what the independent automotive shop of the future might look like
In the end, I concluded that the highly specialized skills needed for deep-level EV repairs are unlikely to be learned across the whole independent repair industry, with battery and electronics experts at every little auto shop. But that doesn’t necessarily keep the industry from doing these deep-level repairs.
With EVs, it’s likely that most independent repair shops will be able to switch a battery pack out in the future, but they’ll buy a rebuilt pack for their customers and then send the broken one in for a core charge. The experts won’t be everywhere, but the benefit of their expertise will still be widely available.
That having been said, relying on a “hub” that helped fill in the knowledge gaps in our new “spoke” was a great help. Prior to this, most of our automotive electrical expertise was limited to that which shows up in ICE vehicles . Being able to hit the ground running with high-voltage systems, battery management, and everything else got us up and running a lot faster than we’d have been able to do by ourselves with trial and error.