Slightly off topic, but I think mechanics will still be relevant if electric vehicles take over the world. I imagine there’ll still be plenty of blend door replacements, fan motor replacements, solenoid replacements, battery replacements, corroded terminal replacements, Freon charges, etc. Machines break down, even electrically driven machines. Even the electric motors themselves. Heck, the gas engine in my 2005 car and my 2005 truck has outlasted the AC blower motors in both of those vehicles.
I’ll admit, I haven’t researched EV’s very much. I’m not convinced it’s a done deal that they will be viable as a 100% replacement for petrol engines. It’s not like the idea just came out, although it’s definitely a more viable idea today than it was 20 years ago. I have some friends with a Tesla of some variety. They really like it. They even take it on relatively extended trips, they just have to plan the route to hit charging stations, which they said wasn’t terribly difficult and will improve, I’m sure. They also mentioned they’d watch Netflix as it charged for 45 minutes. I can see that being a huge issue. I’m imagining a travel center with a host of EV’s all recharging for 30-40 minutes isn’t going to fly. I’m sure they’ll improve the charge time as well…but you’ve got to generate that electric power in order to charge them from somewhere. And right now it’s still coal or natural gas in a lot of (most) places which I assume makes EV’s somewhat pointless in regard to CO2 production. If we go nuclear for power…well, is nuclear waste or CO2 worse for the environment? Hydroelectric? Didn’t we stop some damming in years past because of environmental concerns? Wind? Yeah, I don’t think so. Solar, seems viable as a supplement but not so much as a replacement. So if we’re getting the electricity to charge electric vehicles from the same sources we get it from now, how are EV’s any more environmentally friendly? We’ll probably start burning all that non used gasoline and oil to power generators to charge our EV’s! I’m kidding…sort of. Stranger things have happened.
I don’t think anyone said they wouldn’t. What’s going to change are their skill sets. Keep up on your skill sets and you should be OK. It’s like what I saw in my Career. If I didn’t keep up with my technical skills over the years I’d be an out of work Fortran Programmer. But for a lot of people - change isn’t good. Slow progressive change they can handle…but a lot of people don’t like the quick large changes. A lot of people in engineering (especially Software) get burned out after 10 years or get stuck in a job where they could stay with the old technology. Then when they were forced to find a job due to down sizing or some other reason they find themselves trying to play catchup. That’s very difficult to do. I suspect the same will be true for many mechanics. They won’t be willing to change/adapt to the drastic changes ahead. Some will adapt and thrive. Others won’t.
Someone made the statement that a lot of mechanics will be standing around with nothing to do, so I was responding to that. I guess EV’s might put a lot of quick lube joints out of business, so maybe that’s what they were referring to.
Yeah, that was me. I didn’t say that because I think things won’t need fixing, but because I think the average vehicle owner, who today is neglectful of maintenance regarding anything that won’t kill the car in short order, is going to maintain the car very poorly. When you no longer have a “change the oil on schedule or risk being stranded by a dead motor” factor to consider, you’re probably not going to get all that much maintained. Yes, blend doors will occasionally break, and someone will fix that.
But mechanics/technicians spend a lot of time today changing oil, and spark plugs, and air filters, and head gaskets, and exhausts, and fuel injectors, and doing other work that’s directly related to internal combustion engines, and all of that work disappears when you swap in an electric motor.
We will still have mechanics. Heck, we still have buggy manufacturers, and the car supplanted the horse a century ago. But we have considerably fewer buggy manufacturers now than we used to, and I suspect we’ll have fewer mechanics as well (though still many more than we have buggy producers), because all other things being equal, an electric car is going to require much less service than a gas car does.
Combine that with owners choosing not to replace things like blown shocks (because they don’t replace them now, judging by all the bouncing cars I see on the road) and a lot of EVs will probably never see the inside of a shop other than Discount Tire. By the time something like the blend door breaks, the owner might just decide to unload the car and start fresh rather than putting money into the old car.
Exactly. A lot of normal maintenance will just go away or drastically reduced. Any major component that broke won’t be fixed, but just replaced. Changing out a battery pack or electric motor is several magnitudes easier then changing out an ICE engine.
Totally see your point, and almost certainly the lube shops will be gone, as well as some mechanics, especially the oil change boys assuming petrol cars are phased out. From my past few automotive repairs (excluding fluid changes) probably half or more won’t be needed:
Water pump replacement- I’m assuming the electric motors will be air cooled only? If so, not needed.
HVAC fan motor replacement- still going to have that.
