Its muuch easier to start an EV company than a combustion one tho. Also modding of old cars into EVs is a thing. It will happen but not as extreme as with combustion ones i think. Especially because chinese ones tend to be less enshittified.
less about easy to start an EV company (honestly you can buy engines, so that’s not really the hard part; manufacturing is, as tesla found out the hard way) and more about it being easy to build an EV from almost nothing… you can ram batteries and electric motors into almost any body as you pointed out, so if a company makes junk it’s pretty easy to replace bits with whatever you like, and since electrons are electrons are electrons, your battery, motors, etc only have to kind of match
The Chinese ones tend to be less enshittified? Having just recently about how Xiaomi cars disable software updates if you change the headlights, allow me to doubt that.
The ones from smaller company can be, from what i have been told. Its kinda like with knockoff electronics products where you can get a carbon copy or better version of an arduino for a fraction of the price. You might have to look, but they exist. Here they just dont at all. With phones its pretty bad sadly but with other things you can often get dope open hardware manufactured designs of all sorts of stuff.
That may be ok for an Arduino, but for a car I’d really like to be able to get support, which may be tough with a smaller provider, unless they really use generic components and document their stuff decently, which I’d really have to be convinced about. And let’s not even get into the software support.
And I write this from my 2yo old Fairphone 4, which I plan to degoogle during the holidays, while I sit in front of my 7yo Thinkpad.
I use Arch BTW.
Edit: And my chinese vacuum cleaner runs Valetudo.
