"I don't think you'll be fixing an inverter" Words of someone who does little with electronics I see. Having an inverter come apart as they've done is brilliant. Sometimes that $4,000 part really just needs a 50 cent capacitor replaced. DO NOT RIVET OR GLUE THOSE COMPONENTS, EVER!
@@wrxguyusa They need to worry about profiting on the car and not hoping to make money on parts. Some fools will still buy the $4k part because they don't know better. Those of us who'd prefer to get dirty will go the 50 cent method. Even then it's not unheard of for an issue to develop with capacitors and then they can have "cores" that must be returned to them for servicing. Then they'll wish they had screws so they could quickly repair them and be able to send them out to dealers who have to fix it under warranty.
Bravo to VW for submitting their own part for such an in-depth review! Thanks as always for the technical breakdown video, Sandy. These are always my favorites.
It gives them free tips from the experts. They won't hide anything from competitors anyway so why not get free tips on how to improve. Also VW engineers are probably really proud of what they have developed and want to get some recognition from other experts im the field
The holes in the lamination aren't just for weight savings. They are flux barriers that increase reluctance torque. In other words, they encourage the rotor to align to the stator's rotating magnetic field as the magnetic field prefers to flow through the metal and not the air gaps of the holes (path of least reluctance). Every manufacturer has their own recipe of magnet and flux barrier designs to balance trade offs in performance, efficiency, cost, and noise.
Opinion on the through bolts through the laminates? I finished working on a passenger car motor at a consultancy last year and bolts running through the laminates was not permissible on the grounds of Eddies and flux disruption...
I’m ok with the threaded fasteners personally. I really like what they did with the design. This tear down actually ups my respect for VW and their engineering team.
As a mechanic, yes. As a manufacturer for profit, not a perfect deal. That is why tesla comes on top. But finally we see good old german manufacturing?
As an automotive technician that specializes in low level repairs of electronics and other vehicle systems in vehicles where parts may be obsolete or simply uncommon, I give big kudos to VW for designing an inverter and powertrain system with obvious module-by-module replacement and repair in mind. Snap/press fits and swaged/staked/deformed fastening methods are the absolute bane of my existence and are absolutely antithetical to any sort of repairability. They may be great for penny parts where any failure immediately implies replacement rather than repair, simply due to economies of scale, a likely multi-thousand dollar inverter is definitely on the opposite end of that spectrum. To my mind, it's the equivalent of stating that IC engines should not even have head bolts. We can just weld the heads on and if you have a failure, well too bad, replace the whole thing. (We already know how good Ford is with sparkplug threads on the Triton and head bolts on the Powerstroke). With the world/industry focus shifting from absolute bottom dollar manufacturing to a more sustainable product life cycles, and even situations like our current pandemic-associated parts and chip shortages, designers need to plan for the fact that their customers will often want to repair rather than replace. I remember when the first hybrids came out and manufacturers and talking heads were saying nobody will EVER be disassembling and repairing battery packs! They're just too dangerous for the common person. Well, 2021 is here, and many many shops, techs and just regular owners can and do perform perfectly satisfactory cell replacements and other repairs on the packs. I think the Munro team have put forth a very nice look at the iD4's powertrain, but Sandy has dragged a bit too much early 2000s upfront cost-cutting design philosophy into the conversation. Vehicle components should be as serviceable as possible barring a technical inability to be so. Ask any tech/mechanic/serviceperson whether at the dealer level or independent. I have never in my life encountered one who complained that a component was just too serviceable. I have, and have heard many many of us curse and scream about parts that COULD have been designed to be serviceable, have instead been potted in epoxy, or ultrasonically welded shut, have clips/snaps/tabs that disintegrate after a decade or are in some other way put together to absolutely minimize production cost, at the expense of ever being able to service components. Often, turning a small repair into a massive component replacement bill. Vehicle manufacturers are FINALLY realizing that even at the dealer level, repair rather than immediate replace is often the most cost effective and rapid way to get a vehicle back into a satisfied customer's hands. But Sandy is here trying to drag them back to an antiquated build it to last through the warranty design ethos. And just as a side note: Sandy, your qualms about there being so many screws internal to the inverter and there being no thread locking compound is simply uneducated. Aside from the repairability aspect, many of those boards use silicone heat transfer pads which require certain clamping forces to maintain correct contact through heat cycling and also, the screws themselves look to be of the thread-forming type which self-lock on first installation. Only subsequent reinstallations require thread locking compounds to maintain integrity. Furthermore, as a design philosophy, one has to put oneself in a global mindset. Not every market where an electric car may be fully viable as a product, has the dealer/parts infrastructure that is available in highly metropolitan areas in the US or Europe. I live in a major US city, but interact with customers daily who have modern heavy duty vehicles operating in South America and rural African countries, and dealers for a brand may be 500+km away (if they exist in the area at all). The customers are more than happy to disassemble anything, ship out a board for repair and receive it back by mail rather than having to either tow a vehicle or transport a massive subassembly to a dealer for repair and then go get it again. The singular place where I agree that a different design path could possibly have been chosen is the clamping bolts on the stacked rotor assembly. I think a completely unitary design would improve the ability for the component to be high-speed balanced and prevent any possibility of torsional movement that would disrupt that. But hey, turbochargers still have shaft nuts to hold the turbines on, and un-fastening failures on those is virtually unheard of. And if VAG was really concerned about it, they would have keyed the laminations to the shaft to prevent movement.
Hey bro i m from rural area ev cars need some years to come into my country and i am a Mechanic i just wanna know ev cars have any repairable apart from chnge suspension and brakes calipes ...or does ev cars have service ? Like what future mechanics will earn by doing work on ev if there is nothing service in it.
@@itachi2829 There will be maintenance but it will be much less. People may come to you to restart their central console that has gone down. Then you are at the level of a computer buff who is asked to repair a laptop that won't start up anymore. (A friend of mine puts motherboards of a broken Apple in the oven, would you believe it? And it works!) It requires a whole new set of skills. I am not sure about the transition speed you mention. Perhaps you live in a backward area or a corrupt country where fossil fuel interests hold sway, like the USA. If you look at Canada or Northern Europe, nobody in his right mind wants to buy an EV any more except there are still almost none available at a reasonable price. In Norway, where everybody is happy, healthy and well-off (called "socialist hell" by Fox News anchors and on Sinclair syndication stations by Republican politicians) the sales of ICE cars have gone to zero for passenger cars in January 2022. This drop from 90% to near zero happened within two years. Some maintenance remains, though, like tires, wheels, breaks, hydrolics, cooling agents and leaking gaskets. But you can bet that there will be less wear of breaks and gaskets as an EV can also break on its engine, much much more than an ICE car could. Anything that moves, rotates or is exposed to the elements will degrade. But the amount of wear and tear of an ICE car is much larger than of an EV. There are almost no servicable moving parts in an EV.
It’s the biggest difference with like Tesla way of thinking. VAG in general is the biggest car manufacturer in europe. Thousands of dealerships. People buy a certain brand, because they like that specific dealership. VAG can’t just fuck those people over. Service is of utmost importance.
Credit to VW for sending the motor and for getting a second opinion on what they built. This really was a fantastic breakdown of the motor. Overall, if I was an owner of an ID4 I would be pleased with Sandy's comments. There are other improvements that VW would need to make for me to buy one, but this would give me greater confidence in the vehicle.
Yep- I was surprised really that they sent it, but this is why- Confidence that they've done a good job and therefore free marketing from Munro- a truly credible guy.
Yea, if the worst complaint is they put in too many screws, then they must have done a pretty easy job. As a German, I am thinking that might even have to do with regulations about repairability in Germany. By law if you ask a company for schematics of a product they have to provide them. There is a company you can go through and get them for any product for like 40 Euros (might be more now).
@@excitedbox5705 'Right to Repair'. Feels like Apple are fighting this. They're gluing everything at the moment. It's a nightmare to change anything. All in the pusuit of fractions of mms. Even as a product designer obsessed with aesthetics it drives me insane.
I actually do like the modularity and screw fasteners in the inverter module. Promotes repairability and saves the environment from more crap. Maybe not in America but other Countries most surely take stuff apart to just replace what’s broken.
Yeah. I do agree that there should probably be some kind of thread locker, but if you can't repair a car, it will never become ubiquitous. That's why Toyota dominates in every nook and cranny of the developing world.
I agree. The strategy Kawasaki used in R&D was to simplify engine removal for development use and left it as such which benefitted repair personnel when the engine went into full production. Even if it can't be fixed, there are those who will try.
@Robby Dey the reason for the gasket issue with German vehicles is they are forced to use environmentally friendly plastic over there that wears out very quickly.
@Robby Dey what problem failed gaskets on BMWs, this is a warranty claim. If happen simple ask for repair under warranty. i think in USA four years or 50,000 miles whichever comes first. after 5-10 years car is for recycling. car manufacture short as 3 years after the sale of the last model. Once that term is up, they do not have any further obligations to the consumer. for example parts
I agree. Snap fits will make assembly easier and probably cheaper. But by how much? And its a pain in the arse for recyclability and reusability. You wont inspect your inverter? Sure, but VW will once it gets replaced. If it can't be fixed, it will be recycled, therefore taken apart. The biggest issue with recycling is material separation. If you can only smash your broken inverter to take it apart, that's not ideal. Sandwiching the pcbs and other components in the housing could be an alternative to save on fasteners.
Better , in stead of trowing away a hole unit what the old dinosaur suggested you can replace the part that is broken. So less garbige to trow away and better for the environment .
Love the content! Threaded fastners with lock tight, Threaded fastners makes it easy to disassemble and trouble shoot, change boards -as a Technician I love to be able to disassemble, instead of drilling spot welds and rivets causing damage $$$$
@@BlazerRox It's coming, yes after market, Not PCB,s but hard parts. One of the biggest failed component on the drive unit is "Bearings" they are interference fit pressed
Could imagine VW wants to be able to analyze any defect. Not repairing. But analyze what went wrong. Certainly easier to take apart. As long as it truly never rattles or gets lose that’s fair? Maybe the next big redesign same won’t be needed anymore
@@BlazerRox no, the regulations are getting more and more specific so they have to offer repairabilty and sustainability. Now the whole EV tech is shipping to east europe where tarifs and wages are lower and were the cars get slaugthered and parts also repaired, all the mainboards and so on. great progress and VW is dealing great with the repairability
@@lemongavine Will be cool to see what's different on the Model S Plaid both motor and inverter wise. They're going 1,020hp out of 3 motors, I'd imagine the majority of that is the 2 rear motors as it is with Tesla's other performance models. It's pretty insane. :) We've seen some 4 'hub motor' vehicles only pushing 600hp, so Tesla's certainly pushing some insane power to produce that kind of horsepower with just 3.
What the hell kind of black magic is that green cloth!?!?? Awesome explanations and analysis as always. As the son of a mechanical engineer who worked on products from artificial human hearts to nuclear reactor cooling towers, It is so encouraging seeing people like the Munro team, the Tesla and SpaceX teams, etc. making engineering cool again! It is so important to our society's future - the ability to design, invent, manufacture and improve is critical.
It's actually magnetic view film. It turns white wherever you have a north-south pole transition. We use it for a fast visual quality control to make sure operators haven't accidentally installed a magnet upside down. It's pretty cheap, too - you can get it for under ten bucks.
Having "saved" several older VWs from destruction, I understand the logic of their designs and engineering. While I currently do not own a VW, in the future, I may be in the market for an electric powered vehicle. That vehicle will be a VW. Simply because it can be repaired. Among other reasons of course. Thank you for this insightful look into the inner workings and comparison of these motors.
It can be repaired, but how often will it HAVE to be repaired? VW's are near the bottom for reliability, despite brilliant design and good performance. The ID.3 and 4 are VW's first forays into the world of big batteries so we'll have to wait and see. Plus, the ID.4's will be made in Chattanooga TN, NOT Germany.
@@johnnyViDeO Just because its made in Chattanooga does not make it less quality. The VW Passat has been made in that same chattanooga plant for a very long time, and there are no more complaints about that car vs. others.
