management in BASIC by isolating the compilation unit where "memory is an array" from the one where "a memory address is an integer" and explicitly telling different lies with compiler pragmas in each.
Fast forward a few years and everybody had learned HTML and then I'm confronted with somebody wanting me to fix a steaming basket of soup machine gun sprayed into different files all with "(c) Macromedia" in them. "Where's your no-code tool which generated this?" I innocently ask. "Wuuut?" is the response. Yea well when you find it, let me know. Let's just say the people who have to fix things like that probably get paid good money and the solves they come up with are comparatively fragile, that code will not (and did not) survive; any more than my silicon-aware hacks (which I was paid quite well for) for VAX will work on modern silicon. Where's all of that shitty VB Wizard code spew? Thankfully gone.
Some of these integrations will not be fixable, but some of the subsystems will survive, and it might be simply because there is no security and it's possible to replay CANbus reliably as a result.
EV software engineer here.
Your hypothesis is basically correct. Since the motor is under no load, it will appear to spin out of control even with the smallest torque application, but in reality the torque being applied is very small… probably around 5Nm.
Trust me if it was truly spinning out of control with no load you’d know… it would reach max speed in 0.1 seconds and probably start tearing through the floor.
Most likely what’s happening is that the creep torque is applying a constant small torque and the wheel sensors are reading 0 continuously, so it continues to apply a constant small torque.
Hey! Post author here.
I appreciate the insight from someone who's worked on this kind of thing formally, thanks.
> Most likely what’s happening is that the creep torque is applying a constant small torque and the wheel sensors are reading 0 continuously, so it continues to apply a constant small torque.
This was also my hypothesis at the time of the post. Turned out it's less constrained than this, a fully operational car with the drive wheels off the ground will also run away to high rpm (even in Neutral): https://www.projectgus.com/2024/04/unremarkable/#on-car-test...
There's still minimal torque, as you say, so a small press on the car's brake pedal is all it takes to stop. However I think if a driveshaft broke on a real car then it'd be spinning fast for a minute or two... It kind of makes sense that the control loop is tuned for a heavy car with a fixed drive ratio, though.
I am still hopeful there will be a way to stop this behaviour via a control signal (rather than pulling the safety interlock and slamming the contactors open). Have left the problem aside until I have a mechanical brake to use for testing! If that doesn't work out then it's still usable I think, provided any EV conversion is single speed fixed gear just like the Kona.
If you have any other insights on this then I'd be very interested to hear them, though.
It won’t happen on a real car because the speed probably comes from the ABS wheel speed sensors, and in that case they would read the correct speed of the wheels (unless the motor shaft is proper broken).
If the ABS is properly plugged in it will detect a fault with the sensors (which probably causes the creep to stop) however it won’t detect a mechanical fault with the encoder wheel (such as sensor not bolted to wheel) — such a fault is indistinguishable from the wheel not spinning, thus zero speed.
I think you were emulating the ABS module right? In that case, the spinning out of control is actually probably your fault. If you had not emulated this, the system would realise there is an ABS fault (from the messages not being present) and not use the ABS reported speed. It might even fall back to motor speed automatically.
Re: shaft scenario, if the motor shaft is broken the safety risk is pretty minimal because the torque wont actually cause the car to move.
I guess this is what they arrived to in the FMEA.
Funnily enough I noticed recently that Japanese and Korean engineers usually argue against using checksums and random magic rolling bytes on these messages (“it will never happen”), in contrast Euro engineers use them everywhere. In this case the Euro method although more complex would have let the system know you are spoofing the ABS and no such motion would have happened.
My European car (2013 Volvo) had no checksum or even identifier for the firmware as I found out when my car would just randomly cut all power at speed. I brought it back to the dealership and they found it had a completely different car’s update (2017 different model) installed!
Well. Reading out failure memory from ECUs couple of years old showed us that all chechsums failed several times over that time...
It makes we wonder if they have to do it that way, after what happened with VW lying about their diesel emissions.
> I think you were emulating the ABS module right? In that case, the spinning out of control is actually probably your fault. If you had not emulated this, the system would realise there is an ABS fault (from the messages not being present) and not use the ABS reported speed. It might even fall back to motor speed automatically.
That's a reasonable expectation, and this got left out of the follow-up post I linked, but in the "full car with wheels off the ground" tests we actually tried unplugging the brake module of an otherwise working car and it didn't change anything (including the gradual constant rpm increase in Neutral). If anything the behaviour might have gotten a little more aggressive with the brake module missing.
Have now observed similar behaviour for all three of "spoofed brake messages with 0 wheel speeds and emulated checksums", "fully operational car with wheels off the ground", and "car with wheels off the ground and ABS/brake module unplugged". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Re: shaft scenario, if the motor shaft is broken the safety risk is pretty minimal because the torque wont actually cause the car to move. > > I guess this is what they arrived to in the FMEA.
Fair enough, that makes sense. I guess if that's the case then the other behaviour is outside of the scope of what they need to care about.
If you lifted a working car off the ground and it did it anyway I’ll admit that I’m a little concerned. It should stop creeping around 15km/hr.
If you're interested then click the link in my first reply (which is to a newer post). The first video shows the working car reaching 8000rpm (about 80km/h) around six seconds after the accelerator was released. The second video shows the speed creeping steadily from 38km/h to 44km/h (~2600rpm) after switching to Neutral (before we got nervous again and touched the brake).
(I don't really understand it, but I also haven't managed to think of a safety issue here for normal car use: the broken driveshaft is just a bit scary as the motor spins unloaded at >10,000rpm for a while. The only other time this seems likely to happen is if a mechanic puts the car in Drive on a hoist, and it'll stop as soon as they tap the brake.)
Accident modes for car on a lift in a repair shop, or car gets high-centered with drive wheels in the air?
> I think you were emulating the ABS module right? In that case, the spinning out of control is actually probably your fault. If you had not emulated this, the system would realise there is an ABS fault (from the messages not being present) and not use the ABS reported speed. It might even fall back to motor speed automatically.
If the ABS unit getting stuck causes that kind of acceleration then I'm going to point most of the fault at the control logic.
Not really.. it will only be applying 5Nm or so which is such a small amount of torque that you could likely stop the wheel with your hand (equivalent to holding up 500g object with 1m ruler)
He is spoofing an ABS message from a working vehicle that says “no faults present” on a vehicle that is clearly full of faults.
ABS are usually ASIL D rated (ISO 26262) which means they have an on board watchdog, redundant processor with voting system, etc. so this failure mode (locked up and still sending) is considered impossible by design.
sure, but I would think some special case when we expect car to have 0 speed to not request any torque from its motor. IMO three is no case where car should request any torque when been in neutral
If I had to take a guess why… it probably thinks that you’re sitting on a hill and doesn’t want you to roll back.
> Not really.. it will only be applying 5Nm or so which is such a small amount of torque that you could likely stop the wheel with your hand (equivalent to holding up 500g object with 1m ruler)
It's good that it's small but I'm still not thrilled about this control loop.
> He is spoofing an ABS message from a working vehicle that says “no faults present” on a vehicle that is clearly full of faults.
