8 ms·

Is it insane? I'm working in this field, and I know how quickly you can come up with such a number if you are BMW and you are deathly afraid that someone will g

by jinzo 10mo ago

Is it insane? I'm working in this field, and I know how quickly you can come up with such a number if you are BMW and you are deathly afraid that someone will get electrocuted while working on your car, driving it or rescuing someone in a crash. It's a safety and liability issue, where they go to great lengths to actually re-certify a battery after crash. The whole thing is setup so, that even the dummy electricians in an average BMW shop can safely certify that this battery is still safe. It's a lot easier to kill yourself (or someone else) when working on a EV Battery than wet belt. Also a lot harder to repair said battery than wet belt. And that goes for all EVs and manufacturers that actually care about people (Tesla, demonstrably does not).

close04 10mo ago
The article and comment aren't debating whether the fuse plays an essential role. There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error. Making it a very complicated and expensive fix isn't what's saving your rescuer or mechanic from getting electrocuted while working around your car.
- gmueckl 10mo ago
  You seem to be ignoring the fact that the battery pack status after a crash is essentially unknown. It should go through a thorough and competently conducted safety inspection or it may kill someone in the future. Of course, this doesn't excuse extra red tape tacked into the procedure, but the core idea of an inspection is just unavoidable.
  - close04 10mo ago
    > Of course, this doesn't excuse extra red tape tacked into the procedure That's exactly it. I understand the importance of safety but reading the list of complaints I just cannot believe that safety is the key driver for the design decisions. > ISTA’s official iBMUCP replacement procedure is so risky that if you miss one single step — poorly explained within ISTA — the system triggers ANTITHEFT LOCK. > Meaning: even in an authorised service centre, system can accidentally delete the configuration and end up needing not only a new iBMUCP, but also all new battery modules. > BMW refuses to provide training access for ISTA usage Everything about this screams greed driven over-engineering. Since when are error prone processes and lack of access to information better for safety? We live in a world where everyone justifies taking user hostile actions with some variation of "safety". Software and hardware are locked down, backdoored, need manufacturer approval to operate even when original parts are used, etc.
    - jinzo 10mo ago
      I won't go into details about 'training access for ISTA usage' - cause I don't know what exactly Vanja means by this - but generally speaking in EU BMW provides the easiest access from all OEMs for aftermarket repair. Everyone has to provide it by law, but BMW has the most straightforward way of registering/paying/using it. For sure not ideal, but far from really being problematic IMHO. But other than that I mostly agree, I don't think that the over-engineering is greed driven - but the EU Manufacturers (but honestly, even other ones) have a really hard time with anything software based. Be it in car or outside of it. But BMW is far from the worst on that front. P.S: VW ODIS original diagnostic is based on Eclipse :D
      - gmueckl 10mo ago
        My experience with many German mechanical and electrical engineers is that they have a tendency to think of software like a magical cheap and malleable part on a BOM that can make their arbitrary design work. Especially the mechanical engineers like a nice little black box that they screw on and wire into their machine to make it go brrr once they turn it on. That kind of thinking along with some calcification of organizational structures in/around R&D teams seems to be the cause for the rather dysfunctional software development at the German car companies. Software dev doesn't thrive in this environment. Volkswagen probably had the right idea on paper when they created Cariad as a subsidiary software development company to isolate the devs, but then they ruined it by importing their own culture into it again.
- entrox 10mo ago