In principle, I, of course, agree with You. That is why VW Group (VAG) cars are so popular here where I live. Not only easy to repair (and allowing repairs at all), but they tend to have a bit more of material here & there on the mechanicals, not being so scalloped everywhere. Plus they don’t rust easily (anti-rust treatment flows from all holes). However my latest car, a 4-yr old with an EA 2**-series 1.2 liter, 4-cylinder turbocharged 110 HP VW TSI engine, bought from new, suffers from too much modularity and no repairability. Like the cylinder head - there is one module complete with roller followers + hydraulic tappets, 2 cams with exposed sprocket splines for the cam wheels and… that is all. The unit is locked & sealed. No access. No way to seat the valves, replace a follower, or a (roller!) cam bearing. Every time a complete new module is needed. Another module is the head itself, with a tiny plastic water pump (one of 3 water pumps & 2 oil pumps on that car) on the other end, with its tiny, 12 cm (5’’) belt and hundreds of fasteners & parts. This is madness. No need to tell how bloody expensive all of this is to replace. Staring from the extremely noisy mechanical HP fuel pump, also driven from one of camshafts. And, of course, there is the ever-present black ABS plastic. From the long intake pipes & manifold, thru plastic turbo HP pipes (working under 1.8 - 2 bar on this car and hot!), down to the intercooler chamber (yikes!). All prone to cracking & very sensitive to all sorts of chemicals. Last time I cleaned the intake (a routine for directly injected engines - especially if oil catch can isn’t installed), the assembly of the intake was like a Tonka Toy. Dedicated metal fasteners for plastics, like a toy. Always stressing not to over-tighten the delicate plastic threads. Awful… I generally like this car, but I think I will sell it as soon as I’ll finish repaying it. VW mechanic, a friend of mine said, that VW has no repair procedures anymore. The car is supposed to last 180 000 km or 8-10 years and then the Customer is supposed to replace it with a new one. Yep, todays’s times :-(
@@johnnyViDeO I'm not sure which way to take that comment. But let me just say I grew up poor, and made something of myself and am now middleclass / upper middleclass maybe who lives in new england... and I don't think we should discriminate anyone in the country based on class, where they come from, race, gender, or literally anything else... While I agree that cars made in Germany and Wolfsburg in particular are held to a very high standard of build quality... I have an Audi Q5 currently that was made in Mexico, and its built fairly well, no complaints at all. Having said both of those things I've seen the reliability track record of the passats, and they are good. Also I'd take a car made in Tennesse vs Mexico any day of the week. Having said all of that: I highly doubt an ID.4 made in Tennessee would be of less quality than a Tesla made in fremont california for example( and their build quality / fit an finish is junk ).
Thanks for the detailed look inside the motor. I think the the reason why they use a lot of Fasteners in the motor is for repair and tear down after end of life. There's a lot of expensive material there that can be recycled if it can be cleanly taken apart and separated for recycling. Units like the inverter can be re manufactured if things can be taken apart. When I've tried to repair components that were assembled using Sandy's techniques (plastic clips get brittle or glue/heat riveting ) the subcontinents are usually impossible to take apart without destroying them. That would be criminal environmentally to junk whole components like the inverter because one small subcontinent fails and a whole new OEM replacement part would be very expensive
Your spell checker made "subcomponent" into "subcontinent" (twice). But yes, I think that's a good explanation of why threaded fasteners are appropriate.
@@Sidowse no, solid german engineering. munro forgot that they use german threaded fasteners and a one armed bob uses a german high precision torque screwdriver.
@@stefanweilhartner4415 Simon, is that a thing? Is there something about German threads? Other commented that fasteners never came undone in their German cars, while allowing refurbishing, but Sandy says thermal cycling and lateral loads get them loose….
@@earnmyturns6305 VW very popular in Europe, very reliable, parts realitively cheap and the diseals engines go forever and are very frugal, no experience of fasteners loosening, maybe this was a problem in Ford
German Engineers severely dislike snaps and glue. We will always screw stuff down if we can find a way to. Snaps tend to break off under far less mechanical stress than screws do. Glue deteriorates under heated conditions like in a motor or high-power electronics assemblies. If it costs a few cents more for the screws but lasts twice as long, it was worth the investment. Apparently, Sandy and the US car industry could learn quite a bit from us, again. If your screws come out by themselves, you're using them wrong. There's spring rings or serrated rings if you can't get it fixes with torque alone.
Serrated rings are pretty much useless because they get completely flat when screwed tight. That's why you almost never find them on modern designs. German engineers should know that, as well as Chinese or US American ones... German Wikipedia link about outdated screw securing methods: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schraubensicherung#Schraubensicherungen,_deren_Norm_zur%C3%BCckgezogen_wurde
You would have thought with the roll out 01/03/2021 of the EU's new Ecodesign regulations, otherwise known as the Right to Repair, (currently only washing machines, dishwashers, fridges and displays including TVs but likely to be extended) VW would be thinking of repairability now.
If you change rotor during vehicle life time, then is a bad vehicle. Rotor should not dismounted for years. You can't repair a rotor in any shop without endangering the car.
Watching Sandy tear down the ID-4 motor, I think that if Tesla won’t sell me motors and controllers for car projects then this looks to be a really good solution. Cudos to VW in having the balls in sending a motor to Sandy for his honest critical analysis
I love the inverter design honestly. From a consumers perspective I think it’s very attractive to be ABLE to service an expensive and critical part like a motor controller. Even if it’s not conventional to repair them, the modular design provides an alternative to completely replacing the whole thing if only say the igbt board goes bad.
As an ID.3 owner, thanks a lot for the informative video on what's inside. However, I do disagree fundamentally on your remarks on the use of screws - as other commentors already mentioned, it is about repairability and equally important is recycling and the possibility to separate the precious materials at the end of the lifecycle. .... And of all cars I've owned or used in my +40 years of driving, none has ever failed because of loose or lost screws...
I also learnt to avoid screws for the mentioned reasons. I just want to mention that there a lot of different designs of snap fits. some who are meant to loosen them some are not meant for losening. But I think especially in the pcb compartment, snap fits really have their advantages especially for services.
@@TheBepo1986 Only by snap fits in an environment of thermal fluctuation and vibrations? Do you understand dilation? Without good amount of screws will breakdown before the 5 years of mandatory EU warranty... Everything are fixable here by EU laws, and the spares must be able for a lot of years, otherwise that company are finned because consumer protection are above companies profits. This man are an american, and he doenst realize that the world are not USA. Citizens and consumer protections are above the right of the companies to profit. When he said that "no one will fix it", he only shown to the world how ignorant he is about reality outside USA. Everything have to be fixable and the spares must be available in the market by X years to allow the products to be fixable. If the american consumer dont have that protection against capitalism, its USA issues.
That is not exactly lean design. Rather an example of "Design for X" guidlines, where X is ease of assembly. But since the final assembly is the major measure for whole production, most rules trickle down the line I personally always keep in mind SCS-rule: simple, clear, safe.
True! Lot of threaded fasteners! Why? It's the law in the EU that every electrical circuit must be repairable! Which obviously doesn't apply to the USA!
@@jamesengland7461 The EU and the US have agreed to recognise some of each other’s standards. So a US approved car may be sold in the EU and v.v. but the EU approval requirements (for cars produced in the EU) can still be different.
@@frostyone1967 All EU directives have been put into UK law (just like all other member states had to to). I don’t think that the UK has made any changes yet.
The threaded fasteners in the electronic board are for Ground. They are there to mitigate the "common ground current" which can affect the operation of the electronics. So, they have a precise scope. Cheers!
I was a smartphone repair tech for 5 years at Batteries Plus & hands down, screws (think Swiss luxury watches) are better than adhesive polymers & chemical adhesive that makes removing the battery from a Samsung a royal pain. Apple uses pull tap adhesives & common screws in their iPhones that make a lipo *the first part to fail* battery change relatively easy & was by far the most common repair, second would be screen replacements // if the smartphone makers were consumers they would make the screen out of polymers with replaceable glass screen protectors, so that if you crack your screen with drop damage, you can pull off the outer glass layer & put a new one on. A dual glass protector on plastic base screen makes an even better *easy outer glass change**technical repair increased difficulty inner glass* polymer screen rarely if ever broken *OLED, flexible* etc // just saying They make things throw away so that its cheaper to buy a new one than to fix the old one ** applied to many kinds off products sold worldwide
He's getting fed up with all those wheels and lug nuts that came loose all over the highways. Maybe just weld the wheels directly to the axles to prevent this from happening in the future.
@@RosenT6 I don't care about V8 connecting rods any more. Best to melt down that scrap motor & re-use the metals in an EV. Sick of skinning my knuckles, ripping bolt heads off, freezing my t*ts off in the rain & getting covered in grease & oil.
VW Is big on reconditioning their parts for cheaper repairs in the future so the fasteners help them rip it down in a few minutes and swap components out quickly.
Which is much wiser than saving on assembly costs. This way it helps them to use factory reconditioned parts and also benefits their customers in long-term repairability.
I'm amazed of how little Munroe discusses serviceability and longevity. It's always assembly cost. As someone who has never owned a car younger than 15 years it's frustrating to have to scrap a car because someone tried to save in a few fasteners and make a module a non servicable, or have most body panels on the underside loose because snap fits always breaks after 15 years. Good job VW for making cars built to last
@@XerxesGustav Well because in the eyes of an entity that has to grow and also beat legacy automakers at their own game, production cost and speed really is everything. I mean when the company know that they are working with a technology that was barely worked on in the past, where plenty of new manufacturing and technological breakthrough that would make old car less valuable being repaired than being reporcessed into the finalized technology bearers. This is not something that really has an equivalent in ICE cars, because the internal combustion engine has essentially not changed and reached its peak decades ago. A 2010 ICE power unit is not that technologically outdated compared to its 2021 bretheren, but an electric car is, because in the span of a decade electric cars went from strictly worse than ICE to strictly better than ICE and are likely going to keep going until they reach the peak of battery storage capacity which isn't reached yet by a wide margin. I don't condone Tesla deciding that a car should not be repairable (it should and be designed in such a way that it makes repairing easier), all i'm saying is that from their point of view it makes perfect sense. By the time a decade goes by and these components will need to be checked on, the entire vehicle will be worth more in the raw resources that can be recycled from it than in its value as a vehicle. Not because the vehicle is bad, but because technology has entirely shadowed its previous iterations. Its a bit like saying that we should keep manufacturing repair parts for WW2 transport planes when comercial jets are a thing, that is that kind of leap of technology level, and as such it would make sense that Tesla would think about parts likely to break down within the usefull life of the vehicle but not after the vehicle is already hopelessly outdated
Sandy seems totally uninterested in repairability, with his obsession with snap-together or riveted fixings. Repairability is really important as part of a circular economy.
Sure. But an Inverter repair is work for a specialist. You need all kinds of test equipment. No problem to have the tools to undo fasteners and a supply of replacement parts. Other assemblies like the rotor just cannot be repaired. If they fail it may well be the results of the failure of the threaded fasteners.
3 года назад+31
@@olafzijnbuis you replace the inverter as a whole in teh field, but still want it to come apart easily in the specialised repairhop. those specialists doing the repairs have high hourly rates, you do not want to waste them on fiddling with plastic clips that get brittle over time.
@@jeffgorchynski no, but by European law they have to be designed in a way they can easily be worked on and easily dissasemled into their main material fractions to recycle them more easily.
Thank you Munro and Associates! Well done VW too, that's a very confident move on their part, to actively show off a tear-down of their product. Very enjoyable
I have found that snap in type fasteners tend to break and be extremely difficult to take apart especially when the snap part is hidden and there are no clear points to pry. They are fast for manufacturers but to repair are a pain in the A**. Repair ease needs to be a consideration rather than replace and dispose.
