Some experts believe they could be among the first casualties of an impending electric car revolution.
Excerpt:
As a wave of electric vehicles quickly approaches, experts say, it could wash away a large portion of a skilled labor group that has been around for decades — the neighborhood auto mechanic.
The reason is simple: Unlike gas-powered engines, electric engines don’t require oil changes, have far fewer moving parts and rarely break down, eliminating much of the maintenance that repair shops rely on. The latest electric vehicles can be serviced using parts purchased online or fixed remotely through over-the-air updates.
The U.S. auto repair industry employs about 750,000 workers, nearly four times the number of people employed by the coal-mining industry. Though they are increasingly skilled and tech-savvy, many experts say, they are not prepared for the end of gas-powered transportation.
Unlike gasoline cars, electric vehicles require no traditional oil changes, fuel filters, spark plug replacements or emission checks. In most cases, you can wave goodbye to changing timing belts, differential fluid and transmission fluid. EV brake pad replacements are less frequent because regenerative braking returns energy to the battery, significantly reducing wear on mechanical brakes because they’re used less to slow the vehicle.
Analysts estimate that the repair bills for EVs would be lower and less frequent than the tabs of their gas-guzzling counterparts.
The Chevy Bolt’s maintenance schedule requires owners to rotate tires every 7,500 miles, replace the cabin air filter every 22,500 miles and have the coolant flushed every 150,000, according to Chevrolet. “And . . . yeah, that’s it,” as one writer recently mused. Some of those parts can be purchased online for less than $20.
Van Batenburg said that during the seven years he’s owned a Nissan Leaf, the car has required about one hour’s worth of maintenance total, which he performed himself. His maintenance costs, however extraordinary sounding, aren’t unusual, according to a random sampling of EV owners.
The auto technician of the future will need to become some combination of your company’s IT support guy with a car-lover’s mind, someone with the ability to change tires and operate diagnostic and scanning equipment to root out problems involving computer networks and data processing.
Even for repair shops on the cutting edge — often in urban areas where hybrid cars are already commonplace — survival may not be a matter of willingness to adapt, but by how quickly a business can reasonably do so. Though he doesn’t foresee his industry being wiped out by electric cars, Moss said he expects electric technology to arrive much faster than most analysts predict. “Technology compresses time,” he likes to say, which is why he thinks people should be worried about 2025 — not 2040.
