Software Is The Biggest Problem In Electric Car Technology Development

Tesla also has problems in its software (photo: x @teslacarsonely)

JAKARTA - One of the big sales points for electric vehicles (EVs) is that they require less maintenance than traditional gasoline-fueled vehicles. There is no change in oil, less dirt, less moving parts and that kind of thing.

However, the EV is basically a giant computer on wheels and the computer is actually not problem-free.

Recent quality studies of JD Power have come out, and the results are not good for EVs. In some ways, this is not surprising. As in previous versions of the survey, battery-powered and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles performed worse than gasoline-fueled vehicles in almost every repair category measured by JD Power.

JD Power measures quality based on reported problems per 100 vehicles of certain brands. According to the survey, people who own internal fuel vehicles report having 180 problems per 100 vehicles (PP100), while EV buyers have 266 PP100.

The problem is not much related to the mechanical EV of motorbikes, batteries, etc. and is almost entirely related to technology.

The state-of-the-art BEV and PHEV owners are experiencing problems with a fairly high severity that they have to take their new vehicles to dealers with three times higher levels than those with gasoline-fueled vehicles, Frank Hanley, senior director of car benchmarking at JD Power, said in a statement.

Like everything in EVs, you need to separate Tesla from others thanks to this excessive representation of electric car makers among people who own EVs. Tesla usually performs better than the traditional automaker EV in previous JD Power surveys.

But now the gap has closed, where Elon Musk's company got the rankings as bad as the others. JD Power attributes this to major design changes to Tesla, such as removing control of traditional features such as turning signals and glass-erasing sticks (wiper).