Posted on 11/14/2022 7:27:34 AM PST by DFG
The owner of a Hummer electric truck was shocked to learn replacing his tail lights is a rather expensive venture.
“Had a shocker today,” the owner wrote in a Hummer EV Facebook group. “A new passenger side rear light for the Hummer EV; $4,040 just to buy it.”
Car review website the Drive confirmed General Motor’s list price for one tail light is $3,045. Without factoring in labor, the list price for a set of tail lights runs for nearly $6,100, a cost equaling more than 5% of the Hummer EV’s MSRP.
“The taillights in the Hummer EV have small microcontrollers installed within them. These chips control unique lighting functions in their respective lights,” the Drive suggested as a reason for the high price. “Additionally, the Hummer EV is a fairly limited-run vehicle thus far, meaning parts are generally more expensive until economies of scale kick in.”
Maintenance expenses, in addition to software mishaps that have left EV drivers stranded , have drawn criticism in relation to the United States’s push toward electric vehicles.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
Talked to a neighbor the other day that bought a tesla Y model last year....he was bemoaning the fact that he just had to replace one tire at a cost of $400.
Along with 10 other reasons I just couldn’t bring myself to buy a car from a manufacturer that forces you to take it back to them for every little thing.
That’s progress
Then don't ever buy a BMW or a Mercedes........................
I attended UCSD on a shoestring budget. Just enough to cover books/registration/parking and a daily 50 mile round trip drive to the campus. The calculator I used for all of my lower division classes was a 4 function plus a sign key purchased at Radio Shack for $110. I moved up to a Casio scientific calculator as I started my junior series classes. It was tough to compete against my fellow students with HP-35, HP-45 calculators that had a 1 button square root. I had to do it using my slide rule for first approximation, then a successive approximation with paper/pencil and 4 function calculator.
My graduation gift was an HP-25 programmable calculator. My first real "program" was an algorithm to generate a genetic crossover frequency table from the Schaum's Genetics study guide. No more interpolation.
Vehicles of all kinds are far too complex. Nobody needs all the gadgetry in them. Nobody.
I wish I could buy a vehicle with only basic functions but still comfortable and reliable and efficient. I don’t need or want a big screen TV in the dash or any kind of entertainment system, no auto parking, no follow radar, no 360 cameras. None of that junk. Somehow I managed to drive millions of miles over the laast 50 years without any of this expensive and unreliable crap.
it’s like solar....
Why care about $4o then?
Why are all these stories about the latest generation of Hummer being overpriced, over powered, over sized, and over annoying, just like every other generation of Hummer, blaming it all on being electric? Like do you think the lights on previous Hummers were cheap? It’s a Hummer, big dumb vehicle for people with more money than sense. That’s been true for 30 years, diesel, gas and electric. The power source got not nothing to do with it.
Most cheaper mom and pop car repair shops won’t much about electric repair
Expensive dealers the only way
I worked and saved for an HP-45 calculator when I was in high school, it was the most expensive thing in the house except maybe for the fridge!
Makes you wonder why they don’t standardize on parts and freeze the design doesn’t it?
My truck comes with three different versions of the throttle position sensor. The one for trucks with a manual transmission is different from all others and is no longer produced. Why do they do these things?
I would not touch a Mercedes because they are few in number, parts become nearly impossible to find and they really aren’t worth the money. A guy I know contributed one of those near showroom clean Mercedes to the scrap yard, Spun bearing in a not very old vehicle. Spun bearings should be a thing of the past and sure not in a high end vehicle like a Mercedes.
Sadly, the same applies to most other vehicles now. They are more like rolling computers in a box instead of vehicles.
I wish I could find a Glider type Buick Lucerne. That is the high mark of acceptable complexity for me and it goes too far. Why build a three piece block?
I think if someone built a simple, comfortable, reliable and affordable car he could clean up.
It would have been cheaper to just buy a NEW ONE!..................
You cannot fix stupid, even with duct tape.
But you can silence it for a while.
Electric vehicles, only now in the process of being invented.
In the future, I can see a widespread acceptance of vehicles that deliver motive power to the wheels through electric motors. Electric motors, overall, deliver a greater percentage of the energy as useful work than most other devices used to introduce rotary motion.
The means by which these electric motors get their supply of electricity is the issue in question. Sure, everybody thinks “batteries”, but most battery designs are either extremely heavy in relation to the amount of energy that can be stored in the array, or they are very expensive if greater energy density in the objective, and after a certain point, the battery array can be unpredictably dangerous if the charging or discharging rate is too rapid for the design, resulting in a very hot and perhaps not-extinguishable blaze. And batteries have a rather limited range of ambient temperatures in which they may provide the optimum power output.
The ability to extract and store adequate quantities of hydrogen would make the use of fuel cells for the point generation of electricity feasible, and eventually, this may be the engineering approach that makes electric vehicles feasible. Meanwhile, as a sort of bridge, the use of some sort of hybrid, that uses an internal combustion engine to generate the necessary electrical power to drive the electric motors that actually drive the wheels appears to be a compromise solution. But of course, the internal combustion engine would use some kind of hydrocarbon fuel, and that would involve extraction, refining, transporting and retailing petroleum, and to make that more feasible, most of the regulatory and taxation burden would have to be lifted.
My friend has a Nissan 370z convertible. The power top control unit went out. The part alone was near $4000.00, and it took the dealer several attempts to get the top working correctly with the new part.
That’s sort of true.
There is nothing special about the taillight due to it being an EV. The high price is due to the low production quantity of parts. There are zero economies of scale in this production line, so everything costs a fortune. And that is due to the low quantity of EV Hummers being made.
Again - not saying that this is specifically an EV issue - but this is what it is happening to EV versions and not regular versions.
Ultimately GM and Ford will be defacto owned by the government who will chronically subsidize the money losing companies to “preserve jobs and promote a greater good”. This is socialism in action.
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