Brake pads and rotors- I don’t really know, to be honest. Do EV’s have a similar setup, or is most of the braking done through the motor itself?
Window regulator replacement- still going to need that.
Cat converter replacement- nope.
You’re definitely right that there are a lot of extra bits on a gas engine that an EV won’t have. I’m assuming there’ll be some components specific to an EV that a gas engine doesn’t have also, although probably less so, but I don’t really know…
As far as i’m aware they have pads and rotors but at least with hybrids you might not wear the pads and rotors out that quickly. Depending on how hard you brake.
Yep, most EVs allow for almost one-pedal driving, you let up on the ‘gas’ pedal and the electric motors turn into generators, recharging the batteries and slowing the car to a crawl. Since the brakes will need to be big enough to stop the car in an emergency, they could well last the life of the car.
Should be a steady supply of gas powered vehicles to work on yet, in most areas. My current vehicles are 8, 16, and 16 years old and I don’t plan on getting rid of any of them within the next 4 years. If the average age of vehicles on the road today is12 years and EV’s aren’t the only choice to buy as a new vehicle for a couple of decades…it’s going to be awhile before the gas motor rigs are gone. Unless you’re in LA or NY or something. I can see larger cities going all electric before rural areas. Would make more sense, anyway. I imagine we’re a pretty looong way away from no gas engines in rural MS. I know exactly one person that owns an EV right now. Unless the govt mandates no more production or does some goofball thing like that. Which, I suppose isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Judging by the lack of new cars at local dealers, we may be keeping the older cars on the road even longer. I could find exactly zero new half ton trucks on the Ford and GM lots. It’s a fairly small town, but still…kinda spooky to see NONE.
Which brands?
Just for the heck of it, I checked the inventory at the local Subaru dealership, and they currently have 18 new cars in stock. The local Toyota dealer has 56 new cars sitting on their lot. The Kia dealer has 47 new cars available. These are the 3 closest dealerships to my home.
I think that the Japanese and Korean manufacturers have been able to navigate the worldwide microchip shortage much better than the US mfrs.
GM and Ford. We buy scrap from an automotive supplier (I believe they supply only domestics, have seen Fomoco and Mopar branding). They usually send at least 2 53’ vans full of various material a month, sometimes 3. They didn’t send anything last month. It took all month for “chip shortage” to pop into my brain. If the autos aren’t being built, they’re probably not stockpiling parts to supply the manufacturers above a certain level. They must’ve hit that level. Strange times to be in the scrap biz between plant shutdowns due to COVID a while back, chip shortages, etc. It’s always something. Mill demand is still climbing, though. Seems kinda odd.
Their products are… let’s just say… not the top-sellers in my area, with the exception of police departments and other government entities. A few weeks ago, I took an informal, totally unscientific survey of the cars in the parking lot at my closest State Park, and it broke down something like:
Toyota 5
Kia 1
Subaru 5
Honda 7
Hyundai 5
Nissan 2
Chevy 1
Ford 2
Porsche 1
Chrysler/Dodge 0
The new car inventory where I work is 1/3 what it normally is, they began reducing the inventory in March, 2020. Dealers can’t afford to keep a 15 million dollar inventory in a depressed market.
F150 is the best selling vehicle, out of all vehicles. Or I think I read that somewhere a year or two ago… Maybe that was an ad.
I’m a well aged GM man, myself. Or Toyota. I just never really liked the aesthetics, inside or out, of the 1/2 ton Toyota’s, though. I’m not sure what it is that I’m averse too, they’re good trucks.
But yeah, if I was car or midsize suv browsing, I’d have been in a different lot. No Asian brand lots locally though, I have to drive 30 miles or so to those, and this was more or less a 9 pm, “I feel like driving my truck somewhere” spur of the moment jaunt.
They are up fairly decent. We are at $8.50/hundred for shreddable steel, $10/hundred lb for whole autos. Shredder yards will pay a little more for the shreddable stuff. We feed a shredder in Memphis. #1 copper is approaching $4/lb, which I haven’t seen that since prior to 2008.
I remember we were at $10/hundred for cars in 08, then the next day we were paying $3! I hope the downturn (there always is one) isn’t that drastic.
It’s a small town. 30 miles isn’t that far in a rural area like this. I drive half that to work daily. Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai probably still outsell the domestics here too as far as cars and midsize SUV’s. Subaru…I see very few of those, but AWD isn’t really needed and I think you’d have to drive to Memphis (90 miles) to find a Subaru dealer. I don’t think there’s one in Tupelo, but never looked.