Repairability: the HOP association tackles “disposable cars”

The automobile is transforming. The industry is not only moving towards electric cars, but it is also beginning many other transitions towards ever more connected and automated cars.

The French association HOP therefore looked into the repairability of modern cars in a report entitled Accelerated obsolescence of thermal and electric cars.

Battery repairability at the heart of the lifespan of electric cars

If the authors do not question the need for electrification of the automobile sector, they deplore the uneven repairability of electric car batteries. Their pack is generally broken down into modules, which include the battery cells, but the latter are rarely repairable individually. Most often, it is necessary to replace an entire module, which can represent up to a quarter of the battery, or even the pack as a whole. With the arrival of batteries cell-to-pack which do without modules, or even cell-to-car where the cells are directly integrated into the chassis, their repairability could still be reduced.

Worse, the packs are sometimes sealed, or filled with a kind of foam, “which makes it almost impossible to remove the module”. This complicates the interventions of independent garages, as the technicians of the specialized Revolte workshop deplore. “Tesla turns out to be one of the bad students, injecting 29 kg of pink sticky foam into its batteries until the end of 2022, replaced in 2023 by 4 kg of white foam”denounce the authors of the report.

They also deplore a lack of visibility on the degradation of battery capacity. The Euro 7 standard, currently under discussion, certainly plans to impose minimum remaining capacities to be respected, but it would be a question of an SoH (state of healthor state of health which expresses the capacity of a battery in relation to its initial capacity) of only 80% after five years or 100,000 km and 72% after eight years or 160,000 km.

For the rest, we observe much less frequent breakdowns in electric cars than in models with internal combustion engines. Their electronic components, such as their BMS (battery management system) or even their on-board charger, can however suffer from failures.

Software and associated obsolescence

It will have escaped no one’s attention that software is taking an increasingly important place in modern cars. Many manufacturers are even turning to Software Defined Vehicles (SDV), where software acquires a central place in the automotive product.

“If electronics can be a vector of progress in terms of repairability and reliability, it supposes the introduction of many well-known problems for smartphones”, explains HOP, who is concerned about access to manufacturers’ maintenance software. In fact, some of these issues have been manifesting themselves in automobiles since around the 1990s. Carrying out maintenance on a car without the appropriate diagnostic tool can make the slightest breakdown a real nightmare.

The authors of the report also warn of a possible planned obsolescence which could occur if manufacturers were to force the use of their old models via remote updates. For the moment, no case of this type has been revealed in the automobile, but there is a certain fog over the lifespan of the software support of the models, while more and more of them promise updates updated remotely. The latest update brought by Tesla to its Model 3 and Model Y is, for example, reserved for cars equipped with an AMD chip, produced since 2022 only. Nissan, for its part, disconnected the connected services from its first electric cars in anticipation of the shutdown of the 2G network in France.

Towards a fast-fashion phenomenon in the automobile?

HOP then fears seeing a fast-fashion phenomenon hit the automobile, with “disposable cars” difficult to repair. “The average age of scrapping today’s vehicles is 19 years old, will we be able to say the same about electric vehicles in 20 years?”, ask the authors of the report. For the moment, the market is moving towards a revaluation of used vehicles, in Europe at least, as the price of new cars moves further away from customers’ budgets. The French automobile fleet continues to age, for better and for worse. And if the 1.2 TCe and other 1.2 PureTech can give the impression that modern cars are unreliable, these bad examples should not make us forget that there was a time when vehicles could be scrapped around ten years ago. only years after leaving the dealership, because they were already eaten away by corrosion.

However, HOP is concerned about many practices that could harm the repairability of modern cars. Giga-casting, for example. This is a production technique which consists of molding very large chassis elements with huge presses, previously made up of numerous parts assembled by welding. If this technology makes it possible to reduce production costs, “at the slightest shock, it will be necessary to replace such an important part of the car that it will probably be more profitable to scrap it”worries HOP.

To avoid a scenario of “disposable cars”the HOP association makes several proposals:

• Integrate battery durability and repairability standards in Europe
• Guarantee the disassembly of vehicles
• Promote the market for spare parts from the circular economy (PIEC)
• Propose a repairability index
• Extend the legal warranty of the vehicle
• Preventing vehicle software obsolescence
• Supervise REP sectors to prioritize repair and reuse

The association also launched a petition “to put a STOP to future disposable cars and push for the implementation of demanding standards on new models.”