My point is that the same messages would happen if you had a fully working vehicle and then the ABS unit locked up in a way that didn't interrupt sending.
It's not acceleration, it's torque application. There is a slight difference in nuances between those.
The problem is that it's doing both when it's only supposed to do one.
No, constant torque against nothing is infinite RPM. Imagine a space capsule with a stuck roll thruster.
Please explain how that is a "no". You just described a situation where it would be doing both when it's not supposed to. In the analogy, the thruster is supposed to turn off once it starts spinning, but it doesn't.
The entire reason this mechanism exists is that resistance can be significantly nonzero and needs to be adjusted for. It's just doing the adjustment in a flawed way.
Sorry if it sounded dismissive, but, I mean, modern motor control formulae[1][2] don't have a term for RPM. Motor controller derives new output state from just torque and instantaneous state of the motor, RPM is somewhat externally controlled unless that version of formula is in use. Hence the capsule analogy: F=ma for constant F means a > 0 and (rotational)velocity monotonically increases.
It doesn't make instinctive sense to me too that motor people haven't been thinking RPM-first for some time, but apparently they're not.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_control_(motor)
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_torque_control
> Motor controller derives new output state from just torque and instantaneous state of the motor
And the way it makes the motor state advance causes acceleration. It doesn't matter what variable goes into the formula, especially since you can convert freely. I'm pointing at the output and what I find scary about it. What comes first doesn't matter, I'd have the same issue even if I'm looking at the control formula from a jerk-first perspective.
And I don't really see the value of the "against nothing" analogy because the reason it's increasing torque is because it thinks there's resistance.
ABS faults can do way more dangerous things than indirectly command 5 Nm of torque in a no-load situation.
I have experienced a spurious ABS activation while braking from highway speed on an offramp. It was terrifying, and would have led to a crash had there been any traffic when I rolled through the stop sign at the bottom with the ABS still chattering.
That vehicle got its ABS fuse pulled.
Interesting. Sounds like really bad software.
There should be some sort inertia estimation turning off the motor if the inertia don't include the wheels or whatever.
There should also be some check that output axis speed (abs sensors) and motor speeds match.
The behaviour sounds kinda dangerous and not up to ECU standards.
We don’t implement stuff like this because it would go off when you’re going down a slight incline for example, and the more bandaids you slap on it to get it to work, the more complex testing the failure scenario would be.
> creep torque
Tangent: creep is an artifact of how an idling ICE interacts with a torque converter. Simulating it on EVs seems like a mistake to me, serving only to make them feel more familiar to a subset of first-time EV drivers.
Creep is needed for tight parking, for example when you'd like to move the car 10 cm forward. To simulate driving without it, turn on auto-hold and use only accelerator and brake for parking -- tight spots become extremely hard.
Using both feet is a potential solution here, though I've heard some newer cars respond poorly to that.
Data point: some ICE vehicles now have settings to turn creep on or off.
Source: My mother's 2024 Subaru that I help set up for her.
The automatic transmissions for all recent Subarus appear to use torque converters, which would normally have creep. Modern torque converters are much more advanced than older ones, so I'm not surprised the option exists to disable it. All models except the BRZ use a CVT with fake gears, which I find distasteful.
Heh, I will see your “distasteful” adjective and raise you “nauseating”. I got a newish Subaru as a rental a couple of months ago and found both city and highway driving left me feeling slightly disoriented all the time.
Specifically automatic transmissions.
Standard/Manual/Stick transmissions don't have creep.
Automated manuals and DCTs also don't naturally have creep, but sometimes it's added in. I imagine that's bad for the clutches.
This shows why BYD developed their "e-axle" system.[1] The drive axle, differential, and motor are an integrated unit. There's an electronics box that connects the battery, the e-axle, and the charging port. It's controlled over CANbus. So there's a coherent standalone component BYD can reuse in many different vehicles. Which they are doing, and clobbering Detroit on price.
[1] https://www.yolegroup.com/technology-outlook/whats-in-the-bo...
If you read the earlier articles in this series you'll see that the motor, diff, motor controller, charge controller and inverter are all on a single 'stack', treated as a single unit in the car. This module is used in the Hyundai Kona, Kia e-Niro and Soul EV.
Modular car design is nothing new and almost all carmakers thesedays do this.
how repairable is such a design?
There's an e-axle repair kit from Germany.[1] This kit is for a Schaeffler e-axle, and contains all the bearings and seals. If you have to take the axle apart to replace any of those, you may as well replace all of them.
Third party E-axles are mostly for trucks, where power trains and truck bodies come from different manufacturers. Heavy trucks can be maintained for decades, and that market wants repair parts available. For a car, the powertrain bearings tend to outlast the useful life of most cars.
[1] https://www.repxpert.com/en/eaxle
I guess a repair could mean swap it out, and the unit would get sent back to get refurbished, like what's commonly done with say alternators.
It isn’t inherently more difficult to make it more or less repairable.
Repair ability is a design attribute that is planned for.
>Which they are doing, and clobbering Detroit on price.
Let's be real, their prices are lower because Chinese labor is cheaper. US companies have to pay US rates and import as much as they can rather than having it all made in the US.
I'm sure that's a factor, but probably not for long - Chinese wages are on the rise along with China's economy, still a long way from US wages but they doubled in the past decade according to [0].
But one thing that's hard to deny is that US and European car manufacturers are still building on top of previous iterations of their vehicles, swapping out a ICE with an electric system but keeping the existing systems, frankensteining the two together. The article itself makes note of it:
> More than five separate CAN buses, ten or more kilograms of low voltage wiring, probably over one hundred electronic modules (most with their own CPU and firmware), etc.
I don't know cars, granted, nor legislation, but surely a car engineered from scratch would be much simpler and thus cheaper to build? How does Tesla do this?
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages
> But one thing that's hard to deny is that US and European car manufacturers are still building on top of previous iterations of their vehicles, swapping out a ICE with an electric system but keeping the existing systems, frankensteining the two together. The article itself makes note of it:
Worth noting that the car in the article isn't from a US or European car manufacturer, though Hyundai is certainly fairly well-established at this point.
But also, a lot of the stuff going on/wiring+subsystem count is not solely a factor of "making a motor assembly from scratch". For instance the steering wheel lock sensors in the article. Or all the safety-related sensors and subsystems, let alone all the infotainment stuff and related "features" in a modern car... Is BYD doing any better at reducing all that sprawl?
Bro, Chinese auto factory workers make like $300 per month: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chinas...
Compare that to US workers making about $30 per hour: https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm
As for the engineering costs: I think reusing existing designs is a way of cutting costs for US companies. Chinese companies and Tesla designed very different stuff from scratch because they had no choice I think. Remember, existing designs are proven over potentially decades, comply with various laws, etc.
And as now Tesla has moved past that early 'greenfielding' stage, their situation has changed to be dramatically more similar to the 'legacy' car makers. And suddenly, Tesla sees that their supposedly superior quirky approaches to carmaking generally are probably going to 'solidify' into systems eerily similar to the legacy ones.
