Leave servicing your EV to the professionals as merely touching live wires by mistake puts you at risk of severe burns, serious injury or death. Patrick Pleul/dpaCars with electric motors have far fewer moving parts than those with internal combustion engines, which suggests that they might be easier to repair.This is however not the case. EVs are complex machines that require experts to keep them running properly.The upside is that electric cars often require far less maintenance than their IC equivalents.Owners can still perform some familiar tasks providing they go nowhere near the high-voltage system.AdvertisementAdvertisementWhat you can do is keep up regular maintenance such as replacing various fluids, rotating the tyres to minimize wear and swapping cabin air filters.Having said that, owners should steer well clear of fiddling with any of the electrical components. Do not install new parts on your own or else risk serious injury and even death.Tesla batteries, for example, operate at a voltage of 450 volts, which is twice that of European domestic mains voltage.Unless the battery bank has been fully disconnected, an EV is always "on". That means you could touch the wrong thing and, potentially, lose your life. A combustion engine, on the other hand, is inert and safe as soon as it is switched off.AdvertisementAdvertisementMaintaining the health of your batteries is easier. Keep them away from extremes of heat and cold, and maintain a charge level of 85% or 90% for daily use.Keep an eye on the brakes too. Thanks to regenerative braking, the stoppers on an EV do not wear as quickly. Yet Tesla advises lubricating the brake calipers every 12 months or 12,500 miles in areas that use salt to melt snow and ice.But it is easy enough to create havoc with ill-advised DIY home electrical work in general, and the same applies to EVs.In the end, the question of whether it is safe to service an electric car yourself is more a matter of whether you have enough knowledge to understand all the sensors and gizmos. You also must know how to dismantle them and put them back together in the right order.AdvertisementAdvertisementJust touching live wires by mistake can cause severe burns. It is not for nothing that mechanics who work on electric cars are required to wear gloves which insulate at up to 10,000 volts."Servicing, repair, maintenance and recovery of electric and hybrid Vehicles will put unprepared and untrained technicians at risk of electric shock resulting in serious injury or death," says the US company EINTAC. It has been making insulated tools for work on high voltage electrical systems since 2016.Here are four key safety rules to observe:High-Voltage Battery Packs: Never open, modify, or try to fix the main drive battery.AdvertisementAdvertisementOrange High-Voltage Cables: Avoid touching or disconnecting thick orange power lines, inverters and motors.Electric drive units and power electronics: Leave these entirely to certified dealer technicians.Software Calibration: Advanced sensor resets and system reprogramming call for expensive tools. This is not a DIY issue.Mechanics receive professional training in order to work on high voltage components and cables that have the potential to deliver a fatal electric shock.Should you venture close to high-voltage systems, you will first of all need those heavily-insulated gloves mentioned above.AdvertisementAdvertisementYou will also need to check these every time to ensure the gloves have not been punctured in storage. A pinprick-sized hole is enough to rob you of protection.Electric overboots are needed too, along with a new set of insulated tools. And get a special multimeter to check whether the high-voltage system has been completely discharged. This involves measuring voltages at the inverter.Last but least, jacking up a BEV is different. If you need to raise the car to gain access to batteries and underfloor, a regular car jack is useless. Lifting arm raisers are essential since these sensitive underparts are not designed to withstand the car's weight.If the battery modules or cells get damaged, this could increase the risk of a dreaded thermal runaway and a fire.AdvertisementAdvertisementA thermal runaway can happen when an EV is involved in a collision.It is an unstoppable, self-heating chain reaction where an increase in temperature changes conditions to cause a further temperature increase, commonly leading to fire, explosion, or device destruction in lithium-ion batteries.On the plus side, the electric motor on a BEV seldom needs attention. Aside from occasional bearing failure, they seem to be reliable units. The safety circuit will detect any short circuits in the motor windings and shut down the high-voltage system. Leave it to the professionals to repair any faults.Merely touching live wires by mistake puts you at risk of severe burns or worse, so don't try to fix your EV at home. Sven Hoppe/dpa
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