You could swap out the Pixel+Graphene for say a FairPhone+LineageOS. I ran misc-secondhand-phone+LineageOS for over a decade. Still selfhost everything I need. My family have all their photos upload to my nextcloud instance instead of Google.

My switch to Pixel+Graphene is because ultimately the problem is political not technical. A banking app I needed for work refused to run without the real Google services. It also refused Custom ROMs. I tried a lot of tricks. Also GoogleMaps is the only satnav with traffic information in the route planning. There is other things, but Graphene allows you a compromise of running the Google services, but sandboxed.

The problem is not technical, it’s political. Most people don’t understand the difference between a standard and a monopoly. The law makers are asleep to monopolies and the need for competition in the tech world, so have allow this tech dystopia to happen. Some that are more awake know big monopolies are easier to get things like this story from. Multinational corporation are money machines, they won’t really fight for their users. But they miss the bigger picture.

If you care about all this stuff, there is groups like:

https://openrightsgroup.org/

https://fsfe.org/

Maybe also https://openuk.uk/ , though they more work with big tech.

Exactly. I want things, especially expensive things, built to be repaired and upgraded. Not vendor locked and with built in obsolescence.

See, for me, I rapid charge like once a month. All the rest of the time I use my home charger or even a granny lead. 10A granny charging is absolutely fine overnight. But for the size of the E-Berlingo, the battery is a bit small and I know all kind of new batteries are coming. More kWh for the same weight/size, less degradation, safer, etc etc. If I knew the car was designed with battery replacement in mind, I’d worry a lot less about it being obsoleted prematurely. These cars are all black boxed stuck together. It’s not built with repairing and upgrading in mind.

Oh totally, I have a E-Berlingo which basically an ICE converted to an EV, so there is all kind of compromises.

But batteries do improve and an old existing EV can be improved battery. Example: https://evsenhanced.com/aftermarket-battery/

But the economics is much harder if batteties aren’t unique to each EV. (They aren’t completely of course, the guts of my E-Berlingo are shared across a number of others.) EVs, like a lot else, should be designed with maintaining and upgrading in mind. Especially with parts like batteries which are in such evolutionary flux.

Yes and no. No need to hot swap massive EV batteries. Rapid is fast enough. But yes so the EV can be upgraded. The batteries go obsolete quicker than they degrade. So make it so we can swap the batteries and keep the rest running. In fact, just right-to-repair the whole car. In fact, the whole everything!