Inside the garage of the future Servicing and repairing electric cars requires new skills

A S A STRING of high-performance cars thunder round the twists and turns of Hockenheimring F1 circuit, in south-west Germany, a stripped-down vehicle at an adjacent Porsche customer centre offers a peek inside a speedy but far quieter way of getting round the track. Christian Brügger, a product engineer with Porsche, a sports-car maker that is part of the Volkswagen group, points to the edge of a large black box in the centre of the vehicle’s chassis. “This”, he says, “is where the knife goes in.”

The box is a 93kWh battery. The chassis belongs to a 260kph Taycan, Porsche’s first fully electric vehicle (EV). Cables, bright orange in warning, snake across it to a pair of motors and other electronic gubbins. As many a mechanic, professional and amateur, knows, fiddling with the 12V system of a typical internal-combustion engine (ICE) can give you a nasty electrical jolt. But this battery delivers 800V. Though it is fitted with safety systems, that is enough for a knockout punch that could kill you.

The knife Mr Brügger talks of is special. It has a blunt vibrating blade, like those used by doctors to remove plaster casts without damaging the patient. After some 160 bolts have been removed it can be slid under the edge of the battery’s cover to cut away the glue used to seal it tight. This reveals 33 modules containing the lithium-ion cells that constitute most EV batteries. With the cover off, a faulty module can be swapped for a new one.

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