this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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What do you mean by “good”? I see a constant stream of articles about EVs being enshitified with cloud-attached surveillance tech and vulnerable to unwelcome remote hacking. To privacy advocates and tech rights proponents this means the ones designed as EVs are worse.
If you mean efficient, I’d be tempted to say the difference would be negligible in the big scheme of things. Factory produced EVs are not only surveillance systems on wheels, they are more hackable by threat agents than they are by their owners. Whereas a converted EV is likely more conducive to a /right to repair/.
The best scenario I could envision is this:
You bring your car to shop of expert converters. You watch over their shoulder as they convert it. This serves as training to know your own car. And as well to know how the power generator is built. You drive away with an open source EV that you can fix yourself, pulling behind it a trailor with a power generator, which is then connected to the charging inlet of the EV.
Okay, that last sentence was a joke, to be clear.. Some Teslas have been spotted pulling a power generator on a trailer which then plugged into the car. I hope that practice of towing a generator is not actually a serious trend.
I was talking about efficiency and range, which typically falls pretty short of cars intended to be EVs. But there are also other changes like wheels being closer to the front ends of the vehicles and not needing the transmission hump in the floor, giving more passenger and cargo space.
All new cars are terrible for privacy, EV or not. Small shops doing conversions on older cars will absolutely be better in that regard. But as soon as you make it a mass market thing, the same incentives to invade the privacy of their consumers will end up with the same result. Better privacy and data protection laws are the only way to stop that, I think.