Sandy, You’re at your best explaining the technical differences between the motors. The meet and greet travel is great but it doesn’t educate me like your technical talks do. Thank you
"nobody's gonna service these things" Hopefully the threaded fasteners and some "right to repair" legislation make it possible to service these electric vehicles. From a repair perspective, repair of an electric car should be rather simple.
Repair of electronic board is a big business. Maybe not done by third party in electric cars, maybe yes, but the key thing, is that it is way cheaper to repair boards like this, than to toss them out. in consumer electronics, boards are repaired. Service center "buys" a new board, which is actually repaired from some other customer. There is a big location that only repairs, and the "cost" for the new boards is basically the average repair cost + profit.
Also, it allows you to replace a defective part, without replacing the whole system, like with Tesla. I wonder if VW makes you code everything in, to get it to work?
This inverter module can NOT be serviced except from the manufacturer. So the screws are a good idea to make it possible to repair things. May be in China? 😃😮 Don't compare these threaded fasteners with screws of the body
In Germany there will be people servicing these! I would have loved to see the ID.4 equivalence of the carcomputer. In their VW's ICE-cars I owned these are a cheap piece that is easy to replace, yet they were allways made in a not humidity tight way...so basically after 12 years or so some conection will be corrodet away and I had to replace it... I would want to know if they do that annoying shit to the ID.4 too.
The capacitor isn't "what makes the motor work", it provides a local short-term energy reservoir to overcome the effects of the resistance and inductance of the battery and its cabling, effectively smoothing out the current draw as the inverter switches the DC from the battery into AC to drive the motor. (There is a thing called a "motor run capacitor", but that's something different, for a different type of motor).
Basically you have a low impedance buffer to the IGBT B6 bridge, so no overvoltage stress will be present on the switches. I really like how the capacitor-IGBT connections are interleaved for minimum stray inductance.
You might think someone who works in R&D consulting should know these basics.. but the more of Sandys videos I watch, the more I am appalled about the apparent lack of knowledge. "Use snaps instead of screws, it's more robust." - everyone who has ever taken apart a chinese wifi router knows the opposite is true.
@@WooShell Snap fits are used all over the place in a lot in vehicles. I am not saying Sandy is gospel, but you are comparing a low tolerance $50 plastic item to a $1000 critical automotive component. It's more likely you'd use a metallic snap joint and plenty of FEA to back it up. The tolerances and materials are a world apart. I am not sold on the idea of a snap join in this location...but I don't have enough experience to doubt him. Do you work in automotive manufacturing?
The idea that VW shared that hardware is amazing. They really wanted Sandy to tear a car down and show this off and when he wasn't interested due to other design features they must have said get him the part!
The quality of the comments is absolutely top notch. A great many viewers clearly have a lot of experience. Respect to Sandy, to VW (for taking a brave decision), and the commentators.
VW has long been a very clever company. Excellent tear down. All those PCB mounting points are needed to damp board resonance. It's an "instrument" that the car's vibrations "play", pet resulting in failure. Even desktop PC motherboards, and other hardware boards, are done this way, usually with IRREGULAR fastener spacing.
Just subscribed! I can't believe that 34 minutes passed while watching this video! As a former professor in Instructional Technology in the USA (and, many years ago, a year of university studies at a technical German university), I regard this presentation as an EXEMPLAR in dealing with very unfamiliar content. Wonderful. I am so impressed that VW allowed you unfettered access to evaluate their pride and joy power system. It's a sea change. That means, to me, that your video will be analyzed in GREAT detail by EVERY member of the VW design team that developed the ID.4 electric motor drive. Germans, in my opinion, have great respect for knowledgeable engineers but have a GREAT reverence for technical curmudgeons who provide useful advice. TESLA engineers will do the same. Yes, Elon will watch this. You, sir, have just kicked the collective butt of EV engineers around the world. W. Edwards Deming would be proud.
That sort of numbre of fasteners is pretty similar to others I've seen - Renault, Hyundai. A problem with large PCBs is that you can get mechanical resonance issues if they aren't fixed down in multiple places due to the springiness of the fibreglass substrate.
Sandy talks about screws coming out. I have worked on electric equipment for years and I can't remember seeing them loose or one ones that have fallen out. I have harvested parts from Ford electronic assemblies and it's a struggle to get the screws out using manual tools.
@@stevegorkowski3246 Keep in mind, if 1 in a million breaks/ unscrews in automotive industry, it's a disaster. In this instance, it produces a rattle that makes the customer go "WV = shit". Quality control in automotive is on another level & taking apart a car to fasten an "un-fastener" is expensive beyond belief, cost & reputation-wise.
@@alexlacroix8435 Ford in the past used that but sometimes had conformal coating on them. This makes repairing the board fun to say the least. In this case VW didn't use conformal coatings from what I seen in the video.
I love that this channel exists - this is amazing info, but reparability should be a concern and Volkswagen is takin care of it when using fasteners instead of rivets
I personally think threaded fasteners are a good thing, with the correct locking device they are reliable. From a service perspective there's nothing worse than components that are clipped or glued together.
all the old plasticky cracking bits! maybe ford didnt calibrate their torque fastening tools when sandman was there. That sure gave VW the leg up! and many ford owners agony...
@@yujyuj2957 Ford has never been able to get their screws and bolts to do their one job. On vw, you replace the bolts and torque to yield, plus some thread adhesive.
As a machinist (Caterpillar) it's super common to see, but also easy to prevent. Rotating and vibrating parts often do it, even if torqued to spec. If your bolts are not hardened, you can flatten the end of the threaded bold, after torqueing it down. Or spot-weld right behind the nut, if your bolt material allows it. Adhesives are... hit and miss, particularly useless in heated applications. I don't recommend them.
I really enjoyed this. I also enjoyed the whole discussion of fasteners and all the comments below and debate related to that topic. I am not an engineer, but someone who has repaired everything in the house and the cars for decades. As such, I appreciate design that allows for ease of service and it is a huge consideration before I buy things. I used to curse plastic fasteners, but now I don’t care as long as they can be unfastened and refastened without great difficulty. Self repair is usually the most economical method and keeps things out of the landfill before their time.
Sandy, so long you use the correct force, Ripp-Lock nut fasteners wont let the screws come out for sure. This Powertrain is the real german product design...clean and planned thinking, I like it!
I do not think it is right what he said about European rail tracks. For high speed lines the rails are welded together. The diagonal cut is used at bridges to allow bridge to expand and contract.
'Threaded fasteners' in the pc board of the inverter ensure good heat transfer contact to the cooling plate. They aren't 'holding it down', they're helping keep it cool.
Thanks Sandy. Great work with this review. As senior citizens, my wife and I respond to different features when choosing our next car. One of us is 5' 2" and the other is 6' 2". We are planning to trade our Audi sports sedan in on an ID.4 to take us (comfortably) through our 70's. Having both front seats powered is a must-have for us, along with the latest driving assist aides. This is covered in Volkswagen's option package. Volkwagen's choice to have the instrument panel move with the steering column as it is adjusted for each driver puts the ID.4 far beyond other EV's on the market. This is especially relevant for older (boomer) women who did not grow up with the effects of food additives and the growth hormones fed to our children (i.e. they are often shorter than their sons and daughters). Simplifying the transition into electric vehicle ownership is very helpful to seniors, and Volkswagen has done this by their clever hiding of the regen features. Many automotive reviewers are howling about the lack of regen paddles etc. But this simplification carried out in the ID.4 makes for a more comfortable transition to the world of electric vehicles (as VW intended). From a pure technical discussion it can be argued that the Model 3 is superior. However, from a senior's perspective it falls quite short in utility. Few reviewers look at these aspects of a vehicle. Things such as straight in loading of the SUV style vehicle let seniors load and unload baggage etc. without having to lift over a high trunck lid. This allows one to easily handle bulky items (such as a wheelchair) but is a feature of this body style and not of the ID.4 specifically. And marketing directed at the next generation of car buyers will not tend to focus on these features, choosing rather to showcase video games, etc. I have been playing with electric vehicles for over 20 years and we have chosen the ID.4 as possibly our last new car purchase. For background look up "Ken Norwick Electric Vehicle on Grist". And that's my two cents worth
Sandy seems to have a little obsession with threaded fasteners, apart from that this is a great video. Thank you. But I have never seen one of the threaded fasteners undoing itself, if it was fitted right. But I had a lot of plastic clips, rivet or snap fasteners in my live which broke trying to service a component. I mean the thought of scrapping or binning a few thousand dollar / euro part for not being able to replace an electronic part which costs a few cents is unsettling me. Honestly this is not forward thinking.
Also your description of plastic and elastic deformation is hard to follow, I mean a single material can undergo elastic deformation and then plastic deformation. All ductile materials undergo both plastic AND elastic deformation! Let me explain why those bolts are in the plastic state. They are Torque to Yield as described in the video, which means they are torqued to a tensile load that causes the materials to transition from an elastic state to a plastics state. That's why TTY fasteners cannot be reused and should always be replaced.
He's definitely thinking and his main thought is he wants the cars to be as disposable and unrepairable as possible. He's not making a mistake this is deliberate.
This is a very learned commentary on the ID4 drive strip. Towards the very many "threaded fasteners" (I like this word of art!) Volkswagen probably either want to have the first lot of drives fully repairable in order to duly follow up on material and design failures or...they just don't want to follow a typical throw-away-mentality.
25:49 "In Germany they must be able to get threaded fasteners 10 a penny" Yes, I can confirm that this is the case. They are everywhere and dirt cheap. Everybody makes them - in all shapes and sizes.
Great Sandy, one of the best quick teardown, very informative and great to see this EV Engine, a great job as always and keep them coming, and bravo to VW for being brave enough to give you a green light to exposing the teardown👍👏👏👏
The Capacitor is a Failure point, they will need service in about 10 years or some number of hours usage. And IC and other SMD can fail so DONT throw away an entire inverter for a 5 cent failed SMD, $3 IC, or $20 capacitor. Grubber Motors is demonstrating that Inverters and Battery packs can be repaired for much less then a new module.
Absolutely, screws may be a pain, but use loctite and this way of doing things massively reduces waste and cost to repair. It’s extremely wasteful to throw out an entire assembly just because of one failed part.
There are a lot of factors involved in capacitor life. Materials and ripple current being the main two. They can be reliable. The tradeoffs are cost and space. So it really is up to the companies choices.
Based on the numbers of inputs/outputs on that module, it looks like it is arranged in such a way that it would form the capacitive voltage dividers required for the 3 half-bridges inside the power module. Based on that I don't believe this capacitor is a huge weak point, as It must be a form of film capacitor, possibly polypropylene, and those don't dry out or go bad in 10 years. The inverter switches are much more likely to fail first.
I believe VW is committed to dealerships. Dealerships do NOT repair parts (regardless) -- they simply replace them. This saves the Mechanic's time and the expensive new part increases the dealership's profit. A GM dealership once replaced a push on parking brake that was sticking and only needed lubricant -- then defended their action when I complained after looking at the original part they replaced.
Did the 35 minutes already pass? Great insight on how different companies tackle the same problems. Lets hope they learn enough from each other, because these outcomes can also be applied good in other fields.
There is something besides weight savings going on with that rotor. Yes, it may help with cooling the magnets, but I suspect it has more to do with magnetic flux and stray inductance. VW is obviously very proud of that drive unit.
@@Miata822 the shape of the voids near the core of the rotor are not suited to determining reluctance (which controls magnetic flux); I think Sandy is likely correct that they are simply skeletonizing.
The skew in the magnet alignment is also to reduce cogging torque (as it is with helical gears versus straight gears) It's actually pretty common practice across other industries.
Cogging torque is an undesirable component for the operation of such a motor. It is especially prominent at lower speeds, with the symptom of jerkiness. Cogging torque results in torque as well as speed ripple; however, at high speed the motor moment of inertia filters out the effect of cogging torque. Source, wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogging_torque
That's a fantastic inverter design. Just wait until your electric car is off warranty and the dealer wants more than $5k for an inverter. The after market rebuilders will be an option for this part. I've worked on lots of old VW's and the clips and snaps break but the bolts all work fine. That why old Fords are scraped and old VW's live on.
i like that integrated design. in more homebrew version the inverters and motors are completely separated with cables in between. that integrated design of vw saves a lot of money. brainwashed tesla fanboys think that only tesla does that "vertical integration". but that is not true as we can see.