Whoever was dismissive of the legacy car makers was also assuming decades of innovations in maintainability planning and reuse logic in one of the most highly competitive industries. Turns out, Tesla - even though the shook up the legacy contenders early on - is losing a lot of the advantages quicker that they have imagined to stay. Hardly a surprise to anyone who understands that millions of highly skilled engineers in the car industries aren't exactly less competent than the average Tesla engineer.
It seems to me that Tesla still makes the best functioning EV if you overlook their warts like being all proprietary, difficult to repair, and so on. Even the best EV sucks compared to an ICE car, and that is reflected in demand. Furthermore, Tesla is essentially competing with China, which they rely upon for many components and which seeks to cut them out of the domestic market. I don't think any Chinese EV is actually better than a Tesla but it is cheaper for various reasons, and that can cut into their market share. Remember, the Chinese government is investing heavily in EV tech and they basically force their citizens to buy the things regardless of how good they actually are. It would be foolish to think that they will always suck compared to Tesla. The Chinese government is willing to lose money to put every Western manufacturing company out of business. You can't compete with that, their protectionist policies, or even their cheap labor, without serious protectionism of your own.
They are genuinely more efficient as a result of ingenuity and intense competition. In addition to that, they have the entire supply chain on the continent and have become incredibly vertically integrated.
I know someone will chime in and talk about subsidies and IP theft, and while that may be true, the Chinese manufacturers are also incredibly willing to take risks and innovate, and that seems to be a reality that we do not want to confront in the west.
They are fairly efficient but we used to be efficient too. We simply cannot compete on cost because wages are so low there. Even if we had 100% automation we could not do it.
Let me put it another way. It is literally cheaper to ship basic materials like wood to China and have them send us back popsicle sticks. Does that sound like a cutting-edge efficiency problem, or is it a wage problem?? The same can be said about all kinds of things from food to pig iron. We're not talking about tech in any sense. The US mastered every single industry it sent to China with great efficiency, but the exchange rate situation and low wages there make it very difficult for a US company to compete.
Also, China protects its markets much better than we do. In order to sell in China you have to set up a 51% Chinese-owned outfit just to do that. Meanwhile they dump all their products on the world market with very few reciprocal relationships. Imagine how different things would be if we required Chinese companies to do the 51% US-owned franchise thing here. We could even require them to build factories here. Of course, there is no point doing that. If they did it, the goods would be just as expensive as 100% American companies. That's why we don't bother. They on the other hand do it mainly to swipe whatever knowledge they can from foreign companies. I've seen many accounts of this from US companies. You can get the Chinese to make lots of things, but if you send your design there then you risk knockoffs putting you out of business in only a few years.
How do you explain the fact that car manufacturers can and do build plants in Mexico and use cheap labour there, but still can’t compete with Chinese manufacturers? Labour cost isn’t the problem, the problem is that US innovation has stagnated and now his to rely on protectionism to compete.
I feel like I just enumerated several ways that China is overwhelmingly cheaper than practically any other advanced economy. But I will try to spell it out even more.
Labor is almost certainly not as cheap in Mexico as it is in China. China still enjoys benefits of "developing nation" status despite being very advanced when it comes to manufacturing. There are many variables when it comes to productivity such as the amount of investment, the size of the workforce, and government subsidies. If you believe in specialization, then having a much larger population to work (as also consume the product) is a big advantage. The Chinese government is heavily involved with its domestic businesses, from literally owning them to spying on their behalf, to putting up roadblocks for any competition. Mexico might be as advanced as China if we had outsourced everything to them instead of China, but I'm sure that did not make sense when we started doing it and it probably still does not.
There's nothing magic about China. It's just got lots of people and cheap labor, and a bunch of policies that are unfair to the rest of the world. They have a head start of about 30+ years on Mexico and other competition. The US and euro nations have let everything basically rot for 30+ years instead as everything got shipped to China. It's not that we can't do anything that they can do in principle, but it takes time and investment and the result is hard-pressed to make enough money due to the fact China can do it cheaper. In most cases Western manufacturing was better than Chinese for the longest time, but we basically taught them all our trade secrets without them sharing back any knowledge. We don't have a large pool of workers with manufacturing experience as they do, because of the outsourcing.
We have some subsidies, but they pale in comparison to what China does and come with random obligations like quotas per ethnicity or sexual orientation. TSMC complained about this stuff recently. They got billions of dollars in subsidies but still struggle to hire the right people locally in the US.
It takes decades for some of these industries to build up, even going back to the university training pipeline. The idea of pushing a "service economy" is a costly mistake that nearly all Western countries fell into. At some point, China and other manufacturing-based nations will refuse to take worthless Western currencies in exchange for their goods. That is, unless we have something real to offer in exchange.
Price of labor is part of it, but it's mostly the batteries. China is basically the only country that makes LFP batteries in high volume. That may be gradually changing (some big patents expired not long ago), but it'll take time for other countries to ramp up their production if they can even be bothered to.
We could make more batteries in the US too but higher wages and environmental regulations put us at a disadvantage. The same applies to practically anything you can think of.
One would think. But there's a track record of failure outside Asia.
American Battery Factory seems to be good at press releases but not at shipping product.[1]
Tesla had severe problems with in-house battery production. Mostly they packaged Panasonic and CATL cells. But the battery plant may be past that point, finally.[2]
The only European company that makes LFE batteries in quantity is in Serbia, and they're still in the sample stage.[3]
These new plants are starting to make a product Asian plants have been producing for years. All the big Asian makers are frantically trying to get the next generation, solid state battery production to work. Some of them have semi-solid state batteries working. Factorial in the US is trying to do that, too.
[1] https://americanbatteryfactory.com/press
[2] https://insideevs.com/news/733985/tesla-4680-manufacturing-m...
[3] https://elevenes.com/en/contact
Chinese batteries are all over the place in terms of quality. Just because Tesla had problems does not mean those problems are insurmountable. They most likely would have been figured out all problems if they did not have the option to just buy batteries elsewhere. Chinese battery companies benefit from cheap labor, lax environmental regulations, and government subsidies. I think other countries aren't making many EV batteries for the same reason they aren't making much of anything else: because it isn't possible for them to compete with China on cost (yet).
Their prices are lower because China went all-in on EVs in 2010 (as a country, not just their car companies), whereas US companies are still flirting with ICE and hybrids in 2024, and woe betide any US politician who advocates making it harder to register an ICE vehicle.
Labor prices matter, but 14 years of dithering matters more.
> woe betide any US politician who advocates making it harder to register an ICE vehicle.
Right. Try to register an ICE car in Beijing.[1]
[1] https://www.electrive.com/2024/07/25/beijing-increases-nev-q...
ICE and hybrids are still essential. Toyota estimated that EVs were going to be unsuitable for 75% of the US market. They aren't idiots. The car companies are making what people actually need. We don't have charging or electric infrastructure to support everyone having an EV, and there are many fire safety issues yet to be resolved for that to work.
They will be unsuitable because of that dithering resulting in, among many other things, poor charging infrastructure.