  > There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error. Yes there is. Either nobody is engineering towards that aspect or it is a conscious decision, deliberating between two different buckets: bill-of-material cost per unit and estimated impact on your warranty & goodwill budget. Whatever is deemed to be cheaper will win. Source: I work at an automotive OEM and one of my first projects almost two decades ago was how to anchor after-sales requirements into the engineering process. For example, we did things like introducing special geometry into the CAD models representing the space that needs to be left free so a mechanic can fit his hands with a tool inside. These would then be considered in the packaging process. If you consider these are two completely different organizations, it becomes a very tricky problem to solve.
  - actionfromafar 10mo ago
    It's like the manufacturer discovering to their complete surprise they are building a car. :-D
  - close04 10mo ago
    > BMW refuses to provide training access for ISTA usage Refusing access to training isn't a BoM issue by any means. Neither is a repair process that's so error prone that it can do even more damage to the car. We are surrounded by evidence that manufacturers in every field are taking decisions that are hostile towards their customers in the chase for profits. With the rise of EVs with far fewer moving parts needing constant maintenance, the manufacturers had to shift to different revenue streams, like killing repairability and locking everything behind manufacturer approval. This is a professional shop voicing the complaints, not a random guy trying to do a fix on the side of the road. Imagine someone told you they work for Apple and the reason everything is soldered, glued, stacked in a way it will never survive disassembly, and every bit of software and hardware in the device needs the manufacturer's blessing to be replaced or just keep running is because it was cheaper and safer this way. > it becomes a very tricky problem to solve. It was a solved problem for everything mechanical where locking it down or preventing people from learning wasn't really an option. How did it become tricky again just now when we deal with far more flexible software and possibility to lockdown?
bluescrn 10mo ago
Many people drive older cars worth less than £4000. Sticking to old/cheap cars seems like an increasingly good option with so many scare stories about the pain and extreme expense of getting modern cars, particularly EVs, repaired. And the impending ban on new ICE vehicles seems likely to lead to more older cars being kept on the road for a lot longer.
- jacquesm 10mo ago
  My current car is my last. It's a 1997 and it runs pretty much as good as new and I expect the thing to outlive me.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jandrese 10mo ago
    Depends on the parts situation. As someone who works on my own cars I've become increasingly distressed at the car parts industry. Even OEM parts, when they are still available, seem to have had a dramatic decrease in quality over the past couple of decades. This is even assuming the correct part is shipped in the first place, which is another problem that has become entirely too common, especially in an age where everything is computerized. So many times you get a box with the correct part number on the outside but the wrong part inside. If you have the parts and the will it's possible to keep any car running close to forever. That said if you've gotten to the point where the frame is totally rusted out then maybe it's time to consider moving on.
    - jacquesm 10mo ago
      Plastics. Those are the hard to source bits. Plastic doesn't stay plastic for ever and NOS can be dried out just as much as the bits that are in the car. Most other things are easy to source, and anything made of steel can be fixed (zero rust, so far).
      - jandrese 10mo ago
jacquesm 10mo ago
Yes, it is insane. It's a fuse. They must have some stats on how often those things need replacing and it should have been accessible. The customer has - when they buy the car - absolutely no way of knowing what kind of surprises like this there are hidden in the vehicle and besides, it kills the second hand market so you can only trade your vehicle to a BMW dealership where they can absorb those costs for a fraction of what it will cost an end user. BMW is a crap brand in spite of their reputation, we've had one leased Mini in our company and it is the very last time we do business with BMW, that thing was more in the shop than out of it with electrical issues. A friend had pretty much every BMW ever made since he got wealthy enough to afford them (car enthusiast) and his experience is much the same, but he keeps buying them.
- lazide 10mo ago
  Fuses are not items that should be replaced normally - they are self-destroying emergency protections for the electrical system. If it is protecting that end users can plug arbitrary loads into, that is one thing - but this doesn’t sound like that? Why did that fuse blow? Because if that is not addressed, it’s likely to just blow again.