I’m impressed that on the differential had bolts in it, older transaxles that VW has made in the past has had rivets that fail at high mileage and kills the transaxle.
@@V10PDTDI And when anyone does a rebuild on a old one they replace them with bolts (APR) There a lot better. I've had two trans go bad due to rivets letting loose.
Seconding this, I'd love to hear you expand on this subject. As someone who would rather fix than replace, I tend to have a knee-jerk hate for snap fasteners and the like.
Fasterners are fascinating... Especially when it gets to the very big, very small or very esoteric. On a semi-related note, there was a joke that made the rounds when I was studying Mechanical Engineering: An international engineering competition issues a challenge to fasten two sheets of steel together. The US solution is to use three plain 3/4" bolts. One has a washer missing and one is not tightened correctly. The German solution is to use 8x zinc-chromate coated M10 10.9 bolts with washers and nyloc nuts, tightened to torque and angle. The Japanese invent a patent clip specially for this problem that can only be assembled the correct way and will snap-fit shut under gravity. It will either be never reused or reused for everything from clothing to anti-aircraft artillery. The Chinese copy the clip with various levels of success, add an M10 to make it look official and glue everything together. In England, they use a two brass bolts of different sizes and types (one with a left-hand thread), aluminium washers, copper nuts and braze the nuts to the bolts. The Swiss reuse the thinnest possible shaft they got sent by the Japanese in a earlier joke and use it as a tie rod to flange the sheets together. You need a microscope to find the holes they drilled.
EU regulations just might have something to do with the fasteners. There are requirements on recycling and the right of repair. Sandy Munro might be right about using snap fasteners. But I do think VW engineers must take into account not only how you get parts to stay together but also how you can take them apart again.
And even if current EU regs don't force serviceabilty of the inverter today its not a stretch to imagine VW are seeking to be a step ahead of forthcoming right of repair regulation in the near future. Having worked on both Ford and VW vehicles over the years Ive found VW to be among the better manufacturers when it comes to fasteners performing reliably. Only the Japanese manufacturers Honda and Toyota do it any better.
If it can be disassembled, someone will find a way to repair it. Screws for these assemblies often have blue material on the threads so they stay put. VW is very big on torque to yield on their fasteners.
Very honest and descriptive explanation of the EV motors. VW rotor and stator is an other level with respect to Tesla's. The 2 companies and the footage is first class. Thanks.
In Europe, we actually weld our rails together. And actually almost all the rails, not only for high-speed trains. Because we care about the people who live next to the rails...
@@265chemic yes thermite is still the best solution for this problem. there are apparently some induction based solutions but they require insane power to get the ends of the rails hot enough and you need to be close to it while its happening while with thermite you set it up and walk away until its cooled off.
@Robby Dey if you want old rails, try Britain they were the first. All ours are welded now. It's the sheer scale of the US that is off putting I would presume.
I don’t know in what part of Europe you live but they certainly do not weld rails where I do. The rail gaps are actually so terrible that sometimes luggage can fall on people’s heads.
@@mioszradomski1825 Yeah, I also felt that as I left Germany and entered Poland or Check Republic to travel to Austria. I'm talking about Western Europe, I'd say.
Sandy, thank you for the great work, your presentations are delightful and insightful, you help us all stayed informed about the product quality of BEVs.
Train tracks in europe are not cut on a bias in general. They are welded together. This is why there is no noise. Whilst there are a few cut on a bias these are very far apart and only there for expansion relief, not to join standard lengths of track. Ie. we have approx 100 rails welded together before an expansion joint is needed.
I’m very happy to see this review. Nice details, without much emotion, just facts. That’s how I like the Munro videos. This one made me think of the BMW i3 tear down. Looking forward to the rest. This is where Munro’s strong. Great job guys!
Thank you for the beautiful and clear videos. There is a reason why screws are used. All products must be easily dismantled in order to be able to reuse or recycle them properly. If different materials are permanently bonded together, it becomes difficult to reuse or recycle them.
I have to say that the snap-together philosophy is much better if the discussion is about new or recent equipment than it is in respect to old equipment. Both with tractors and on-road vehicles, once parts have been subjected to many years of intense thermal, chemical, or other stresses, I prefer working with quality threaded fasteners many times over. In fact, some of the models of Ford products where I first encountered a lot of snap-together components when I first started working on them had such routine degradation that about half the time the "snap" was tabs breaking or the part itself cracking when any attempt was made to remove or disconnect it. That could make the time and parts cost in servicing it among the worst in the industry. I have no doubt that they're for the best in manufacturing and initial years of plug-and-play servicing now, but if we're seriously talking about million-mile cars, they're unlikely to be the most desirable in quite a few applications that far down the road.
Well.. yes in Germany you are paying one penny for 10 fasteners. 😅 I am an engineer in Germany and that’s pretty much the price we pay for fasteners. So what’s the price in the US?! 😅😅
Also I think designing products that down the line they are repairable should be an important point. Snapping things as they are aging some years tend to break when unsnapped especially plastic. I know that the US is the posterchild of the throwaway economy but I am very happy to see VW using fasteners that allow a person to repair that thing rather than break it. And I am more than happy to pay for those few fasteners that make that possible. UPDATE: Well I would love to get that cap at the end of the life of the vehicle.... it is always useful to have some supercaps lying around :D
@@kozmaz87 Why do you need fasteners to make that possible? Why does any of that actually need to be fastened? On each of those boards, instead of having a screw hold, have a pin just to keep it from shifting. Layer the whole thing press fit from the back side by whatever sits on top of it, and then you only need one set of fasteners at the end to hold the back of the clamshell in.
@@wagnerrp that's a nice idea but it introduces a lot of compromise in the way you arrange and assemble the parts, they all have to have pins which align. much easier to use screws.
Thermite is an old method, newer electric methods of welding produce less material weakening. I'm sorry I'm too lazy to look for the English names of those methods rn
VW did an impressive job on the drivetrain and I like the differences. I like the oil filter and cooler design of the tesla as a consumer for its longevity.
Snap fits may be great for assembly and reliability but trust me, in the aftermarket I prefer threaded fasteners at least it can be dismantled and reassembled again. Don’t kid yourself, people will be going inside units like this his in future. Especially as the inverter is quite refreshingly modular. On another note, are the power devices really IGBTs or are they MOSFETs? IGBTs may have higher power density but they are very lossy compared to a MOSFET.
Sandy, thank you for the through breakdown. Your thoughts on good design/engineering are inspiring, and can be translated over to other fields; such as computer science, good design is so important.
"I don't think you'll be fixing an inverter" Words of someone who does little with electronics I see. Having an inverter come apart as they've done is brilliant. Sometimes that $4,000 part really just needs a 50 cent capacitor replaced. DO NOT RIVET OR GLUE THOSE COMPONENTS, EVER!
Totally agree, these bolts will never ever come off...haha. And they are the best for automation.
Bingo! Switching to rivets or any other anti-repair method will damage their brand way more than any aggregate fixed cost savings
Especially while you are developing/testing the component rather than produce it for 20 years in the row...
Manufacturers are not getting any profit if the repair shop can replace a 50 cent capacitor.
@@wrxguyusa They need to worry about profiting on the car and not hoping to make money on parts. Some fools will still buy the $4k part because they don't know better. Those of us who'd prefer to get dirty will go the 50 cent method. Even then it's not unheard of for an issue to develop with capacitors and then they can have "cores" that must be returned to them for servicing. Then they'll wish they had screws so they could quickly repair them and be able to send them out to dealers who have to fix it under warranty.
Bravo to VW for submitting their own part for such an in-depth review! Thanks as always for the technical breakdown video, Sandy. These are always my favorites.
Thanks for watching!
Thanks for watching!
@@MunroLive thanks for watching
It gives them free tips from the experts. They won't hide anything from competitors anyway so why not get free tips on how to improve. Also VW engineers are probably really proud of what they have developed and want to get some recognition from other experts im the field
vw is probably having a good giggle at his 'don't use threaded fasteners, they come apart' schtick. i know i was.
The holes in the lamination aren't just for weight savings. They are flux barriers that increase reluctance torque. In other words, they encourage the rotor to align to the stator's rotating magnetic field as the magnetic field prefers to flow through the metal and not the air gaps of the holes (path of least reluctance). Every manufacturer has their own recipe of magnet and flux barrier designs to balance trade offs in performance, efficiency, cost, and noise.
Ahhh... I thought it was for the flux capacitor. At least these cars aren't in the "jigawatts". ;)
Yes this is what I was looking for! It would be really interesting to see a study that compared reluctance torque differences in motor design.
Glad somebody pointed that out.
20.30 Thanks for being first, yeah working those out is closer to black magic than science
Opinion on the through bolts through the laminates? I finished working on a passenger car motor at a consultancy last year and bolts running through the laminates was not permissible on the grounds of Eddies and flux disruption...
I’m ok with the threaded fasteners personally. I really like what they did with the design. This tear down actually ups my respect for VW and their engineering team.
As a mechanic, yes. As a manufacturer for profit, not a perfect deal. That is why tesla comes on top. But finally we see good old german manufacturing?
@@lietuvis96 Tesla's manufacturing ethos ruins repairability -- and is a big part of the reason for an increase in insurance premiums
As an automotive technician that specializes in low level repairs of electronics and other vehicle systems in vehicles where parts may be obsolete or simply uncommon, I give big kudos to VW for designing an inverter and powertrain system with obvious module-by-module replacement and repair in mind. Snap/press fits and swaged/staked/deformed fastening methods are the absolute bane of my existence and are absolutely antithetical to any sort of repairability. They may be great for penny parts where any failure immediately implies replacement rather than repair, simply due to economies of scale, a likely multi-thousand dollar inverter is definitely on the opposite end of that spectrum. To my mind, it's the equivalent of stating that IC engines should not even have head bolts. We can just weld the heads on and if you have a failure, well too bad, replace the whole thing. (We already know how good Ford is with sparkplug threads on the Triton and head bolts on the Powerstroke). With the world/industry focus shifting from absolute bottom dollar manufacturing to a more sustainable product life cycles, and even situations like our current pandemic-associated parts and chip shortages, designers need to plan for the fact that their customers will often want to repair rather than replace.
I remember when the first hybrids came out and manufacturers and talking heads were saying nobody will EVER be disassembling and repairing battery packs! They're just too dangerous for the common person. Well, 2021 is here, and many many shops, techs and just regular owners can and do perform perfectly satisfactory cell replacements and other repairs on the packs.
I think the Munro team have put forth a very nice look at the iD4's powertrain, but Sandy has dragged a bit too much early 2000s upfront cost-cutting design philosophy into the conversation. Vehicle components should be as serviceable as possible barring a technical inability to be so. Ask any tech/mechanic/serviceperson whether at the dealer level or independent. I have never in my life encountered one who complained that a component was just too serviceable. I have, and have heard many many of us curse and scream about parts that COULD have been designed to be serviceable, have instead been potted in epoxy, or ultrasonically welded shut, have clips/snaps/tabs that disintegrate after a decade or are in some other way put together to absolutely minimize production cost, at the expense of ever being able to service components. Often, turning a small repair into a massive component replacement bill. Vehicle manufacturers are FINALLY realizing that even at the dealer level, repair rather than immediate replace is often the most cost effective and rapid way to get a vehicle back into a satisfied customer's hands. But Sandy is here trying to drag them back to an antiquated build it to last through the warranty design ethos.
And just as a side note: Sandy, your qualms about there being so many screws internal to the inverter and there being no thread locking compound is simply uneducated. Aside from the repairability aspect, many of those boards use silicone heat transfer pads which require certain clamping forces to maintain correct contact through heat cycling and also, the screws themselves look to be of the thread-forming type which self-lock on first installation. Only subsequent reinstallations require thread locking compounds to maintain integrity.