We don't even produce enough electricity for EVs, and now we are trying to power AI data centers poised to take even more power. It's not just a distribution problem, or a charging facility problem. It is an electricity production problem. The problem of producing power and distributing it alone will likely take 10-20 years to solve. Charging infrastructure is a different beast because it generates huge loads on the power grid in short bursts. Many big charging stations run massive diesel generators and/or have HUGE batteries on site to handle this load. Then there is the fire hazards, toxic mining for batteries, chemical pollution from batteries, and the long charge times. A lot of people live in apartments where home charging will never be feasible. On top of all of this, smart chargers are being designed to "handle" grid issues by turning off charging or even sending your electricity back into the grid which will leave you wondering "Why can't I use my car? It's been on the charger a stupid amount of time now..."
In summary, I won't be hopping on the EV bandwagon. The Toyota CEO is right. They have nothing against EVs and would make them if it made sense. Trying to ram EVs down people's throats will waste a lot of money and cause lots of problems. A hybrid is something that actually does work for many people. Hydrogen would also be superior, if they can get the kinks out. Toyota is a pioneer in hydrogen power too.
> A lot of people live in apartments where home charging will never be feasible
People in apartments usually have an assigned parking space, often covered. All you need to provide is a 240v outlet like a clothes dryer uses. Car owners can bring their own chargers.
It's more accurate to write that a lot of apartment complexes have simply not tried to install charging because most of their tenants don't have electric cars.
>People in apartments usually have an assigned parking space, often covered. All you need to provide is a 240v outlet like a clothes dryer uses. Car owners can bring their own chargers.
That sounds like rich apartments. Most apartments I've seen don't have assigned parking, or adequate parking for guests. Covered parking is extra, even in the hottest parts of the US. Tenants don't have anywhere to plug in. Don't take my word for it. Go take a tour of basic apartments in your area with a realtor and see how many of them can support more than like 5 EV cars. I think you will find that all of them cannot support mass adoption of EVs.
You're talking about installing megawatts worth of cabling for EVs that nobody wants as if it's already done or trivial to do. Even if you did it, the additional fire hazard is nothing to scoff at. State Farm (the insurance company) decided that EV charging was too dangerous for its parking garages. Who are we to tell them that they are wrong about the risks?
You might be somewhat right about this being a chicken/egg problem. It goes all the way back to the power plants that cannot produce enough power for EVs. This conversion to EVs, if it ever happens, will need decades to unfold. It could easily be disrupted by developments in synthetic chemical power such as hydrogen. In any case, whining about manufacturers and consumers not going in directions that don't work for them is a non-starter. EVs are at present luxury items that only work for people who can shape their lives around charging requirements.
Labor is under 10% of the cost of an electric car.
Is there a source on this? And is this the labor cost for the final product, or also that of all components?
The UAW puts it at 5-8%. Other sources put it higher, up to about 15%. But that's for combustion vehicles -- most sources put the labor component of EV's at 40-60% of that of combustion vehicles.
It generally includes the labor for sub-assemblies, but not for components. Components are sourced globally, so manufacturers in different countries should not be paying substantially different prices for components. Certainly sometimes they do, but that's generally a tariff issue, not a labor issue.
Not an expert, this is just based on most of an hour of random Googling.
Does labor include healthcare and pension costs?
A high school teacher once told me that the most expensive part of a car is healthcare and pension costs. Road and Track reported on this a little while ago, no idea what the situation is today.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a9590/pension-costs...
Although this may be true (I haven't found much to the contrary in a few minutes of searching", "raw materials" also involve labor. Facilities in the US are bound to cost more as well because property is so much more expensive. US auto workers and engineers make easily 10x as much as Chinese counterparts.
labor is 100% of the cost of everything. not 100% of the price, as that includes things like profit margins and taxes, but 100% of the cost.
But do you know US car companies are not paying US salaries to people who make cars either? They pay mostly Mexican and Canadian rates
I read it's on average $30 per hour. I have heard of much higher. Anyway, the average Chinese auto worker at BYD makes about $300 per month.
https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chinas...
I bet US companies are not paying anything near 30$ per hour to the workers of their Mexican factories.
Actually they are paying even less than some Chinese companies there.
And your link does say byd offered a base salary 300$, with much more as a total compensation.
Yes I realized that $300 was the base. But "much more" is like $1000 per month so optimistically about $6 per hour.
A while back I heard Boeing had aerospace engineers working abroad (I think in India) for $9/hr. That is probably a good salary for that part of the world. But in the US the same job might pay $100 per hour. Then we also have a different work culture than elsewhere. If you pay foreigners "good money" they might be working at all hours, but US workers demand a reasonable balance.
It's pretty disingenuous to argue that's why they are price competitive when there are so many bigger factors.
The biggest factor is how complacent these car companies have been for years to throw away all the quality and prestige associated with their brand name, and the lead they had over Tesla and other ev focused companies. It is hilarious how bad offerings from Audi/bmv (VW is too shit to compare) compared to Tesla simply because the dinosaurs didn't wanna reimagine their build process. They actually can't even if they want to; unions have them by the throat. And Chinese companies have the benefit of watching Tesla, learning (and stealing) from Tesla and others + lower wages. Legacy automakers can't even compete with Tesla; how will they compete with Chinese ones?
can you please elaborate on this? what are these factors? how do we know which factor contributes how much? thanks!
The support they get from the Chinese government …
BYD et al got massive support from the Chinese government in the past, but most of that support is gone now, and little of what is left applies to exports. The US government's $7500 rebate is larger than what BYD gets per car.
It's easier to register an EV in China than an ICE car, among other things - for instance, ICE cars must be left idle on a specific day of the week (determined from the car's license plate number), whereas EVs can be used the full 7 days a week.
That’s not support from the chinese government, that’s just good climate policy. Sucks that EVs in the US are held back by the government’s poor climate policy.
We don't know that at all.
We know it is 17% or less, because of the EU investigation.
I heard a similar story from a coworker. They were interfacing with a car via CAN. They had an engineer from the manufacturer telling them the details of the message they should be sending to demand a certain speed. Turns out the description wasn’t quite right. The message ID was correct, but not the endianness of the speed demand signal.
Thus when they tried to test it they thought they requested a stately 5m/s, but the vehicle thought they were asking it to exceed the speed of sound. Which of course it wasn’t designed to be able to do, but it still tried.
That’s why i prefer to have nice hardware e-stops on prototype vehicles.
Something similar was at work in the 2018 natural gas explosions in and around Andover, MA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion...
"According to the NTSB's preliminary report, customers in the accident area received gas from a low-pressure (0.5 psi) distribution network which, in turn, was fed from a high-pressure (75 psi) main pipeline via regulators controlled by sensors measuring pressure in the low-pressure pipes. At the time of the accident, workers were replacing some of the low-pressure piping, but the procedure set out by Columbia Gas for doing this failed to include transfer of a regulator's pressure sensor from the old, disused piping to the new. As a result, when the old pipe was depressurized, the regulator sensed zero pressure on the low-pressure side and opened completely, feeding the main pipeline's full pressure into the local distribution network."