  - jacquesm 10mo ago
    I think the people that replace fuses are aware of the potential issues around them. The article - which I'm sure you've read so don't take this as commentary on your comment - details that in other electric vehicles, for instance Tesla this is handled quite differently: "While Tesla’s pyrofuse costs €11 and the BMS reset is around 50€, allowing the car to be safely restored, BMW’s approach borders on illogical engineering, with no benefit to safety, no benefit to anti-theft protection — the only outcome is the generation of billable labour hours and massive amounts of needless electronic/lithium waste." It's not a choice between 'ridiculously inaccessible with the potential to create more damage than your car is worth' and 'push to reset'. There are many options in between, some of which would be a happy medium between the two that protect both safety, the environment and the customers' wallet. Which BMW's solution clearly isn't.
RealityVoid 10mo ago
Yes, it's insane. People working in the field have their perception warped by what they see around them.
- jinzo 10mo ago
  I mean, I don't think my perception is warped by what I see. But by "am I willing to risk that my repair will kill someone, because they wanted cheaper repair"? Or even if not kill, maybe just burn down their car (+ house,...). "Am I willing to use cheap tools, not rated for 800V (or 400V) god knows how many Amps?". Because this is not software development - you can be killed REALLY quickly working on a HV EV battery pack. It's no joke. For sure it'll cost more than working on a regular car, where there is danger, but a lot less. And that's just the basic thinking, without going deeper into why its more expensive to repair stuff like this.
potato3732842 10mo ago
You, you are the problem. It's not excusable to do this to the product because of some hand wavey napkin math about liability. Understand how people will interact with your product and then use that information to avoid doing things like routing power where firefighters want to cut and you'll accomplish the same thing without a stupid expensive hair trigger fuse.
- jinzo 10mo ago
  I am a problem, but on the other spectrum - OEMs ain't getting the repair €€€ because people like me repair stuff (but a different approach than Vanja). Then, almost no manufacturer that sells in the EU knows how to do this (Renault is almost the only one that doesen't have pyrofuses in the battery, almost everyone else has). The catch is, the routed power is not problematic, the problem is when something gets squished and redirects that routed power to somewhere else. Which tends to happen in a metal tincan.
torginus 10mo ago
If you and BMW are correct - if we take it for a fact that a simple fender-bender can make batteries develop life-threatening faults, which absolutely require a 4k euro inspection that involves complete disassembly and specialist equipment, then that means that EVs are unsuitable for public use. So either all EVs need to be scrapped forever, or BMW needs to engineer a more tractable solution to the problem, or BMW is overreacting and overcharging customers.
- jinzo 10mo ago
  No, from my experience, a simple fender-bender does not cause this.
  - RealityVoid 10mo ago
    Yeah, that's OP's point then, that a fender bender causing this is an overreaction from BMW
    - jinzo 10mo ago
      We don't have the full picture. Like I mentioned too many times in this thread, I know EV Clinic head boss Vanja likes to overreact and twists stuff to fit into his narrative. Not saying this one was not a fender bender, but I take all his stuff with a grain of salt. Mostly because I worked with him AND work on the same stuff he does - and it usually doesen't match up to what I'm seeing to the degree he 'dramaticizes'.
  - torginus 10mo ago
    In the article, it was mentioned that the issue can be caused by hitting the curb, there's a guy in the comments who says his VW grenaded itself this exact way just while charging (luckily his car was in warranty).
neuralRiot 10mo ago
I also work in this field, and I feel manufacturers like to exaggerate the dangers as a liability umbrella, aside of disassembling the battery itself it’s very hard to even access the HV components in a dangerous way, every HV connector has an interlocking line that opens the battery internal contactor so other than hacking the HV line with a saw I don’t see how you could “touch” the live wires.