Furthermore, as a design philosophy, one has to put oneself in a global mindset. Not every market where an electric car may be fully viable as a product, has the dealer/parts infrastructure that is available in highly metropolitan areas in the US or Europe. I live in a major US city, but interact with customers daily who have modern heavy duty vehicles operating in South America and rural African countries, and dealers for a brand may be 500+km away (if they exist in the area at all). The customers are more than happy to disassemble anything, ship out a board for repair and receive it back by mail rather than having to either tow a vehicle or transport a massive subassembly to a dealer for repair and then go get it again.
The singular place where I agree that a different design path could possibly have been chosen is the clamping bolts on the stacked rotor assembly. I think a completely unitary design would improve the ability for the component to be high-speed balanced and prevent any possibility of torsional movement that would disrupt that. But hey, turbochargers still have shaft nuts to hold the turbines on, and un-fastening failures on those is virtually unheard of. And if VAG was really concerned about it, they would have keyed the laminations to the shaft to prevent movement.
Great insight.wow
Hey bro i m from rural area ev cars need some years to come into my country and i am a Mechanic i just wanna know ev cars have any repairable apart from chnge suspension and brakes calipes ...or does ev cars have service ? Like what future mechanics will earn by doing work on ev if there is nothing service in it.
@@itachi2829 There will be maintenance but it will be much less. People may come to you to restart their central console that has gone down. Then you are at the level of a computer buff who is asked to repair a laptop that won't start up anymore. (A friend of mine puts motherboards of a broken Apple in the oven, would you believe it? And it works!) It requires a whole new set of skills. I am not sure about the transition speed you mention. Perhaps you live in a backward area or a corrupt country where fossil fuel interests hold sway, like the USA. If you look at Canada or Northern Europe, nobody in his right mind wants to buy an EV any more except there are still almost none available at a reasonable price. In Norway, where everybody is happy, healthy and well-off (called "socialist hell" by Fox News anchors and on Sinclair syndication stations by Republican politicians) the sales of ICE cars have gone to zero for passenger cars in January 2022. This drop from 90% to near zero happened within two years. Some maintenance remains, though, like tires, wheels, breaks, hydrolics, cooling agents and leaking gaskets. But you can bet that there will be less wear of breaks and gaskets as an EV can also break on its engine, much much more than an ICE car could. Anything that moves, rotates or is exposed to the elements will degrade. But the amount of wear and tear of an ICE car is much larger than of an EV. There are almost no servicable moving parts in an EV.
@@quintdegourd6342 so maybe time to shift some other business
It’s the biggest difference with like Tesla way of thinking. VAG in general is the biggest car manufacturer in europe. Thousands of dealerships. People buy a certain brand, because they like that specific dealership. VAG can’t just fuck those people over. Service is of utmost importance.
Credit to VW for sending the motor and for getting a second opinion on what they built. This really was a fantastic breakdown of the motor. Overall, if I was an owner of an ID4 I would be pleased with Sandy's comments. There are other improvements that VW would need to make for me to buy one, but this would give me greater confidence in the vehicle.
typical german engineering
Yep- I was surprised really that they sent it, but this is why- Confidence that they've done a good job and therefore free marketing from Munro- a truly credible guy.
Yea, if the worst complaint is they put in too many screws, then they must have done a pretty easy job. As a German, I am thinking that might even have to do with regulations about repairability in Germany.
By law if you ask a company for schematics of a product they have to provide them. There is a company you can go through and get them for any product for like 40 Euros (might be more now).
@@excitedbox5705 What is the name of the company that provides that service?
@@excitedbox5705 'Right to Repair'. Feels like Apple are fighting this. They're gluing everything at the moment. It's a nightmare to change anything. All in the pusuit of fractions of mms. Even as a product designer obsessed with aesthetics it drives me insane.
I actually do like the modularity and screw fasteners in the inverter module. Promotes repairability and saves the environment from more crap. Maybe not in America but other Countries most surely take stuff apart to just replace what’s broken.
Yeah. I do agree that there should probably be some kind of thread locker, but if you can't repair a car, it will never become ubiquitous. That's why Toyota dominates in every nook and cranny of the developing world.
I agree. The strategy Kawasaki used in R&D was to simplify engine removal for development use and left it as such which benefitted repair personnel when the engine went into full production. Even if it can't be fixed, there are those who will try.
@Robby Dey the reason for the gasket issue with German vehicles is they are forced to use environmentally friendly plastic over there that wears out very quickly.
@Robby Dey what problem failed gaskets on BMWs, this is a warranty claim. If happen simple ask for repair under warranty. i think in USA four years or 50,000 miles whichever comes first. after 5-10 years car is for recycling. car manufacture short as 3 years after the sale of the last model. Once that term is up, they do not have any further obligations to the consumer. for example parts
I agree. Snap fits will make assembly easier and probably cheaper. But by how much? And its a pain in the arse for recyclability and reusability.
You wont inspect your inverter? Sure, but VW will once it gets replaced. If it can't be fixed, it will be recycled, therefore taken apart. The biggest issue with recycling is material separation. If you can only smash your broken inverter to take it apart, that's not ideal. Sandwiching the pcbs and other components in the housing could be an alternative to save on fasteners.
Well done to VW for letting Munro & Associates tell us what they think about the ID4 motor
Volkswagen discovering the internet as a good feedback loop. Congrats VW! this was an awesome engineering video. Well done all!
If the only thing Sandy finds is „Lots of screws“, then the VW design is pretty excellent
.
Better , in stead of trowing away a hole unit what the old dinosaur suggested you can replace the part that is broken.
So less garbige to trow away and better for the environment .
Definitely the attitude of an engineer who is fully in favour of planned obsolescence suggesting glue whenever possible.
Did you foget about the burrs on the bearings?
Given that screws are good and way better than riveting, the motor seems pretty good.
Love the content! Threaded fastners with lock tight, Threaded fastners makes it easy to disassemble and trouble shoot, change boards -as a Technician I love to be able to disassemble, instead of drilling spot welds and rivets causing damage $$$$
I doubt they repair any internal motor components though. For any issues they will just swap in a new motor.
@@BlazerRox It's coming, yes after market, Not PCB,s but hard parts. One of the biggest failed component on the drive unit is "Bearings" they are interference fit pressed
Right to repair. Future mechanics will fix electric motors and batteries.
Could imagine VW wants to be able to analyze any defect. Not repairing. But analyze what went wrong. Certainly easier to take apart. As long as it truly never rattles or gets lose that’s fair? Maybe the next big redesign same won’t be needed anymore
@@BlazerRox no, the regulations are getting more and more specific so they have to offer repairabilty and sustainability. Now the whole EV tech is shipping to east europe where tarifs and wages are lower and were the cars get slaugthered and parts also repaired, all the mainboards and so on.
great progress and VW is dealing great with the repairability
VW giving Munro key parts of there latest EV model, lets all hope this sets a precedent for other manufacturers to follow!
Great point. Please send a tweet to GM, Ford, Rivian, and Lucid.
@@MunroLiveLucid should be proud to give their premium motor the exposure it deserves.
@@MunroLive and Tesla (Plaid). Elon claims it is “alien technology”.
@@lemongavine Will be cool to see what's different on the Model S Plaid both motor and inverter wise. They're going 1,020hp out of 3 motors, I'd imagine the majority of that is the 2 rear motors as it is with Tesla's other performance models. It's pretty insane. :)
We've seen some 4 'hub motor' vehicles only pushing 600hp, so Tesla's certainly pushing some insane power to produce that kind of horsepower with just 3.
@@lemongavine my Speculation is that SpaceX is involved in that.The Carbon-wrapped Rotor sounds to me pretty similar in idea to COPVs used by SpaceX
What the hell kind of black magic is that green cloth!?!?? Awesome explanations and analysis as always. As the son of a mechanical engineer who worked on products from artificial human hearts to nuclear reactor cooling towers, It is so encouraging seeing people like the Munro team, the Tesla and SpaceX teams, etc. making engineering cool again! It is so important to our society's future - the ability to design, invent, manufacture and improve is critical.
Google "magnetic viewer film"
It's actually magnetic view film. It turns white wherever you have a north-south pole transition. We use it for a fast visual quality control to make sure operators haven't accidentally installed a magnet upside down. It's pretty cheap, too - you can get it for under ten bucks.
Having "saved" several older VWs from destruction, I understand the logic of their designs and engineering. While I currently do not own a VW, in the future, I may be in the market for an electric powered vehicle. That vehicle will be a VW.
Simply because it can be repaired. Among other reasons of course.
Thank you for this insightful look into the inner workings and comparison of these motors.
It can be repaired, but how often will it HAVE to be repaired? VW's are near the bottom for reliability, despite brilliant design and good performance. The ID.3 and 4 are VW's first forays into the world of big batteries so we'll have to wait and see. Plus, the ID.4's will be made in Chattanooga TN, NOT Germany.
@@johnnyViDeO Just because its made in Chattanooga does not make it less quality. The VW Passat has been made in that same chattanooga plant for a very long time, and there are no more complaints about that car vs. others.
In principle, I, of course, agree with You. That is why VW Group (VAG) cars are so popular here where I live. Not only easy to repair (and allowing repairs at all), but they tend to have a bit more of material here & there on the mechanicals, not being so scalloped everywhere. Plus they don’t rust easily (anti-rust treatment flows from all holes).
However my latest car, a 4-yr old with an EA 2**-series 1.2 liter, 4-cylinder turbocharged 110 HP VW TSI engine, bought from new, suffers from too much modularity and no repairability. Like the cylinder head - there is one module complete with roller followers + hydraulic tappets, 2 cams with exposed sprocket splines for the cam wheels and… that is all. The unit is locked & sealed. No access.
No way to seat the valves, replace a follower, or a (roller!) cam bearing. Every time a complete new module is needed.
Another module is the head itself, with a tiny plastic water pump (one of 3 water pumps & 2 oil pumps on that car) on the other end, with its tiny, 12 cm (5’’) belt and hundreds of fasteners & parts. This is madness.
No need to tell how bloody expensive all of this is to replace. Staring from the extremely noisy mechanical HP fuel pump, also driven from one of camshafts.
And, of course, there is the ever-present black ABS plastic. From the long intake pipes & manifold, thru plastic turbo HP pipes (working under 1.8 - 2 bar on this car and hot!), down to the intercooler chamber (yikes!). All prone to cracking & very sensitive to all sorts of chemicals. Last time I cleaned the intake (a routine for directly injected engines - especially if oil catch can isn’t installed), the assembly of the intake was like a Tonka Toy. Dedicated metal fasteners for plastics, like a toy. Always stressing not to over-tighten the delicate plastic threads. Awful… I generally like this car, but I think I will sell it as soon as I’ll finish repaying it. VW mechanic, a friend of mine said, that VW has no repair procedures anymore. The car is supposed to last 180 000 km or 8-10 years and then the Customer is supposed to replace it with a new one. Yep, todays’s times :-(
@@daemonthenoob I am familiar with the area and the people that inhabit it. I'd rather get a car made in Germany.
@@johnnyViDeO I'm not sure which way to take that comment. But let me just say I grew up poor, and made something of myself and am now middleclass / upper middleclass maybe who lives in new england... and I don't think we should discriminate anyone in the country based on class, where they come from, race, gender, or literally anything else... While I agree that cars made in Germany and Wolfsburg in particular are held to a very high standard of build quality... I have an Audi Q5 currently that was made in Mexico, and its built fairly well, no complaints at all. Having said both of those things I've seen the reliability track record of the passats, and they are good. Also I'd take a car made in Tennesse vs Mexico any day of the week. Having said all of that: I highly doubt an ID.4 made in Tennessee would be of less quality than a Tesla made in fremont california for example( and their build quality / fit an finish is junk ).