Interesting that they only had a single regulator, if overpressure is that dangerous, I would expect them to have multiple regulators in sequence or a blowout valve to dump excess pressure.
Indeed. Not having a mechanical blow out set a bit above the never exceed pressure sounds like a design fault.
After the accident, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law to require a licensed professional engineers stamp on all gas infrastructure designs of this type
That will be in the postmortem I’m sure.
In the mean time, that costs money, and since no one managed to kill people by being dumb in this particular way before….
The NTSB final report on this accident is here:
https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Pages/2019-PLD18MR003-BMG.a...
Unfortunately the shutdown of go.usa.gov broke a bunch of links from that page, but the NTSB recommendations are summarized starting on page 33 (PDF page 44) of https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
But the recommendations to the gas company included:
> Review and ensure that all records and documentation of your natural gas systems are traceable, reliable, and complete. (P-18-7) (Urgent)
> Apply management of change process to all changes to adequately identify system threats that could result in a common mode failure. (P-18-8) (Urgent)
> Develop and implement control procedures during modifications to gas mains to mitigate the risks identified during management of change operations. Gas main pressures should be continually monitored during these modifications and assets should be placed at critical locations to immediately shut down the system if abnormal operations are detected. (P-18-9) (Urgent)
Edit to add:
This page has currently working links to the specific recommendations:
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/pld18mr003.aspx
Thanks for the links - looks like I was right?
Well, my reading is that the corrective action was less "add redundant safeties" and more "have sufficient process controls in place to ensure you don't break the feedback loop during pipeline work".
One potential problem with a pressure relief valve as a safety is that it could turn into a flare/blowtorch if there is an ignition source nearby, which constrains where it can be located (and requires ongoing maintenance to ensure vegetation/etc., doesn't build up where it could get torched).
If you're just talking about when something in a feedback loop gets disconnected (causing the output of the error amplifier to go to an extreme), you can do this with cruise control and a manual transmission (at least on some cars). Engage cruise control on the highway, then pop the car out of gear without using the clutch (so cruise control doesn't disengage). As the car's speed drops, the cruise control applies ever more throttle making the RPM shoot up. I've also done this going downhill with the car naturally gaining speed (and RPM going to idle).
Huh. I've owned a few manual-transmission cars over the years and they all disallowed this trick -- pressing the clutch would disengage cruise control just like a tap on the brakes.
Yeah, pressing the clutch will do that. But you can pop the car out of gear without pressing the clutch. (IIUC) the synchros provide some positive holding force that holds the transmission in gear, but you can overcome it. Also that force goes down with the amount of torque being transferred through the transmission, so you can make it easier by playing with the gas pedal a bit.
Yup. EStop saved is from the fence when a programmer learned that there are "low active" signals on an ECU he war trying to convince to follow our acceleration CAN signals. Adrenaline time...
> That’s why i prefer to have nice hardware e-stops on prototype vehicles.
Yeah, I kind of wonder if lawsuits/regulation might be the way to get those.
Because there will always be some sort of cost with that kind of thing.
I'm pretty sure a major reason garage doors have limit and occlusion sensors is because of regulation. (and even those suck - it is common for garage doors to incorrectly sense occlusion in bright sunlight)
> I kind of wonder if lawsuits/regulation might be the way to get those.
I’m talking about prototype cars. The solution there to have an e-stop is to ask your technicians to put it on. No lawsuit or regulation is necessary for that.
If you are thinking about mandating e-stops on production vehicles then I don’t think that is the right thing to do. It is a complicated analysis but it boils down to that the cases where it would help should be vanishingly small, and even in those people not trained for it would forget to use them.
> there will always be some sort of cost with that kind of thing
Absolutely. And the cost of the switch is not the major component. Where i work forgetting to reset the e-stop is so common that it is the first thing we ask about when something is weird. And the people forgetting them are skilled engineers with known prototype cars. I imagine the cost of support/service calls would be huge in prod.
> So the controller only ever increased the torque request, or kept it at the same level. Even when I simulated pressing the brake it was like "Nothing needs to change, we're not even moving!"
So wheel speed sensors drop out and the car will accelerate uncontrollably? I love EVs, but with all this complexity I wish there's some kind of mechanical disconnect or a big red STOP button somewhere.
This is a video of a driverless car getting rear-ended, and doing who-knows-what damage to its electronics; it then goes rogue at max speed through the streets smooshing whatever is in its path:
https://x.com/PicturesFoIder/status/1832940173400699255
(apologies -- not sure of the best Twitter passthrough to use)
I am completely ignorant of all things automotive. I was under the impression that any relatively recent (15 or so years) ICE car also operates by way of a car computer, and that stepping on the gas pedal is just a way to politely instruct the computer that you would like it to apply throttle. And that for even more recent cars this also applies to braking (since the newer cars can brake automatically). Have I got it all wrong?
If not, what's stopping a "traditional" (ICE) car from (mis)behaving in a similar fashion in some catastrophic circumstance that would damage its computer?
You’re sort of right in your assumption but there’s a lot of context missing. First, the time period is more like 30 years for cars having engine control units (ecu), but most car up until 10 years ago or so had hard physically wired throttles where you stepping on the throttle pulled a physical cable. If that cable doesn’t get pulled the engine doesn’t get enough air to go really fast no matter what the ecu tries to do. More recent cars have fly by wire throttles meaning they are like electric cars in that sense.
An ecu has a far more complicated control algorithm than a electric motor controller. If it were suddenly damaged it’s more like that the engine would fail to run at all then run out of control because the ecu needs to control the airflow, fuel and spark position for the engine to run, if any of those fail to work, or stop firing at the right the exact time they are required the engine will just stop or run very poorly. I actually think this is true of electric vehicles too, it’s far more likely to stop the motor working than to have it run out of control, unless a wheel speed sensor is damaged or something.
A petrol car can be placed into neutral if all else fails, the engine will run out of control but the car wont. Also the gearbox controller is typically a different computer from the ecu.
The brakes on any car should be able to over power the engine. This is not a challenge for 99% of petrol cars because the torque they output is tiny compared to what a brake system can apply to the wheels. If you slam on the brakes the engine doesn’t even come close. Idk about other countries but in Australia this also applies to electric cars that are road legal, it’s a requirement.
the ecu is usually located in the passenger cabin or sometimes next to the battery quite deep inside the engine bay.
The only thing that would cause a petrol engine to really go out of control would be if it was fly by wire throttle and that throttle position sensor was broken in the particular way that it’s reading as full throttle. Idk if manufacturers do this but it wouldn’t be hard to design a fly by wire throttle that when it fails the ecu will see it as closed not open.
Anyway I don’t think it’s much of a concern for electric cars either tbh.
> most car up until 10 years ago or so had hard physically wired throttles where you stepping on the throttle pulled a physical cable.
More like 25 years ago, at least in France. The 2001 Renault Clio 2 I'm driving has throttle-by-wire, the newest car I personally know of with a mechanical throttle is a 1998 Peugeot 205, the last model year of a car that debuted in 1982. I doubt any European car manufactured after 2001 has a mechanical throttle, if only because of European emission standards.
