The BYD revolution – but why am I spending six hours at a service centre?

By Tyron Devotta 

There is something wonderfully contradictory about owning an electric vehicle. We are told that the electric vehicle represents the future of motoring. Fewer moving parts, no engine oil, no spark plugs, no oil filters, no timing belts and none of the countless mechanical components that have kept garages busy since the internal combustion engine became king of the road. So, naturally, when I took my BYD Atto 2 for its first service, I expected the experience to be relatively painless.

Then came the surprise.

“About five hours, sir.”

Five hours? As someone who has spent all of his motoring life driving vehicles powered by internal combustion engines (ICE), this seemed rather difficult to comprehend. What exactly were they going to do for five hours to a car that doesn’t even have an engine in the traditional sense?

Welcome, apparently, to the new world of electric motoring.

A computer that happens to have four wheels. The answer, I discovered, is that servicing an electric vehicle is fundamentally different from servicing the cars most of us grew up with. With the old ICE vehicle, servicing was largely mechanical. Drain the engine oil, replace the filters, inspect belts, check fluids, brakes and tyres, and attend to whatever else the manufacturer prescribed.

The EV removes a great deal of this. But it replaces some of it with something quite different: diagnostics. Today’s electric car is essentially a sophisticated computer system attached to a battery pack, electric motors and four wheels. The service technician is therefore not merely looking for worn mechanical components. The vehicle’s electronic systems have to be interrogated, fault codes checked, the high-voltage system inspected and, where necessary, software and firmware updated.

There are still conventional things to inspect, brakes, tyres, suspension, steering, coolant and other components, but much of the health of the vehicle is now determined electronically. In other words, we exchanged the oil can for the laptop. That is progress, although sitting in a service centre for five hours gives one plenty of time to contemplate precisely what the word “progress” means.

And then there is Wattala

There is another practical issue for a Colombo motorist. The BYD service facility I visited is in Wattala, outside Colombo. That changes the equation considerably. If a service takes an hour or two, one can perhaps arrange the day around it. But when the vehicle is going to be unavailable for five hours, the customer effectively loses a substantial part of the working day. And unlike dropping a car at a workshop somewhere within Colombo and disappearing back to the office, Wattala makes the logistics rather more complicated.

For a brand selling what is essentially a new generation of mobility, this is something worth thinking about. As EV adoption grows, after-sales service will become almost as important to the customer experience as the vehicle itself. The technology may be revolutionary, but customers still live in the very analogue world of traffic, distance and time.

Perhaps the future EV service model therefore needs to be different too: appointment slots that genuinely correspond with workshop capacity, faster diagnostic lanes, courtesy transport, mobile servicing for simpler procedures and additional service points closer to where concentrations of customers actually live and work.

If EVs are changing the automobile, perhaps they should also change the automobile workshop.

Settling in for the long haul

To be fair to BYD, if they are going to keep you for five hours, they have at least made an effort to make the waiting comfortable.

The customer lounge is spacious, well air-conditioned and furnished with comfortable chairs. There are refreshments, including coffee and soft drinks, and a large-screen television showing English-language movies. Unfortunately, the movie playing during my visit was of absolutely no interest to me.

Fortunately, we live in the age of the smartphone and tablet. Most of us now carry our entertainment around in our pockets. So while my Atto 2 was presumably somewhere behind the scenes having an intimate conversation with a diagnostic computer, I could settle into one of the comfortable chairs, put on my headphones and watch Netflix.

There is a certain irony to this.

My technologically advanced car was being serviced by computers while I passed the time watching a movie streamed over the internet onto a device in my hand.

Perhaps this really is the digital economy in its purest form.

There was, however, one glaring omission in this otherwise comfortable arrangement.

Tea. I don’t drink coffee. And this is Sri Lanka.

We may be embracing electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, streaming television, digital payments and every other manifestation of the brave new world, but surely we haven’t progressed so far that we have forgotten the humble cup of tea.

Here I was, sitting in Wattala waiting for an electric vehicle to undergo its electronic health check, in a country that has spent more than 150 years producing some of the finest tea in the world, and there wasn’t a cup of it in sight. There is something wonderfully Sri Lankan about that contradiction.

Perhaps someone at BYD should add one more item to the service checklist.

Battery – check.
Software – check.
Brakes – check.
Tyres – check.
Ceylon tea – please.

EV ownership needs a new service culture

Humour aside, this experience raises a larger question about Sri Lanka’s transition to electric mobility.

We spend enormous amounts of time discussing battery range, charging infrastructure, electricity tariffs, resale values and the eventual cost of replacing batteries. But there is another ecosystem that has to evolve alongside the electric vehicle: after-sales service. EV manufacturers have an opportunity to rethink this completely.

If the vehicle can diagnose itself to an extraordinary degree, why shouldn’t much of that diagnosis take place before the customer even reaches the workshop? If software can be updated remotely, why should every update require the vehicle to occupy a service bay? And if routine EV maintenance involves fewer consumables and fewer mechanical interventions, shouldn’t the customer eventually experience a substantially faster service than with an ICE vehicle?

That, surely, should be one of the great benefits of electric mobility. My Atto 2 has so far been an interesting introduction to this new world. I enjoy the technology and the fundamentally different driving experience. But my first service has also taught me something. The transition from petrol to electricity isn’t simply about replacing an engine with a battery and electric motor. The entire culture surrounding the automobile has to change with it.

The motor industry spent more than a century perfecting the ecosystem surrounding the internal combustion engine. The EV industry is trying to reinvent much of it within a couple of decades.

There will inevitably be growing pains.

For the moment, however, if you are taking your electric car for its first service in Wattala, there are a few things I can confidently recommend. Don’t schedule a meeting for lunchtime. Make sure your phone or tablet is fully charged. Have your Netflix subscription handy! And if, like me, you don’t drink coffee, perhaps take a flask of tea.

After all, the electric-car revolution may have arrived in Sri Lanka. But surely it doesn’t have to come without a good cup of Ceylon tea.

There was some good news at the end of the day, as the service took a little over 4 hours to complete and that was a bonus !