Thanks for the detailed look inside the motor. I think the the reason why they use a lot of Fasteners in the motor is for repair and tear down after end of life. There's a lot of expensive material there that can be recycled if it can be cleanly taken apart and separated for recycling. Units like the inverter can be re manufactured if things can be taken apart. When I've tried to repair components that were assembled using Sandy's techniques (plastic clips get brittle or glue/heat riveting ) the subcontinents are usually impossible to take apart without destroying them. That would be criminal environmentally to junk whole components like the inverter because one small subcontinent fails and a whole new OEM replacement part would be very expensive
Your spell checker made "subcomponent" into "subcontinent" (twice). But yes, I think that's a good explanation of why threaded fasteners are appropriate.
Respect to VW for offering this up to be analysed in public.
Good way to get free advice
@@Sidowse no, solid german engineering. munro forgot that they use german threaded fasteners and a one armed bob uses a german high precision torque screwdriver.
@@stefanweilhartner4415 Simon, is that a thing? Is there something about German threads? Other commented that fasteners never came undone in their German cars, while allowing refurbishing, but Sandy says thermal cycling and lateral loads get them loose….
@@earnmyturns6305 VW very popular in Europe, very reliable, parts realitively cheap and the diseals engines go forever and are very frugal, no experience of fasteners loosening, maybe this was a problem in Ford
German Engineers severely dislike snaps and glue. We will always screw stuff down if we can find a way to. Snaps tend to break off under far less mechanical stress than screws do. Glue deteriorates under heated conditions like in a motor or high-power electronics assemblies. If it costs a few cents more for the screws but lasts twice as long, it was worth the investment. Apparently, Sandy and the US car industry could learn quite a bit from us, again. If your screws come out by themselves, you're using them wrong. There's spring rings or serrated rings if you can't get it fixes with torque alone.
I mostly agree with this. Screws are a sign of reparability.
Exactly
Serrated rings are pretty much useless because they get completely flat when screwed tight. That's why you almost never find them on modern designs. German engineers should know that, as well as Chinese or US American ones...
German Wikipedia link about outdated screw securing methods: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schraubensicherung#Schraubensicherungen,_deren_Norm_zur%C3%BCckgezogen_wurde
What do the Japanese do? They make more reliable engines though they don’t make high stress engines as much as the Germans.
a very thoughtful reply - thanks. What a great video!
avoiding screws has one major drawback for the customer: reparability. plastic snapping cases should be banned from consumer electronics
BATA concept! Buy And Throw Away!
Exactly! I just repaired my 6 year Old 120€ keyboard, spilled a Drink on it, took it appart, washed it and boom works like a charm
You would have thought with the roll out 01/03/2021 of the EU's new Ecodesign regulations, otherwise known as the Right to Repair, (currently only washing machines, dishwashers, fridges and displays including TVs but likely to be extended) VW would be thinking of repairability now.
Screws suck. Jo-bolts, Hi-loks, Bolts and RIvnuts are where its at
If you change rotor during vehicle life time, then is a bad vehicle. Rotor should not dismounted for years. You can't repair a rotor in any shop without endangering the car.
Watching Sandy tear down the ID-4 motor, I think that if Tesla won’t sell me motors and controllers for car projects then this looks to be a really good solution.
Cudos to VW in having the balls in sending a motor to Sandy for his honest critical analysis
I love the inverter design honestly. From a consumers perspective I think it’s very attractive to be ABLE to service an expensive and critical part like a motor controller. Even if it’s not conventional to repair them, the modular design provides an alternative to completely replacing the whole thing if only say the igbt board goes bad.
I agree, as I repair controllers myself. But in the mass scheme of things, very few will get opened up to see the light of day sadly.
As an ID.3 owner, thanks a lot for the informative video on what's inside.
However, I do disagree fundamentally on your remarks on the use of screws - as other commentors already mentioned, it is about repairability and equally important is recycling and the possibility to separate the precious materials at the end of the lifecycle.
.... And of all cars I've owned or used in my +40 years of driving, none has ever failed because of loose or lost screws...
I also learnt to avoid screws for the mentioned reasons. I just want to mention that there a lot of different designs of snap fits. some who are meant to loosen them some are not meant for losening. But I think especially in the pcb compartment, snap fits really have their advantages especially for services.
@@TheBepo1986 Only by snap fits in an environment of thermal fluctuation and vibrations? Do you understand dilation? Without good amount of screws will breakdown before the 5 years of mandatory EU warranty...
Everything are fixable here by EU laws, and the spares must be able for a lot of years, otherwise that company are finned because consumer protection are above companies profits.
This man are an american, and he doenst realize that the world are not USA. Citizens and consumer protections are above the right of the companies to profit.
When he said that "no one will fix it", he only shown to the world how ignorant he is about reality outside USA. Everything have to be fixable and the spares must be available in the market by X years to allow the products to be fixable.
If the american consumer dont have that protection against capitalism, its USA issues.
21:40 to 24:05 is a masterclass in engineering and lean design! none of my teachers never-ever explained it so well and so concisely!
Thanks for the kind comments
That is not exactly lean design. Rather an example of "Design for X" guidlines, where X is ease of assembly. But since the final assembly is the major measure for whole production, most rules trickle down the line
I personally always keep in mind SCS-rule: simple, clear, safe.
@@feedbackzaloop I follow the KISS rule ..
Keep it simple stupid
@@MunroLive Can you sell us the card or provide it for downloads?
True! Lot of threaded fasteners! Why? It's the law in the EU that every electrical circuit must be repairable! Which obviously doesn't apply to the USA!
Well, Tesla sells their cars in Europe, so fasteners may not be the problem.
@@jamesengland7461 Tesla just swaps the whole motor out and charges you 10k$ for it.
or the UK anymore
@@jamesengland7461 The EU and the US have agreed to recognise some of each other’s standards. So a US approved car may be sold in the EU and v.v. but the EU approval requirements (for cars produced in the EU) can still be different.
@@frostyone1967 All EU directives have been put into UK law (just like all other member states had to to). I don’t think that the UK has made any changes yet.
The threaded fasteners in the electronic board are for Ground. They are there to mitigate the "common ground current" which can affect the operation of the electronics. So, they have a precise scope. Cheers!
I'd like to see more threaded fasteners everywhere! Especially in mobile phones for easy repairs. Just hate glue .
I would want to see a v8 conecting rods that uses snap-on fasteners that that Ford guy love so much 😅
Customers like repairable products.
Manufacturers have a different view.
I was a smartphone repair tech for 5 years at Batteries Plus & hands down, screws (think Swiss luxury watches) are better than adhesive polymers & chemical adhesive that makes removing the battery from a Samsung a royal pain. Apple uses pull tap adhesives & common screws in their iPhones that make a lipo *the first part to fail* battery change relatively easy & was by far the most common repair, second would be screen replacements // if the smartphone makers were consumers they would make the screen out of polymers with replaceable glass screen protectors, so that if you crack your screen with drop damage, you can pull off the outer glass layer & put a new one on. A dual glass protector on plastic base screen makes an even better *easy outer glass change**technical repair increased difficulty inner glass* polymer screen rarely if ever broken *OLED, flexible* etc // just saying
They make things throw away so that its cheaper to buy a new one than to fix the old one ** applied to many kinds off products sold worldwide
He's getting fed up with all those wheels and lug nuts that came loose all over the highways. Maybe just weld the wheels directly to the axles to prevent this from happening in the future.
@@RosenT6 I don't care about V8 connecting rods any more. Best to melt down that scrap motor & re-use the metals in an EV. Sick of skinning my knuckles, ripping bolt heads off, freezing my t*ts off in the rain & getting covered in grease & oil.
I've never been so interested in how cars are built, that I am right now.
VW Is big on reconditioning their parts for cheaper repairs in the future so the fasteners help them rip it down in a few minutes and swap components out quickly.
Which is much wiser than saving on assembly costs. This way it helps them to use factory reconditioned parts and also benefits their customers in long-term repairability.
I'm amazed of how little Munroe discusses serviceability and longevity. It's always assembly cost. As someone who has never owned a car younger than 15 years it's frustrating to have to scrap a car because someone tried to save in a few fasteners and make a module a non servicable, or have most body panels on the underside loose because snap fits always breaks after 15 years. Good job VW for making cars built to last
@@XerxesGustav Well because in the eyes of an entity that has to grow and also beat legacy automakers at their own game, production cost and speed really is everything.
I mean when the company know that they are working with a technology that was barely worked on in the past, where plenty of new manufacturing and technological breakthrough that would make old car less valuable being repaired than being reporcessed into the finalized technology bearers. This is not something that really has an equivalent in ICE cars, because the internal combustion engine has essentially not changed and reached its peak decades ago. A 2010 ICE power unit is not that technologically outdated compared to its 2021 bretheren, but an electric car is, because in the span of a decade electric cars went from strictly worse than ICE to strictly better than ICE and are likely going to keep going until they reach the peak of battery storage capacity which isn't reached yet by a wide margin.
I don't condone Tesla deciding that a car should not be repairable (it should and be designed in such a way that it makes repairing easier), all i'm saying is that from their point of view it makes perfect sense. By the time a decade goes by and these components will need to be checked on, the entire vehicle will be worth more in the raw resources that can be recycled from it than in its value as a vehicle. Not because the vehicle is bad, but because technology has entirely shadowed its previous iterations. Its a bit like saying that we should keep manufacturing repair parts for WW2 transport planes when comercial jets are a thing, that is that kind of leap of technology level, and as such it would make sense that Tesla would think about parts likely to break down within the usefull life of the vehicle but not after the vehicle is already hopelessly outdated
Reuse and repair....vs landfill or shredder
@@MrCarGuy...and while reconditioning it in the factory, they can see what actually went wrong and make improvements for future versions
Sandy seems totally uninterested in repairability, with his obsession with snap-together or riveted fixings. Repairability is really important as part of a circular economy.
Sure. But an Inverter repair is work for a specialist. You need all kinds of test equipment. No problem to have the tools to undo fasteners and a supply of replacement parts.
Other assemblies like the rotor just cannot be repaired. If they fail it may well be the results of the failure of the threaded fasteners.
@@olafzijnbuis you replace the inverter as a whole in teh field, but still want it to come apart easily in the specialised repairhop. those specialists doing the repairs have high hourly rates, you do not want to waste them on fiddling with plastic clips that get brittle over time.
@could you estimate what percentage of inverters sold will be opened up and worked on?
Cmon, who will ever repair converter?
@@jeffgorchynski no, but by European law they have to be designed in a way they can easily be worked on and easily dissasemled into their main material fractions to recycle them more easily.
Thank you Munro and Associates! Well done VW too, that's a very confident move on their part, to actively show off a tear-down of their product.
Very enjoyable
I have found that snap in type fasteners tend to break and be extremely difficult to take apart especially when the snap part is hidden and there are no clear points to pry. They are fast for manufacturers but to repair are a pain in the A**. Repair ease needs to be a consideration rather than replace and dispose.
Any snap type fastener is only designed for easy assembly, not intended for easy disassembly.
Connectors are the worst I always break the first one trying to figure out how to open it.
That was his point. You don't fix the inverter. You swap it out. So don't make it serviceable. I don't like that when I try to fix something but....
Sandy,
You’re at your best explaining the technical differences between the motors. The meet and greet travel is great but it doesn’t educate me like your technical talks do.
Thank you
Yes
"nobody's gonna service these things"
Hopefully the threaded fasteners and some "right to repair" legislation make it possible to service these electric vehicles. From a repair perspective, repair of an electric car should be rather simple.
Repair of electronic board is a big business. Maybe not done by third party in electric cars, maybe yes, but the key thing, is that it is way cheaper to repair boards like this, than to toss them out. in consumer electronics, boards are repaired. Service center "buys" a new board, which is actually repaired from some other customer. There is a big location that only repairs, and the "cost" for the new boards is basically the average repair cost + profit.
Also, it allows you to replace a defective part, without replacing the whole system, like with Tesla. I wonder if VW makes you code everything in, to get it to work?