> The only thing that would cause a petrol engine to really go out of control would be if it was fly by wire throttle and that throttle position sensor was broken in the particular way that it’s reading as full throttle. Idk if manufacturers do this but it wouldn’t be hard to design a fly by wire throttle that when it fails the ecu will see it as closed not open.
On the Clio 2 car, there are two redundant linear potentiometer tracks. If the dual measurements don't match or if either sensor is disconnected, the ECU will default back to a slightly higher than idle throttle.
I once had a diesel engine runaway (google it, the engine ran on its own oil at some insane rpm). I put it in neutral until the engine seized. Scary stuff
why not put it on max gear with brakes fully pressed? it should not have enough power to continue
The correct course of action is stuffing up the air intake to suffocate the combustion, if this is still a viable option. Otherwise, depart from the vehicle and be ready to call the fire department.
I should have done that, hoping to stall the engine. I panicked and really didn’t know what to do. The noise and MASSIVE cloud of black smoke pouring out the back were terrifying. Not a great first drive after an engine swap.
Brakes are not usually "by-wire" on a car that is able to automatically brake. The brake pedal is still physically connected to the brakes.
Same for the steering. BMW for example has a method where the steering wheel is physically connected but the computer can add corrections to it via a clever set of gears. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_steering
If the computer (or electric steering motor) fails the steering wheel still works.
Nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration has a list of cases, some of them ECU related.
Especially since each link to Xitter forwards a couple times to itself and messes the browser history… One popular option is to use the Nitter instance xcancel.com
> So wheel speed sensors drop out and the car will accelerate uncontrollably?
No, I don't think any of my bench tests suggest that for this car. The torque is minimal throughout, so if the motor was pushing an actual car then it might not move at all. If it did move, even a light touch on the (mechanical) brake pedal would stop it.
My problem is that I had a bench setup with no load on the motor and no mechanical brake. I could have pulled the safety interlock (all EVs have these for emergency first responders) but this stops the motor at all costs - wasn't sure of potential damage to the motor controller circuitry from back EMF.
If the wheel speed sensors drop out they put nothing on the CAN bus, not a "0 speed" message. I think it's pretty safe to assume the controller logic here has a fairly strict timeout on how often it wants to see wheel speed messages.
There is presumably still some possibility of them failing in an "always reports 0" way
There are some parts of engineering in safety systems where you have a single thing that could go wrong that would have serious consequences, and the result of the FMEA is that "it has to not do that".
I don't think you'll find a wheel speed sensor without a few "outputs incorrect speed" failure modes.
Detectability is one dimension of an error, and "bad wheel speed" has decent detectability I reckon - either through redundancy, grey codes, index pulse checking, bound checking.
Also the issue experienced in the post wasn't an issue with a sensor per se.
Sure, it is possible theoretically.
However, most relevant regulation (IEC61508, ISO26262, DO-178X) requires that systems controlling machines in automotive, rail or aerospace have a possibility of dangerous faults lower than 10^-9 (over the expected lifespan).
Many critical control systems like this are formally verified and/or extremely well-tested and have redundancy in both software and hardware.
…Like when dismembered and spread across a bench.
It's not unthinkable that whatever transducer takes rotation and turns it into a signal which is processed by an MCU and translated into CAN messages could get stuck producing one signal and trigger such a scenario without the car's control system needing to be on a bench.
Huh. It just occurred to me that our EV has no mechanical mitigation at all. No physical handbrake, no clutch, no mechanical key to power off the engine. I'm not sure how to feel about this.
You have brakes.
>the car will accelerate uncontrollably?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009–2011_Toyota_vehicle_recal...
'Michael Barr of the Barr Group testified[30] that NASA had not been able to complete its examination of Toyota's ETCS and that Toyota did not follow best practices for real time life-critical software, and that a single bit flip which can be caused by cosmic rays could cause unintended acceleration. "
Yeah, maybe not particular to EVs. I do remember wondering back during the Toyota "uncontrolled acceleration" epidemic why people wouldn't just put the cars in neutral
Because the vast majority of people driving cars don't have enough of a mental model of the vehicle systems to consider such a thing, especially in a panic situation such as unintended acceleration.
If you've driven rattletrap manuals for most of your life, and have worked on cars, rebuilt engines, replaced clutches, rewired things that failed, yeah. That's an obvious conclusion, and I expect some people without doing that will have enough sense of what's going on to consider a drop to neutral (and letting the rev limiter handle keeping the engine intact).
But go ask most people, even in technical fields, about the details of a car, and you'll struggle to get much beyond "I press the gas and it goes." You run into this constantly if you're a "car guy" and people ask you questions about why their car isn't going. "It turns over but doesn't start!" can mean anything from "the lights are barely on and nothing happens" to "the starter relay clicks but nothing happens" to what I would consider that to mean, "the engine is rotating under the starter's power but is not engaging in sustained internal combustion."
Neutral isn't a thing most people even think about, unfortunately. Park, Drive, Reverse, and some oddball other positions that you don't want to end up in accidentally. Yes, they're useful, and yes, they solve problems, but it's not something that a lot of people would consider. Neither do they seem to consider "Stand on the brakes until the car comes to a stop. No, really, stand on them!" - because I've yet to meet a moderately well maintained vehicle that can't come to a stop with the gas floored and the brakes applied firmly (yes, I've tried, it's a standard test of mine after brake work). But if you only apply partial brake pressure, or have a vacuum brake booster, you only get a few attempts before the booster has lost vacuum (won't get any more, because wide open throttle), and if you've heated up your brakes trying without succeeding, you may very well have no usable brakes left. Passenger car brakes are adequate, but you can easily overheat them and fade them if you try, or boil the fluid, or... etc. Again, not something you'll find many people aware of these days.
I wish it were different, but "magic box I put gas into and it goes" is closer to the reality of how many people consider cars these days.
Even people who know about the solution might find it drops out of their brain in a moment of panic.
I locked myself out of my house recently, and it was only after scaling to the 1st floor, breaking in through an open window, and breaking through a locked interior door (the house had been secured as I was going on a trip, and the only things I forgot were my keys and that window), that I remembered that there was a spare key in my car (which was open). This moment of clarity coincided with the stress going away.
> Even people who know about the solution might find it drops out of their brain in a moment of panic.
I agree. During a period of huge storms in my region I kept mentally preparing for getting caught in a flood: engage first gear, press the gas and go, slow and steady.
Then my fears materialized and as soon as the flood started pushing my car, I pressed the clutch and engaged the second.
Thankfully I realized it fast enough, kept pressing the gas and engaged back the 1st, so my mental training may have helped, but that was a close call.
Again, it depends a lot on your experience with vehicles. I expect someone who had driven a manual for a long while (or even learned on one but hadn't driven one recently) would be radically more likely to come to "Oh, select neutral" as a solution than someone who has only ever driven automatics. "Neutral" is far more part of "life with a manual" than it is with automatics - I would be willing to bet that a substantial fraction of automatic transmissions have never been deliberately put in neutral.