by jinzo 10mo ago

close04 10mo ago

The article and comment aren't debating whether the fuse plays an essential role. There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error. Making it a very complicated and expensive fix isn't what's saving your rescuer or mechanic from getting electrocuted while working around your car.

gmueckl 10mo ago
You seem to be ignoring the fact that the battery pack status after a crash is essentially unknown. It should go through a thorough and competently conducted safety inspection or it may kill someone in the future. Of course, this doesn't excuse extra red tape tacked into the procedure, but the core idea of an inspection is just unavoidable.
- close04 10mo ago
  > Of course, this doesn't excuse extra red tape tacked into the procedure That's exactly it. I understand the importance of safety but reading the list of complaints I just cannot believe that safety is the key driver for the design decisions. > ISTA’s official iBMUCP replacement procedure is so risky that if you miss one single step — poorly explained within ISTA — the system triggers ANTITHEFT LOCK. > Meaning: even in an authorised service centre, system can accidentally delete the configuration and end up needing not only a new iBMUCP, but also all new battery modules. > BMW refuses to provide training access for ISTA usage Everything about this screams greed driven over-engineering. Since when are error prone processes and lack of access to information better for safety? We live in a world where everyone justifies taking user hostile actions with some variation of "safety". Software and hardware are locked down, backdoored, need manufacturer approval to operate even when original parts are used, etc.
  - jinzo 10mo ago
    I won't go into details about 'training access for ISTA usage' - cause I don't know what exactly Vanja means by this - but generally speaking in EU BMW provides the easiest access from all OEMs for aftermarket repair. Everyone has to provide it by law, but BMW has the most straightforward way of registering/paying/using it. For sure not ideal, but far from really being problematic IMHO. But other than that I mostly agree, I don't think that the over-engineering is greed driven - but the EU Manufacturers (but honestly, even other ones) have a really hard time with anything software based. Be it in car or outside of it. But BMW is far from the worst on that front. P.S: VW ODIS original diagnostic is based on Eclipse :D
    - gmueckl 10mo ago
      My experience with many German mechanical and electrical engineers is that they have a tendency to think of software like a magical cheap and malleable part on a BOM that can make their arbitrary design work. Especially the mechanical engineers like a nice little black box that they screw on and wire into their machine to make it go brrr once they turn it on. That kind of thinking along with some calcification of organizational structures in/around R&D teams seems to be the cause for the rather dysfunctional software development at the German car companies. Software dev doesn't thrive in this environment. Volkswagen probably had the right idea on paper when they created Cariad as a subsidiary software development company to isolate the devs, but then they ruined it by importing their own culture into it again.
entrox 10mo ago
> There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error. Yes there is. Either nobody is engineering towards that aspect or it is a conscious decision, deliberating between two different buckets: bill-of-material cost per unit and estimated impact on your warranty & goodwill budget. Whatever is deemed to be cheaper will win. Source: I work at an automotive OEM and one of my first projects almost two decades ago was how to anchor after-sales requirements into the engineering process. For example, we did things like introducing special geometry into the CAD models representing the space that needs to be left free so a mechanic can fit his hands with a tool inside. These would then be considered in the packaging process. If you consider these are two completely different organizations, it becomes a very tricky problem to solve.
- actionfromafar 10mo ago
  It's like the manufacturer discovering to their complete surprise they are building a car. :-D
- close04 10mo ago
  > BMW refuses to provide training access for ISTA usage Refusing access to training isn't a BoM issue by any means. Neither is a repair process that's so error prone that it can do even more damage to the car. We are surrounded by evidence that manufacturers in every field are taking decisions that are hostile towards their customers in the chase for profits. With the rise of EVs with far fewer moving parts needing constant maintenance, the manufacturers had to shift to different revenue streams, like killing repairability and locking everything behind manufacturer approval. This is a professional shop voicing the complaints, not a random guy trying to do a fix on the side of the road. Imagine someone told you they work for Apple and the reason everything is soldered, glued, stacked in a way it will never survive disassembly, and every bit of software and hardware in the device needs the manufacturer's blessing to be replaced or just keep running is because it was cheaper and safer this way. > it becomes a very tricky problem to solve. It was a solved problem for everything mechanical where locking it down or preventing people from learning wasn't really an option. How did it become tricky again just now when we deal with far more flexible software and possibility to lockdown?

bluescrn 10mo ago

Many people drive older cars worth less than £4000. Sticking to old/cheap cars seems like an increasingly good option with so many scare stories about the pain and extreme expense of getting modern cars, particularly EVs, repaired. And the impending ban on new ICE vehicles seems likely to lead to more older cars being kept on the road for a lot longer.

jacquesm 10mo ago
My current car is my last. It's a 1997 and it runs pretty much as good as new and I expect the thing to outlive me.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- jandrese 10mo ago
  Depends on the parts situation. As someone who works on my own cars I've become increasingly distressed at the car parts industry. Even OEM parts, when they are still available, seem to have had a dramatic decrease in quality over the past couple of decades. This is even assuming the correct part is shipped in the first place, which is another problem that has become entirely too common, especially in an age where everything is computerized. So many times you get a box with the correct part number on the outside but the wrong part inside. If you have the parts and the will it's possible to keep any car running close to forever. That said if you've gotten to the point where the frame is totally rusted out then maybe it's time to consider moving on.
  - jacquesm 10mo ago
    Plastics. Those are the hard to source bits. Plastic doesn't stay plastic for ever and NOS can be dried out just as much as the bits that are in the car. Most other things are easy to source, and anything made of steel can be fixed (zero rust, so far).
    - jandrese 10mo ago

jacquesm 10mo ago

Yes, it is insane. It's a fuse. They must have some stats on how often those things need replacing and it should have been accessible. The customer has - when they buy the car - absolutely no way of knowing what kind of surprises like this there are hidden in the vehicle and besides, it kills the second hand market so you can only trade your vehicle to a BMW dealership where they can absorb those costs for a fraction of what it will cost an end user. BMW is a crap brand in spite of their reputation, we've had one leased Mini in our company and it is the very last time we do business with BMW, that thing was more in the shop than out of it with electrical issues. A friend had pretty much every BMW ever made since he got wealthy enough to afford them (car enthusiast) and his experience is much the same, but he keeps buying them.