This inverter module can NOT be serviced except from the manufacturer. So the screws are a good idea to make it possible to repair things. May be in China? 😃😮 Don't compare these threaded fasteners with screws of the body
In Germany there will be people servicing these!
I would have loved to see the ID.4 equivalence of the carcomputer. In their VW's ICE-cars I owned these are a cheap piece that is easy to replace, yet they were allways made in a not humidity tight way...so basically after 12 years or so some conection will be corrodet away and I had to replace it...
I would want to know if they do that annoying shit to the ID.4 too.
@@myg63 That's absolute nonsense. They can be serviced.
The capacitor isn't "what makes the motor work", it provides a local short-term energy reservoir to overcome the effects of the resistance and inductance of the battery and its cabling, effectively smoothing out the current draw as the inverter switches the DC from the battery into AC to drive the motor. (There is a thing called a "motor run capacitor", but that's something different, for a different type of motor).
Basically you have a low impedance buffer to the IGBT B6 bridge, so no overvoltage stress will be present on the switches. I really like how the capacitor-IGBT connections are interleaved for minimum stray inductance.
So basically it makes the motor work :-)
You might think someone who works in R&D consulting should know these basics.. but the more of Sandys videos I watch, the more I am appalled about the apparent lack of knowledge. "Use snaps instead of screws, it's more robust." - everyone who has ever taken apart a chinese wifi router knows the opposite is true.
maybe useful for stabilizing the inrush current of the motor.
@@WooShell Snap fits are used all over the place in a lot in vehicles. I am not saying Sandy is gospel, but you are comparing a low tolerance $50 plastic item to a $1000 critical automotive component. It's more likely you'd use a metallic snap joint and plenty of FEA to back it up. The tolerances and materials are a world apart. I am not sold on the idea of a snap join in this location...but I don't have enough experience to doubt him. Do you work in automotive manufacturing?
The idea that VW shared that hardware is amazing. They really wanted Sandy to tear a car down and show this off and when he wasn't interested due to other design features they must have said get him the part!
The quality of the comments is absolutely top notch. A great many viewers clearly have a lot of experience. Respect to Sandy, to VW (for taking a brave decision), and the commentators.
VW has long been a very clever company.
Excellent tear down. All those PCB mounting points are needed to damp board resonance. It's an "instrument" that the car's vibrations "play", pet resulting in failure.
Even desktop PC motherboards, and other hardware boards, are done this way, usually with IRREGULAR fastener spacing.
Just subscribed! I can't believe that 34 minutes passed while watching this video! As a former professor in Instructional Technology in the USA (and, many years ago, a year of university studies at a technical German university), I regard this presentation as an EXEMPLAR in dealing with very unfamiliar content. Wonderful.
I am so impressed that VW allowed you unfettered access to evaluate their pride and joy power system. It's a sea change. That means, to me, that your video will be analyzed in GREAT detail by EVERY member of the VW design team that developed the ID.4 electric motor drive. Germans, in my opinion, have great respect for knowledgeable engineers but have a GREAT reverence for technical curmudgeons who provide useful advice.
TESLA engineers will do the same. Yes, Elon will watch this.
You, sir, have just kicked the collective butt of EV engineers around the world. W. Edwards Deming would be proud.
I'm glad that VW gave you a motor for tearown! It was pretty interesting!
Me too!
That sort of numbre of fasteners is pretty similar to others I've seen - Renault, Hyundai. A problem with large PCBs is that you can get mechanical resonance issues if they aren't fixed down in multiple places due to the springiness of the fibreglass substrate.
Sandy talks about screws coming out. I have worked on electric equipment for years and I can't remember seeing them loose or one ones that have fallen out. I have harvested parts from Ford electronic assemblies and it's a struggle to get the screws out using manual tools.
@@stevegorkowski3246 yes, if you use Loctite or tufflock patches, then they will not easily come off...
@@stevegorkowski3246 Keep in mind, if 1 in a million breaks/ unscrews in automotive industry, it's a disaster. In this instance, it produces a rattle that makes the customer go "WV = shit".
Quality control in automotive is on another level & taking apart a car to fasten an "un-fastener" is expensive beyond belief, cost & reputation-wise.
@@alexlacroix8435 Ford in the past used that but sometimes had conformal coating on them. This makes repairing the board fun to say the least. In this case VW didn't use conformal coatings from what I seen in the video.
@@stevegorkowski3246 In GTE they have UV coating on all boards. I think they have also on this one, maybe was a development board provided?
I love that this channel exists - this is amazing info, but reparability should be a concern and Volkswagen is takin care of it when using fasteners instead of rivets
Thank you Sandy Munro for your detailed analysis and honest review. Credit to VW also for agreeing to submit their parts for this video.
I personally think threaded fasteners are a good thing, with the correct locking device they are reliable. From a service perspective there's nothing worse than components that are clipped or glued together.
As a VW tech, I've never seen a fastener undo itself. In most cases it's the "snaps" that come loose.
all the old plasticky cracking bits! maybe ford didnt calibrate their torque fastening tools when sandman was there. That sure gave VW the leg up! and many ford owners agony...
@@yujyuj2957 Ford has never been able to get their screws and bolts to do their one job.
On vw, you replace the bolts and torque to yield, plus some thread adhesive.
As a machinist (Caterpillar) it's super common to see, but also easy to prevent. Rotating and vibrating parts often do it, even if torqued to spec. If your bolts are not hardened, you can flatten the end of the threaded bold, after torqueing it down. Or spot-weld right behind the nut, if your bolt material allows it. Adhesives are... hit and miss, particularly useless in heated applications. I don't recommend them.
true, its not an issue
I really enjoyed this. I also enjoyed the whole discussion of fasteners and all the comments below and debate related to that topic. I am not an engineer, but someone who has repaired everything in the house and the cars for decades. As such, I appreciate design that allows for ease of service and it is a huge consideration before I buy things. I used to curse plastic fasteners, but now I don’t care as long as they can be unfastened and refastened without great difficulty. Self repair is usually the most economical method and keeps things out of the landfill before their time.
Sandy, so long you use the correct force, Ripp-Lock nut fasteners wont let the screws come out for sure. This Powertrain is the real german product design...clean and planned thinking, I like it!
Great in depth video of this new technology, thanks. This is the future without a doubt and VW seems to be beating the competition in many areas.
Amazing work Sandy !!
Cheers to VW Team too
Really interesting. There's more than you imagine going on in an electric motor. Thank you Sandy, and James Maxwell.
Michael Faraday: umm, Hi?
Thank you Sandy for that TRAIN TRACK analogy! I always wondered about the design's effect on noise production, and i now know exactly what you mean!
All the traintracks I have seen the rails have been welded and ground to make the ride smooth, and to save the wheels of the railroad cars
I do not think it is right what he said about European rail tracks. For high speed lines the rails are welded together. The diagonal cut is used at bridges to allow bridge to expand and contract.
@@ulwur So there is at least one topic, Sandy was not involved yet.
@@Foersom_ correct, in Europe CWR (Continuous Welded Rail) is typically used
The analogy is actually wrong. High-speed rail tracks are usually continuously welded; there are *no* cuts at all.
'Threaded fasteners' in the pc board of the inverter ensure good heat transfer contact to the cooling plate. They aren't 'holding it down', they're helping keep it cool.
great to see the modularity of the system and the clean design and installation of the sub-systems. competition in the marketplace at work. love it.
Thanks Sandy. Great work with this review. As senior citizens, my wife and I respond to different features when choosing our next car. One of us is 5' 2" and the other is 6' 2". We are planning to trade our Audi sports sedan in on an ID.4 to take us (comfortably) through our 70's. Having both front seats powered is a must-have for us, along with the latest driving assist aides. This is covered in Volkswagen's option package.
Volkwagen's choice to have the instrument panel move with the steering column as it is adjusted for each driver puts the ID.4 far beyond other EV's on the market. This is especially relevant for older (boomer) women who did not grow up with the effects of food additives and the growth hormones fed to our children (i.e. they are often shorter than their sons and daughters). Simplifying the transition into electric vehicle ownership is very helpful to seniors, and Volkswagen has done this by their clever hiding of the regen features. Many automotive reviewers are howling about the lack of regen paddles etc. But this simplification carried out in the ID.4 makes for a more comfortable transition to the world of electric vehicles (as VW intended).
From a pure technical discussion it can be argued that the Model 3 is superior. However, from a senior's perspective it falls quite short in utility. Few reviewers look at these aspects of a vehicle. Things such as straight in loading of the SUV style vehicle let seniors load and unload baggage etc. without having to lift over a high trunck lid. This allows one to easily handle bulky items (such as a wheelchair) but is a feature of this body style and not of the ID.4 specifically. And marketing directed at the next generation of car buyers will not tend to focus on these features, choosing rather to showcase video games, etc.
I have been playing with electric vehicles for over 20 years and we have chosen the ID.4 as possibly our last new car purchase. For background look up "Ken Norwick Electric Vehicle on Grist". And that's my two cents worth
Is the Price difference to the etron q4 so big outside of Europe?
Sandy seems to have a little obsession with threaded fasteners, apart from that this is a great video. Thank you. But I have never seen one of the threaded fasteners undoing itself, if it was fitted right. But I had a lot of plastic clips, rivet or snap fasteners in my live which broke trying to service a component. I mean the thought of scrapping or binning a few thousand dollar / euro part for not being able to replace an electronic part which costs a few cents is unsettling me. Honestly this is not forward thinking.
@Will he heck as like They are in a plastic state genius, though good job for being confidently incorrect.
Also your description of plastic and elastic deformation is hard to follow, I mean a single material can undergo elastic deformation and then plastic deformation. All ductile materials undergo both plastic AND elastic deformation! Let me explain why those bolts are in the plastic state. They are Torque to Yield as described in the video, which means they are torqued to a tensile load that causes the materials to transition from an elastic state to a plastics state. That's why TTY fasteners cannot be reused and should always be replaced.
@Will he heck as like certainly you are not an engineer.
He's definitely thinking and his main thought is he wants the cars to be as disposable and unrepairable as possible. He's not making a mistake this is deliberate.
"I can Snap-fit together anything, including wood parts" - IKEA wants to know your location :D
IKEA is already doing that!
😅
This is a very learned commentary on the ID4 drive strip. Towards the very many "threaded fasteners"
(I like this word of art!) Volkswagen probably either want to have the first lot of drives fully repairable in order to duly follow up on material and design failures or...they just don't want to follow a typical throw-away-mentality.
I'm shocked that Munro only has about 200k subscribers with this kind of information being provided. This has to be an undiscovered gold mine.
Thanks! Our channel is fairly young (15 months). It helps for people to spread the word; tell a friend! Email your family!
14:45 Sandy made me google “radial riveting” process. Learning something new every day! I THANK YOU SIR!
I'm guessing Sandy has the smartest subscriber base on RUclips. Love to read the comments from other engineers geeking out on this content.
Love these dissections. Your design tips have already helped me improving a design I've made for a school project, great stuff!
Interesting to see the amount of thought going into the whole system. Every detail is done, still keeping the big picture in mind.
25:49 "In Germany they must be able to get threaded fasteners 10 a penny" Yes, I can confirm that this is the case. They are everywhere and dirt cheap. Everybody makes them - in all shapes and sizes.
Great Sandy, one of the best quick teardown, very informative and great to see this EV Engine, a great job as always and keep them coming, and bravo to VW for being brave enough to give you a green light to exposing the teardown👍👏👏👏
Thanks 👍
The Capacitor is a Failure point, they will need service in about 10 years or some number of hours usage. And IC and other SMD can fail so DONT throw away an entire inverter for a 5 cent failed SMD, $3 IC, or $20 capacitor. Grubber Motors is demonstrating that Inverters and Battery packs can be repaired for much less then a new module.
I agree, bulk caps are the first ones to go. Sadly very few people repair boards anymore.
Absolutely, screws may be a pain, but use loctite and this way of doing things massively reduces waste and cost to repair. It’s extremely wasteful to throw out an entire assembly just because of one failed part.