My daily driver has an archaic manual sequential transmission (2005 Ural - sidecar motorcycle sort of thing), and I select neutral at every stoplight I'm likely to be at for a while to avoid wearing the clutch bearings. Also, I have to most of the way double clutch my shifts on that bike (pause in the false neutral between gears) to avoid too much clashing. If I had a runaway throttle condition (certainly possible), I have at least three instant methods I'd use (kill switch, clutch, and rock it into a false neutral). But I've spent most of my driving career with such things, and vehicles that don't have those are a bit of a novelty to me.
Also my Toyota Auris Hybrid has a weird kind of joystick for changing gear and putting it into neutral position requires holding that position for some time. Gave me an unpleasant (but luckily harmless) event in a car wash where you're required to have power on but use neutral position with automatic gearing.
Random aside, I set my automatic in neutral while setting the parking brake, to let it rock into place
On a manual it's the opposite. Put it in 1st gear, let it settle into place, only then parking brake.
1st will hold the car by itself if the parking brake slips.
Oh I still have the engine running for this. The computer will bitch at me if I turn off the engine and it's not in P
That works until it doesn’t. When my poorly adjusted and full of mud parking brake finally failed The weight of my Jeep overcame engine compression and rolled the engine over while it was in first. It got going surprisingly fast until it smacked into a rock wall and flipped the Jeep on its side. This was in remote Uganda.
Video from immediately after it flipped over https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DChDTGIciNI
Shouldn't you put it in reverse on a forward incline, not 1st?
And turn the wheels such that even if it got going it would be stopped by terrain? That should be especially easy on unpaved African roads.
Reverse is troublesome, because if it does roll the engine over it will turn the engine backwards. While that shouldn’t cause damage, it’s still not great. I actually felt it doing so once while sitting in the drivers seat. I could feel it turning over one cylinder at a time , one every 5 seconds or so.
Using the terrain is my preferred option, but then I didn’t have that choice
I don't think there's any particular problem with rotating the engine in reverse while it's off, but on most manual transmissions that I'm aware of, first and reverse ratios are pretty similar, so likely not much to be gained.
> I don't think there's any particular problem with rotating the engine in reverse while it's off
I agree, in theory it should be fine.
Driving a lap around the African continent is not the place to test that theory.
I just looked it up, my Jeep has the NSG 370 6 speed box behind the old 3.8ltr V6.
1st is 4.46
Reverse is 4.06
Would it have helped to put it in second? If this the case. Why don’t we put the car in highest gear instead of first?
You want the car to have the least leverage against the engine, not the most.
No actually, first gear low range 4x4 would be better - and that’s what I do now.
Think of how much effort it takes to pedal a bike from standstill in 1st gear vs the highest gear. The force required is the same if it’s being applied to the wheel and turning your legs (the engine)
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic...
If people think they are hitting the brakes (but are accidentally hitting the gas), then hitting the 'brakes' harder will make the problem worse.
That makes sense in most cases, but I remember there being multiple cases where people had the composure to call 911 and report the situation.
This is why I'm so glad I have a manual transmission with a physical ignition key.
Car starts accelerating out of control? You have several options that you can try in no particular order (except the first one, which should always be tried first).
Lift your primary foot to confirm you're not accidentally pressing the accelerator instead of the brake (this is surprisingly common). Dump the clutch with the other foot at the same time.
If the engine is still going nuts, shift to neutral and/or turn the ignition off (DON'T remove the key yet; that will lock the steering wheel, which is a bad idea when you're still moving). Coast to a stop somewhere safe; your brakes will also still work for a while. You won't have power steering, but you won't need it. Remove the key -- this WILL kill the engine (if you didn't already switch off). You're done.
My driving instructor did this to me in an empty supermarket car park. Then he did it again until I got the hang of it. It's a valuable learning experience.
People that did put their car in neutral didn’t make the news
I'm still not sure whether it applies to this case, but on the Prius at least, "neutral" is a software concept. There is no physical linkage from the drive mode selector ("gearshift") to anything mechanical, and there are no mechanical components that could uncouple the powerplant from the wheels. Putting the powertrain in neutral is accomplished by removing torque commands from the electric motors, at which time the engine and wheels can free-spin.
At the time this was in the news, I was never able to find a coherent explanation of whether any such bit-flip affecting some piece of software on some module, would also inhibit the interpretation and implementation of a neutral drive mode selection.
1) Because panic is a thing.
You need training to guarantee correct reaction when things go wrong.
Here's an anecdote: I used to drive a car with a standard transmission in Los Angeles. In quite a few places, the parking spots have a "trench" in the front for drainage. So, you can place your car in reverse, release the brake and have your car roll forward quite a bit (the trench makes an even stronger downward slope on a hill that is already pointing downward) before the clutch engages. A bit surprising but nothing that weird for someone who drives a stick.
Now, have that sequence happen to someone driving a car with an automatic transmission. They shifted to reverse, the car is rolling forward more than they expect and is on a hill, they hit the gas to arrest the roll, the transmission engages and the car shoots in reverse. Pray that there isn't anything close behind them or they're going to run over a pedestrian, put their car through a wall, etc.
2) Because the majority of the people who had "uncontrolled acceleration" were old.
The vast majority of the cases were very likely driver error by older drivers who had incorrect habits ingrained. Toyota probably would have won the case if this was the only issue.
Alas, Toyota lost the case because their processes for safety were such a complete shitshow that they were going to get destroyed in court.
EVs (and hybrids) solve that problem so elegantly.
They have so much torque at a standstill that hill assist is a given and going up or down a hill slowly forwards or reverse is not an issue. Absolute gamechanger.
Not sure what you mean by standard transmission, but in a manual you'd also have to use the parking brake while using the clutch to go up in reverse. Otherwise the motor would stall, or you'd roll forwards.
I feel like if you can't come up with the idea to try pushing in the clutch, shifting into neutral, turning off the key, or applying the handbrake within ten seconds you should have your license taken away. and if you design a car where those things wouldn't work you should go to prison.
This was on automatic shifting cars.
I don't have a lot of experience with automatic shifting cars, but I believe that they still have neutral, keys, and handbrakes. If they don't then their designers should go to prison.
IIUC, flying orbital altitude over on this domain, treat as hallucinations:
High end brushless motors like EV traction motors are "vector" controlled and instructed by desired torque, not in sinusoidal phase shifts and desired RPM. Back EMF voltages are measured at output terminals of drivers, and errors between expected vs measured voltages is fed back to the driver thereby achieving requested torque, somewhat disconnected from RPM.
This means motor RPM always diverges into +/- infinity with any non-zero torque request under no-load condition.
There is another quirk of note, that some EV motors seem to jump into an open-loop mode when BEMF or rotor phase detection reports failure, and that might also result in unintended acceleration, but that's probably not it.
> the Hyundai Kona Electric is absurdly complicated. More than five separate CAN buses, ten or more kilograms of low voltage wiring, probably over one hundred electronic modules (most with their own CPU and firmware), etc.
This is just sad for electric cars.
Why is it sad?
Cause electric cars are supposed to be simple.
