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
Well the ev probably won’t knock.
Probably. If anyone could manage, it’s Hyundai.
Hyundai is not the only company doing this. Volvo, for example, although there is a roundabout way to do this mechanically. Worse, try to service a Volvo. You have to pay to READ the service manual to find such things as torque specs. A NHTSA safety issue, IMO.
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.
Note that this is not a treat (threat) of electric vehicles, but of the ongoing computerization of vehicles. I guess Hyundai will happily pull off the same trick in their petrol vehicles.
well, to Hyundais defence it might not be related to making $$$ here.
The whole EPB system has very likely a lower ASIL classification as it prevents obvious hazards or is providing a fallback protection.
With that many systems may require a cyber security assessment and the whole thing gets tough, if the TARA finds yellow/red items (see ISO21434). And some “temper protection” is a mitigation for some cases.
Sometimes the automotive safety guys are even tougher than the bean counters… ;)
That is a very dangerous assumption, since brake components will corrode if not regularly used. If you drive your car like a granny, always brake with the motor/regen and feather the brake pedal, chances are your brakes will get stuck after a winter or two. That’s because the brakes never get hot, the hydraulic pistons don’t move but a tiny bit, and rust and dirt accumulates everywhere and isn’t removed by the mechanical action of using the brakes.
The next time you have to use the mechanical brakes, you’ll find that they grind and stutter, and may no longer release after you let go of the pedal.
Same thing with regular cars: if you don’t drive much and the car’s just sitting on the parking lot, whenever you do drive, the first few miles the brakes are going to feel awful. Take it up to highway speed and brake hard on the off-ramp (make sure nobody’s behind you), repeat once or twice, and the grinding and stuttering clears away. If you didn’t do that regularly, the pistons would start to jam and the pads would move closer and closer to the discs until they start to drag. Running the brakes hot now and then makes the components expand from the heat and pushes the pistons back into their cylinders, restoring the clearances and working the grime out of the gaps.
For reading:
https://doi.org/10.56578/pmdf020203
The takeaway is that manufacturers can apply surface treatments and coatings to extend the lifespan of new brake discs/pads in EV use, but the long term performance when the parts inevitably do wear down and the surface treatments are lost is a different concern.
In other words, the brakes will perform well for a while, and then start deteriorating faster in the lack of use like regular brakes would. It doesn’t solve the issue, it delays the symptoms – most likely just long enough to put the car out of warranty or off the hands of the first owner, adding to the problem of mounting “maintenance debt” with second hand vehicles. Instead of fixing the problems while they’re small and relatively cheap to remedy, they’re left to accumulate until small problems become big costly problems.
The reason why cars eventually get taken off the road and scrapped is often because they develop multiple simultaneous problems that require repairs exceeding the market value of the car, so it’s cheaper to just replace the car at once instead of attempting to maintain it. If you’re looking at a brake system overhaul, battery system overhaul, and whatever else in the span of the next few years, you’d be a fool to pay a lot of money for the car. That creates a sharp drop in the value of second hand EVs beyond a certain age. That goes back to the first point: when soon to be broken EVs can be bought for a song, it makes more sense to just get another one and drive it until it breaks. Treat it as a hot potato – get rid of it as soon as it starts to burn your hand.
The design point of “no maintenance required” turns it into a disposable product. This lack of a second life and the rapid loss of value shifts the cost onto the first owner, making EVs less affordable to new car buyers.
It doesn’t matter how much you “granny” the brakes, you are going to use the pads enough to prevent your hypothetical problems.
I’ve run into something similar while rowing gears in my old manual Camry forever ago, I engine braked so much that the rotors started to rust while driving! Never got to the point of calipers locking up but I can see how that would occur.
2018 Toyota Camry Hybrid with 100K miles is here . Original breakpads are still good.
I’m not fan of hyundai, but let’s be honest, they’re nor the first or the worst in this. Volkswagen (car i own personaly), but not only them, don’t let you change rear braking pads on cars with electric parking brake without a diagnostic tool. Modern cars have displays and electronics more than enough to avoid to use diagnostic tools. But people still give them money, why would they not continu to do so?
As far as I remember, Audi was the first brand to pull this trick off, fully engaging the e-brake when you pulled the pads out, ICE vehicles.
That’s dumb. So his money isn’t good enough for them? They expect him to take the car to a shop that has already paid instead of giving them more money than they would have received otherwise?