lazide 10mo ago
Fuses are not items that should be replaced normally - they are self-destroying emergency protections for the electrical system. If it is protecting that end users can plug arbitrary loads into, that is one thing - but this doesn’t sound like that? Why did that fuse blow? Because if that is not addressed, it’s likely to just blow again.
- jacquesm 10mo ago
  I think the people that replace fuses are aware of the potential issues around them. The article - which I'm sure you've read so don't take this as commentary on your comment - details that in other electric vehicles, for instance Tesla this is handled quite differently: "While Tesla’s pyrofuse costs €11 and the BMS reset is around 50€, allowing the car to be safely restored, BMW’s approach borders on illogical engineering, with no benefit to safety, no benefit to anti-theft protection — the only outcome is the generation of billable labour hours and massive amounts of needless electronic/lithium waste." It's not a choice between 'ridiculously inaccessible with the potential to create more damage than your car is worth' and 'push to reset'. There are many options in between, some of which would be a happy medium between the two that protect both safety, the environment and the customers' wallet. Which BMW's solution clearly isn't.

RealityVoid 10mo ago

Yes, it's insane. People working in the field have their perception warped by what they see around them.

jinzo 10mo ago
I mean, I don't think my perception is warped by what I see. But by "am I willing to risk that my repair will kill someone, because they wanted cheaper repair"? Or even if not kill, maybe just burn down their car (+ house,...). "Am I willing to use cheap tools, not rated for 800V (or 400V) god knows how many Amps?". Because this is not software development - you can be killed REALLY quickly working on a HV EV battery pack. It's no joke. For sure it'll cost more than working on a regular car, where there is danger, but a lot less. And that's just the basic thinking, without going deeper into why its more expensive to repair stuff like this.

potato3732842 10mo ago

You, you are the problem. It's not excusable to do this to the product because of some hand wavey napkin math about liability. Understand how people will interact with your product and then use that information to avoid doing things like routing power where firefighters want to cut and you'll accomplish the same thing without a stupid expensive hair trigger fuse.

jinzo 10mo ago
I am a problem, but on the other spectrum - OEMs ain't getting the repair €€€ because people like me repair stuff (but a different approach than Vanja). Then, almost no manufacturer that sells in the EU knows how to do this (Renault is almost the only one that doesen't have pyrofuses in the battery, almost everyone else has). The catch is, the routed power is not problematic, the problem is when something gets squished and redirects that routed power to somewhere else. Which tends to happen in a metal tincan.

torginus 10mo ago

If you and BMW are correct - if we take it for a fact that a simple fender-bender can make batteries develop life-threatening faults, which absolutely require a 4k euro inspection that involves complete disassembly and specialist equipment, then that means that EVs are unsuitable for public use. So either all EVs need to be scrapped forever, or BMW needs to engineer a more tractable solution to the problem, or BMW is overreacting and overcharging customers.

jinzo 10mo ago
No, from my experience, a simple fender-bender does not cause this.
- RealityVoid 10mo ago
  Yeah, that's OP's point then, that a fender bender causing this is an overreaction from BMW
  - jinzo 10mo ago
    We don't have the full picture. Like I mentioned too many times in this thread, I know EV Clinic head boss Vanja likes to overreact and twists stuff to fit into his narrative. Not saying this one was not a fender bender, but I take all his stuff with a grain of salt. Mostly because I worked with him AND work on the same stuff he does - and it usually doesen't match up to what I'm seeing to the degree he 'dramaticizes'.
- torginus 10mo ago
  In the article, it was mentioned that the issue can be caused by hitting the curb, there's a guy in the comments who says his VW grenaded itself this exact way just while charging (luckily his car was in warranty).

neuralRiot 10mo ago

I also work in this field, and I feel manufacturers like to exaggerate the dangers as a liability umbrella, aside of disassembling the battery itself it’s very hard to even access the HV components in a dangerous way, every HV connector has an interlocking line that opens the battery internal contactor so other than hacking the HV line with a saw I don’t see how you could “touch” the live wires.