If I buy an EV, does it mean I’ll have to get it serviced and repaired by expensive dealerships rather than local independent mechanics?
For now, the answer is yes. Electric cars aren’t as mechanically complicated as combustion engine cars, but the big issue here is the relative newness of the tech, and more importantly the sheer amount of power and voltage running through the batteries.
The batteries on an electric car are enormous – the one in a Volkswagen ID.4, currently Ireland’s most popular electric car, holds 80kWh of energy, and runs on a 400-volt electrical system. For comparison, the power in your house runs at 230 volts, and the average Irish household burns through about 11kWh (kilowatt hours) worth of energy each day. So that’s slightly more than seven times the amount of raw energy needed to run your house for a day, and at half-again as high a voltage. If you grabbed hold of a naked positive wire in your house, you’d know all about it and then very shortly afterwards so too would your local ambulance service, so try to imagine what would happen if someone were careless with the components of a 400-volt, 80kWh battery.
More and more, carmakers are even moving to 800-volt systems, and even more energy storage to increase the useable range of a car. So Hyundai and Kia both use 800-volt batteries for their Ioniq 5, EV6, and EV9 models, while Audi and Porsche use 800-volt batteries, with up to 94kWh capacity, in the new Q6 and Macan Electric.
Of course, it’s not the voltage that necessarily can prove fatal, it’s more about the amps and the ohms, but whatever way to choose to measure the output of a battery, they can be enormously lethal if they’re not handled correctly, in a safe environment, by trained technicians.
Which is why it’s best, for now at any rate, to bring your EV to a main dealer for servicing. Generally, servicing costs will actually be lower than for a combustion engine car, as EVs have fewer moving parts, so there’s no oil to top up, no air filter to replace, no spinning mechanical bits that need inspection.
When it comes to servicing, most EVs will require only some minor fluid top-ups, brake pad and disc checks (and replacements, when needed, but then EVs also tend to have less brake wear as they can use the kinetic braking effect of their electric motor, handily pumping some charge back into the battery as they do so (that’s what regenerative braking is), and maybe a reset of their various safety sensors and cameras.
Actually, it’s that last part that causes some of the expense. As with batteries, the safety sensors and cameras require very careful and precise calibration if they’re to work properly, and believe us – you want them to work properly. Hence why you really do need properly trained technicians to look after this stuff.
In general, what happens with car technicians is that they get trained up by the big carmakers and dealers, and then eventually they move on, and either work for or set up on their own as smaller independent garages, sometimes specialising in one particular make or even model, and are then able to offer much more affordable servicing and repair work than the main dealers (lower overheads, smaller pool of staff etc) but with that expertise and knowledge baked in.
There simply hasn’t been a chance for that to happen, as yet. Robert Guy is director of group aftersales services for Volkswagen Group Ireland, and as he guides us around the company’s huge training facility on the western fringes of Dublin, he lays out the shortfall in the Irish market at present. “We usually run at about 85 per cent of what we need, in terms of the number of technicians,” says Guy. “That’s been exacerbated by the pandemic, and there is now a shortage of apprentices coming into the trade.”
That shortfall is about to become more serious, as the need for training is ramping up. While future mechanics and technicians won’t have to replace as many sparkplugs nor fix as many gearboxes (although they will have to deal with those on older models for some time to come), they will have to contend with incredibly high-tech driver assistance systems, and software that requires three data cores, running at once, just to function.
As an example, Volkswagen Ireland’s head of training, John Cunningham, points out that “adjusting the tracking on a car used to be relatively simple, but now, when you do that, you have to show all of these high-end system that the tracking has been changed, otherwise things such as lane-keeping steering won’t be able to keep the car straight.”
Guy likens working on a modern car to “a Boeing 737″ and the training is intense. It can take as long as 10 years to train someone to “master technician” standard – easily the equivalent of a third-level degree, and there is some rancour that such qualifications are not given their due recognition – and even once done, it’s easy to lose that person to another industry. “We create ready-made technicians, and then the likes of Intel come in, and we lose people out the door in front of us,” says Cunningham.
A significant problem is the perception of the job among parents, reckon both Cunningham and Guy, and both the whiff of grease that still taints those perceptions, and worries that long-terms careers in motor servicing just aren’t going to be possible as the electric revolution takes hold.
All of that plays into how, where, and how expensively you get your electric car serviced. As with so much to do with EVs, those of us who own and drive one now really are the pioneers, with both the upsides and downsides that implies.