There are a lot of factors involved in capacitor life. Materials and ripple current being the main two. They can be reliable. The tradeoffs are cost and space. So it really is up to the companies choices.
Based on the numbers of inputs/outputs on that module, it looks like it is arranged in such a way that it would form the capacitive voltage dividers required for the 3 half-bridges inside the power module. Based on that I don't believe this capacitor is a huge weak point, as It must be a form of film capacitor, possibly polypropylene, and those don't dry out or go bad in 10 years. The inverter switches are much more likely to fail first.
I believe VW is committed to dealerships. Dealerships do NOT repair parts (regardless) -- they simply replace them. This saves the Mechanic's time and the expensive new part increases the dealership's profit. A GM dealership once replaced a push on parking brake that was sticking and only needed lubricant -- then defended their action when I complained after looking at the original part they replaced.
Oh man, your show gets better and better. Mesmerising. But more important: you give old people (1952 here) a good name. We're not done yet!
1949 here!
Are those the years you guys retired in? 🤣🤣🤣
@@zetadimensions what kind of zoomer comment is that.....
@@teej5619 sorry not all of us were born before 1960
@@zetadimensions ik but damn... No need to dunk on em 😅
Bleed resistors on the PCB adds thermal stress to the board and that can break solder joints and other problems if not done correctly.
Again another masterful job Sandi. Gotta love the way you are enlightening the world!,
Did the 35 minutes already pass?
Great insight on how different companies tackle the same problems. Lets hope they learn enough from each other, because these outcomes can also be applied good in other fields.
Yes who would know that Tesla electric motors requires filter and oil change.
@@Foersom_ big oil probably loves to put that on the front page 😁
There is something besides weight savings going on with that rotor. Yes, it may help with cooling the magnets, but I suspect it has more to do with magnetic flux and stray inductance. VW is obviously very proud of that drive unit.
@@Miata822 the shape of the voids near the core of the rotor are not suited to determining reluctance (which controls magnetic flux); I think Sandy is likely correct that they are simply skeletonizing.
Holy cow! This is amazing information for anyone wanting to service or start a business servicing EVs
The skew in the magnet alignment is also to reduce cogging torque (as it is with helical gears versus straight gears) It's actually pretty common practice across other industries.
Cogging torque is an undesirable component for the operation of such a motor. It is especially prominent at lower speeds, with the symptom of jerkiness. Cogging torque results in torque as well as speed ripple; however, at high speed the motor moment of inertia filters out the effect of cogging torque.
Source, wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogging_torque
I was thinking the same, glad to find this already written! Bosch SMG138 (motor-generator) has similar design, very smooth rotation.
That's a fantastic inverter design. Just wait until your electric car is off warranty and the dealer wants more than $5k for an inverter. The after market rebuilders will be an option for this part. I've worked on lots of old VW's and the clips and snaps break but the bolts all work fine. That why old Fords are scraped and old VW's live on.
Even better design is when Bob can also take it apart again to repair when needed.
And innovation keeps going. Good for all.
i like that integrated design. in more homebrew version the inverters and motors are completely separated with cables in between. that integrated design of vw saves a lot of money. brainwashed tesla fanboys think that only tesla does that "vertical integration". but that is not true as we can see.
I’m impressed that on the differential had bolts in it, older transaxles that VW has made in the past has had rivets that fail at high mileage and kills the transaxle.
you are right I notice that too sandy tells US that rivets are better.
@@V10PDTDI And when anyone does a rebuild on a old one they replace them with bolts (APR) There a lot better. I've had two trans go bad due to rivets letting loose.
You talk about fasteners a lot: Could you make a video on that subject alone, showing your favorite fastening solutions?
Seconding this, I'd love to hear you expand on this subject. As someone who would rather fix than replace, I tend to have a knee-jerk hate for snap fasteners and the like.
Fasterners are fascinating... Especially when it gets to the very big, very small or very esoteric.
On a semi-related note, there was a joke that made the rounds when I was studying Mechanical Engineering:
An international engineering competition issues a challenge to fasten two sheets of steel together.
The US solution is to use three plain 3/4" bolts. One has a washer missing and one is not tightened correctly.
The German solution is to use 8x zinc-chromate coated M10 10.9 bolts with washers and nyloc nuts, tightened to torque and angle.
The Japanese invent a patent clip specially for this problem that can only be assembled the correct way and will snap-fit shut under gravity. It will either be never reused or reused for everything from clothing to anti-aircraft artillery.
The Chinese copy the clip with various levels of success, add an M10 to make it look official and glue everything together.
In England, they use a two brass bolts of different sizes and types (one with a left-hand thread), aluminium washers, copper nuts and braze the nuts to the bolts.
The Swiss reuse the thinnest possible shaft they got sent by the Japanese in a earlier joke and use it as a tie rod to flange the sheets together. You need a microscope to find the holes they drilled.
No, he can't, because the methods he praises don't enable him to take things apart, and if he does, he can't put them back together.
EU regulations just might have something to do with the fasteners. There are requirements on recycling and the right of repair. Sandy Munro might be right about using snap fasteners. But I do think VW engineers must take into account not only how you get parts to stay together but also how you can take them apart again.
And even if current EU regs don't force serviceabilty of the inverter today its not a stretch to imagine VW are seeking to be a step ahead of forthcoming right of repair regulation in the near future. Having worked on both Ford and VW vehicles over the years Ive found VW to be among the better manufacturers when it comes to fasteners performing reliably. Only the Japanese manufacturers Honda and Toyota do it any better.
This was really interesting! Unbelievable the amount of technical details you can get for free :)
Finally! Thanks Sandy and team.
If it can be disassembled, someone will find a way to repair it. Screws for these assemblies often have blue material on the threads so they stay put. VW is very big on torque to yield on their fasteners.
but at what cost on top of the initially overly priced car?
@@verdeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Repairing a thing, normally is cheaper than replacing a thing, if the price for the thing, is very high.
This is so cool. Love to see what each manufacturer improves on differently from the others.
Very honest and descriptive explanation of the EV motors. VW rotor and stator is an other level with respect to Tesla's. The 2 companies and the footage is first class. Thanks.
Thank you Munro. We in Germany very appreciate your work here and I like watching your videos. Ahoy
Glad to see VW working seriously on their EV's.
In Europe, we actually weld our rails together. And actually almost all the rails, not only for high-speed trains. Because we care about the people who live next to the rails...
Do they still use thermite for this?
@@265chemic yes thermite is still the best solution for this problem.
there are apparently some induction based solutions but they require insane power to get the ends of the rails hot enough and you need to be close to it while its happening while with thermite you set it up and walk away until its cooled off.
@Robby Dey if you want old rails, try Britain they were the first. All ours are welded now. It's the sheer scale of the US that is off putting I would presume.
I don’t know in what part of Europe you live but they certainly do not weld rails where I do. The rail gaps are actually so terrible that sometimes luggage can fall on people’s heads.
@@mioszradomski1825 Yeah, I also felt that as I left Germany and entered Poland or Check Republic to travel to Austria. I'm talking about Western Europe, I'd say.
This is my favorite video from Sandy so far. Thank You!
You are so welcome!
Sandy, thank you for the great work, your presentations are delightful and insightful, you help us all stayed informed about the product quality of BEVs.
Train tracks in europe are not cut on a bias in general. They are welded together. This is why there is no noise. Whilst there are a few cut on a bias these are very far apart and only there for expansion relief, not to join standard lengths of track. Ie. we have approx 100 rails welded together before an expansion joint is needed.
As a ID3 owner i think this is very interesting to see
Long story short they get a free assessment of their motor it's fairly smart...
Trust me, the people who design and engineer these parts know a hell of a lot more than you'd believe
I’m very happy to see this review. Nice details, without much emotion, just facts. That’s how I like the Munro videos. This one made me think of the BMW i3 tear down. Looking forward to the rest. This is where Munro’s strong. Great job guys!
Thank you for the beautiful and clear videos. There is a reason why screws are used. All products must be easily dismantled in order to be able to reuse or recycle them properly. If different materials are permanently bonded together, it becomes difficult to reuse or recycle them.
I have to say that the snap-together philosophy is much better if the discussion is about new or recent equipment than it is in respect to old equipment. Both with tractors and on-road vehicles, once parts have been subjected to many years of intense thermal, chemical, or other stresses, I prefer working with quality threaded fasteners many times over. In fact, some of the models of Ford products where I first encountered a lot of snap-together components when I first started working on them had such routine degradation that about half the time the "snap" was tabs breaking or the part itself cracking when any attempt was made to remove or disconnect it. That could make the time and parts cost in servicing it among the worst in the industry. I have no doubt that they're for the best in manufacturing and initial years of plug-and-play servicing now, but if we're seriously talking about million-mile cars, they're unlikely to be the most desirable in quite a few applications that far down the road.
This level of detail is amazing! Top quality content and well explained
Thanks
Well.. yes in Germany you are paying one penny for 10 fasteners. 😅 I am an engineer in Germany and that’s pretty much the price we pay for fasteners.
So what’s the price in the US?! 😅😅
10 pennies for one. Might go to 10 dollars to one fastener if the shortage continues...
Also I think designing products that down the line they are repairable should be an important point. Snapping things as they are aging some years tend to break when unsnapped especially plastic. I know that the US is the posterchild of the throwaway economy but I am very happy to see VW using fasteners that allow a person to repair that thing rather than break it. And I am more than happy to pay for those few fasteners that make that possible.
UPDATE: Well I would love to get that cap at the end of the life of the vehicle.... it is always useful to have some supercaps lying around :D
@@kozmaz87 Why do you need fasteners to make that possible? Why does any of that actually need to be fastened? On each of those boards, instead of having a screw hold, have a pin just to keep it from shifting. Layer the whole thing press fit from the back side by whatever sits on top of it, and then you only need one set of fasteners at the end to hold the back of the clamshell in.
@@wagnerrp that's a nice idea but it introduces a lot of compromise in the way you arrange and assemble the parts, they all have to have pins which align. much easier to use screws.
@@daos3300 There’s zero difference between that and what we already have. Every screw hole, just invert it and make it a pin.
Train rails are now hydraulically stretched then welded together with thermite. This removes the need for expansion gaps.
He was talking about joining rails from different tracks I thought. You are right thought they weld most rails lately.
Thermite is an old method, newer electric methods of welding produce less material weakening. I'm sorry I'm too lazy to look for the English names of those methods rn
To me, the fact Munro uses harbor freight tools sums up his entire focus and philosophy on design… Just make it as cheap and disposable as possible.
VW did an impressive job on the drivetrain and I like the differences. I like the oil filter and cooler design of the tesla as a consumer for its longevity.
10 years from now, owners like to hear someone was able to replace that canbus tranceiver, six pack, or shorted capacitor, or even reballed that bga.
Repairability is highly underrated
@@darkreaper72jp And not favored by many OEMs.
@@storeskeeperrvl3797 It is if they're the ones having to disassemble it all to use reconditioned parts. And that's why VW did it
Snap fit doesn't mean impossible to service, you just have to do it a different way.
Always a great description of every part and process! So interesting to see.
Thank you!
The "Secondary capacitor" looks like a common-mode filter to reduce noise conducted back to the battery cables.
And on the buss-bar is the ferrite choke :)
The monster ferrite core around the input buss-bars is another tell tail on a high power LC input filter
It is. (Valeo-Siemens engineer here)
Yeah damn during CE testing I needed one of those lol
Snap fits may be great for assembly and reliability but trust me, in the aftermarket I prefer threaded fasteners at least it can be dismantled and reassembled again. Don’t kid yourself, people will be going inside units like this his in future. Especially as the inverter is quite refreshingly modular.
On another note, are the power devices really IGBTs or are they MOSFETs? IGBTs may have higher power density but they are very lossy compared to a MOSFET.
Sandy, thank you for the through breakdown. Your thoughts on good design/engineering are inspiring, and can be translated over to other fields; such as computer science, good design is so important.
This fine gentleman knows his stuff I’ve learned so much in such a short time 👋🏼💯