Changing the pads on your car’s brakes is a pretty straightforward and inexpensive process on most vehicles. However, many modern vehicles having electronic parking brakes giving manufacturers a new avenue to paywall simple DIY repairs.
Most EVs will rarely, if ever, need to replace their mechanical brake pads as in most driving situations the car will be predominantly relying on regenerative braking to slow down. A hot hatch like the Ioniq 5N, however, might go through brakes a lot faster if it spends a lot of time at the track, which is what happened with Reddit user [SoultronicPear].
Much to their chagrin, despite buying the required $60/wk subscription to the National Automotive Service Task Force (NASTF) and the $2,000 interface tool, [SoultronicPear]’s account was suspended because it was not intended for use for anyone but “service professionals.” Not exactly a Right-to-Repair friendly move on Hyundai’s part. After trying a number of different third party tools, they finally found a Harbor Freight T7 bidirectional scan tool was able to issue the parking brake retract command to perform the pad swap, albeit not without throwing some error codes in the process.
Electrification of vehicles should simplify repairs, but manufacturers are using it to do the opposite. Perhaps they should read our Minimal Motoring Manifesto? There is a glimmer of hope in the promises of Slate and Telo, but we’ll have to see if they make it to production first.
I suspect the gent who diy’d an EV Fiat 600 here in Portland some years back was on the right track. At least he won’t be subject to corporate greed mongers when he wants to fix something.
This kinda of thing just ensures I will never buy a Hyundai.
Lol shit cars that will have a catastrophic failure before 50k miles
And that is the easy part… just wait for knock to kick you in the balls every 2 weeks
Farmers have been fighting this for years, loosing the use of equipment during harvest can be disaster.
My sister has needed to drive over 100 miles one way to get a part they needed to get a harvester back working. Tough way to make a living.
Here is a thought…
Quit driving like an asshat for a change?
I’m still rocking my 2013 pads and they are starting to get measuringly EOL
And before any asshat chimes in the local shop said I got a little while before it became shady… and that was 6500 ish miles ago while we moved to another state
Did you read the whole thing? This is a car specifically designed to be driven hard on off-highway private racing courses. One of it’s main selling points.