How would you do it otherwise? And btw. Ice cars have probably similar amount of modules.
ICE cars are more complex. You want an ECU and TCU separate because those are pretty critical to the cars not breaking, you have a separate system for 12v power to the battery and accessories, you want your steering gauge cluster/display separate so it can show critical information apart from the entertainment cluster, and so on.
With an electric car, the control of the motor is DEAD simple, and you already have your electrical power. You really need like 2 modules/computers at most. Motor controller that takes DC power and converts it to the phase power to drive the motor, and the "main" computer that includes a PDU and manages the systems of the car.
Optionally a 3d entertainment cluster, but honestly, you can just include a slot for a tablet with a USBc plug from the main computer, and an app, and that would be better than whatever manufacturers are doing now.
If you're interested in this check out the previous posts:
Part 1 https://www.projectgus.com/2023/03/ev-conversion-one/
Part 2 https://www.projectgus.com/2023/03/ev-conversion-two/
Part 3 https://www.projectgus.com/2023/10/kona-can-decoding/
...and the follow-up posts:
Part 5 https://www.projectgus.com/2024/04/unremarkable/
Part 6 https://www.projectgus.com/2024/10/simplifying-bench-kona/
The removal of the parentheses in the title really changes the meaning... The original title focuses on the fact that they got the motor to turn, with the addendum that it turns too much. The HN title makes it sound like the article is about how the motor turns too much.
Very cool, I'm in automotive and in school we've got a few of these builds with some older engines to play around with.
The constant 5 Nm torque is probably to prevent backlash in the driveline when setting off. Best to keep all the gears, shafts etc under a slight preload so they don't "clunk" when you start accelerating. Much easier on the components, and better comfort.
Seems only a matter of time until Chinese manufacturers start providing kits for EV conversions. Can they compete on price and convenience with equipment rescued from scrapped EVs? Would EV tariffs apply?
It's quite difficult to convert a combustion engine vehicle to an EV.
- EVs need significant volume for batteries. The only places available in a combustion vehicle are the engine bay and the gas tank. If you put batteries in the engine bay, you'll mess up the weight distribution. The volume occupied by the gas tank isn't nearly large enough to house a battery for decent range.
- The extra weight of the batteries requires changes to the suspension and tires.
- EV motors have lots of torque. If you use the original transmission, you'll need to limit torque based on which gear it's in. Any replacement transmission will need to be designed for that car chassis. It's not easily adapted to other models.
- Combustion vehicles are designed with an accessory belt in mind. The air conditioning, power steering, and many other components are run off of these belts. An EV motor doesn't spin while idling. These components will need another power source, or they'll have to be replaced with EV-specific components.
- Combustion vehicles use waste heat from the engine to heat the cabin. Unless you live in a mild climate, a retrofit will need electric heating coils (or a heat pump for maximum efficiency).
And after making all of these modifications, you'll need to deal with regulations around making sure the vehicle is street legal. Those can differ greatly based on the state and the model year of the vehicle you're converting. Considering all that, it's unlikely that you'd save money by converting an existing vehicle.
An EV kit car might make more sense, but the market for those is quite small.
There's already a small market for this in classic cars and they've worked most of these things out even to the point of installing heated seats, writing their own software, making and selling kits for common target cars etc.
It's just mostly based on salvaged Tesla motors and batteries as far as I can tell.
(I think Jaguar and Ford talked about selling EV crate engines for their older models but I've not heard about that for a while)
Classic cars don't make sense, though - if you're driving e.g. a Ford Model T, then you just objectively don't care about performance or cost effectiveness.
Check out Electric Classic Cars on YT: https://www.youtube.com/@ElectricClassicCars
Most of their conversions are sports cars but many aren't.
Electric are no bueno for those 2 metrics
Classic cars are the perfect example of a hobbiest niche - where practicality is often literally a negative.
Frankly, if it’s common in Classic Cars, it’s probably not a good idea to do it in a production vehicle/practical situation.
> EVs need significant volume for batteries. The only places available in a combustion vehicle are the engine bay and the gas tank. If you put batteries in the engine bay, you'll mess up the weight distribution. The volume occupied by the gas tank isn't nearly large enough to house a battery for decent range.
You're forgetting: exhaust and transmission tunnel (for RWD/AWD cars). Just those two areas alone are a substantial amount of space. Add in space in the sub-trunk area (that might have a spare tire, or just free space)... and you can cobble together quite a bit of capacity.
> EV motors have lots of torque. If you use the original transmission, you'll need to limit torque based on which gear it's in. Any replacement transmission will need to be designed for that car chassis. It's not easily adapted to other models.
Why would you use the existing transmission? Just use the transmission built into the EV motor... they all have them.
.
- battery significant volume: this depends on intended range, and if sulfur chemistries hit the market you can probably drop the required volume by 40-70%.
- extra weight: see above, and removing engine and other components
- yes the EV motor will need to be aware, that's a control issue not some physical issue
- another power source.... like, a battery bank?
- waste heat for AC: heat pumps
Yeah, I know I am massively handwaving. It's a really hard problem, but some EV retrofit for "incumbent" cars (eventually to be "classic") would save a lot of carbon.
But it's not going to happen, it's too labor and skill intensive. Capital hates everything that is labor/skill dependent. It might be able to be assembly lined to some degree: common car platforms of major manufactures would help. The engine lift isn't THAT bad for many platforms, the hood removal - bolt loosen - engine lift could be done in 3-4 "disassembly line" steps.
EV motors are pretty compact from what I can tell, so the engine compartment can probably accommodate enough high-density (sulfur chemistry in 5-8 years) batteries to get a 150-200 mile range.
The REALLY OPTIMAL conversion target should probably be a swapout with a hybrid drivetrain, if we could get a compact rotary recharge engine developed combined with a compact EV motor. The transmission interface is still a PITA, but the heat excess and other things might be conserved better, and there might be room left over for 50 miles of all-electric range.
That would deliver 90% all-electric trips in-city, regen braking, but keep ICE power for all the legacy accessories.
We should have been working collectively on hybrids within a couple years of the Prius being released in the late 1990s. We should have forced all auto manufacturers to have hybrids for all cars in 10 years (regen braking and city efficiency would have been 20% gas savings right there, maybe more).
Then 10 years after that have forced plugin hybrids with increasing thresholds for all-electric range.
Check out what https://www.edisonmotors.ca/edison-pickup-kit is doing
Very nice. I really would like to get a replacement kit of my XC90 battery and electric engine. Especially one that doesn’t cost more than half of the remainder of the economic value of the car. This is my second second hand plug in hybrid that loses battery capacity rapidly and the battery is crazy expensive to replace. Moreover, newer generations have stronger electric motors giving wider range of use and better regen.
I'm rooting for Edison but after watching some recent videos on this kit I don't have high hopes. There are only a few people working on this project.
That would be a major operation, basically a rebuild of a car, plus you'd need all the relevant controls etc rewired too. It wouldn't be worth it, not when this same China is investing heavily in affordable EV mass production.
EV conversions aren't gonna catch on due to the complexities of removing everything from a ICE car.
[dead]
[flagged]