Motor bearings should be an easy fix, provided the bearings are of a standard size. Any decent workshop ought to be able to disassemble the motor, put the bearings in an mount it in the car again. That being said, traditional garages are often wary so find one that is certified on HV systems.

We all know how manufacturers want to lock you in, so not sure if any brand is better than others in this respect.

 

It is a weak point. I've just been watching what a total pain it is to do on one of the youtube channels. It's a weak point on the 40 and the 50. There's a lot of weak points on the Zoe. The motor bearing failure can ruin the entire motor so you can't just refit bearings always. It's a cheap car with a lot of expensive problems to fix.

I'd think a Tesla would be a better choice as their cars are designed to last a lot longer and are far more repairable. BMW i3 also seems to do reasonably well for reliability. Motor mounts are a weakness in them though.

All of the modern manufacturers tie in parts to the car far more than they should. It's a massive issue.

There's more teslas around with galactic mileages on than any other brand from what I can tell. Taxi drivers are the best clue. They do things on the cheap so whatever they are using are probably reliable and fairly cheap to repair.

 

MG5 seems to be the Taxi EV of choice near me.

Would take one over a Zoe in the blink of an eye.

 

Yes. Totally forgot about the MG5. That's another good choice.

 

Cleevly's service vehicles, MG5's, have some pretty big mileages without problems.

 

Aye - James Coates is one of their service engineers, here's a 143k video he made about his car....

 

There's this guy on YouTube who does Zoe repairs, including the bearings, so they are repairable.

 

With repairable I obviously mean also affordable. Having a mechanic taking apart the entire front end of a car just to replace a wearable component is not repairable in my view. It would cost more than 2000€ in working hours alone? Replacing a belt in an ice car is a 30min job probably?

Also there are no independent garages that take on this work in Belgium. You always have to go to a Renault garage and they just put in a new engine…

EV manufacturers took a page from the Apple playbook so it seems.

 

Gary who is member here and posts videos mainly about repairing ZOEs explains on this video why what appears to be a simple job on a ZOE is actually really hard, he also gives some insight into what EV owners should worry about on older ZOEs (Spoiler alert - it is not the Battery on these cars)

 

As a rule, the bearings in EVs are slightly looser-fit in their spacing between the inner race, the balls, and the outer race, i.e. they feel "rattlier" when taken out of the box. Reason is these motors run at high rpms, so you don't want the bearing to be as quite tight as you might if fitting it to, say, a regular mains AC low-speed motor.

Qn then is, did Renault skimp on this, rather than fit a "special" carefully-toleranced bearing designed for continuous high speed running, and did they cheap-out and fit the regular off-the-shelf bog-standard one? Also was it a cheap asian-made bearing, or high-quality eg SKF one?

Getting the correct replacement bearing might not be quite as simple as it sounds.

Also, are there issues with stray electrical conduction routes? With magnets & rotating metal around, EVs seem to have a problem with generating small electrical currents which flow from the rotor to the motor casing, through the steel ball bearings! Not good - the microscopic arcing begins to etch-away the metal, think electric switches/points etc, so there's a need to either use ceramic insulating bearings, or provide something like a carbon brush to earth the Rotor bypass the problem. I don't what approach the Zoe takes. Might need a new set of brushes as well, whatever.

 

Are you sure that the motor bearings are designed to run loose? Normally that is an no no, as if the bearing is loose, the balls will slip and skip, resulting in pitting and burning of the balls or the races. I'm no EV motor specialist, but I know a lot about bearings in high RPM motors used in industrial machinery, and loose balls in those will fail very quickly. Large motors industrial motors can even use angular contact bearings, which have a very precise preload, or rotor oscillation and bearing failure will occur.

Carbon grounds are pretty common, and ceramic balls are becoming more abundant in some industrial motors too.

 

Love the videos from valdemars garage when bjorn has them, interresting to see what fails on older evs, but also remember that they see less of the fleet, same cleevely has talked about there is longer between the repairs on evs than ice, and that can cause trouble for the independet garages, so some might have to close if they can't change.

 

Do not Conti make the drives in Zoe’s?

I do recall Tesla had a spell of bearing issues with the model S in the early-ish years, so it’s not just a cheap French car thing either.

I’ve plenty of personal horror stories on repairs from Audi too. The Taycan that’s on my driveway currently is my most recalled vehicle in living memory. But I still enjoy it 😂

 

Do not Conti make the drives in Zoe’s?

Conti make the motors in the Q models, Renault the motors in the R models.

Zoe motors are different because they don't use permanent magnets (I think using the motor as windings for the charging transformer is part of the reason). It seems that the working theory is that some stray current flows through the magnets in specific circumstances, and that, over time, wears the bearings out faster.
The lack of permanent magnets also means that Zoe motors have brushes which can wear out! To me, it seems like the whole Chameleon thing was a giant experiment, and the rest of the car being half decent meant it lasted way beyond it should have.

 

Ordered a set of bearings from Smoothbev store, the bearing specs say they are rated up to 16,000 rpm:

{spam deleted]

Good luck!!!

Would you happen to be the same spammer , Roman Kivenko in Estonia, retailing vehicle parts, that is promoting this bearing company on other forums, as in this post in the Ioniq forum, by any chance?

https://www.ioniqforum.com/threads/28-kwh-ioniq-motor-bearing-noise-and-failure-due-to-current-passage.44234/?post_id=623864&nested_view=1&sortby=oldest#post-623864

 

It's not so much as "leaking" current but a build of an induced static charge which then discharges through the bearings. Some synchronse induction motors use a separate brush to earth the rotor so you don't get this static build up. BTW I believe you could get the same on a permanent magnet motor which could affect the bearings.

 

...BTW I believe you could get the same on a permanent magnet motor which could affect the bearings.

Nissan fit a carbon brush in the reduction gear, to earth the end of the motor shaft, for pre-2025 Leaf and e-NV200 (with identical permanent-magnet synchronous motors). Presumably they wouldn't have spent money on that if they didn't think it was useful. Renault could have fitted an extra earth brush with the two to feed the rotor windings, but didn't.

 

@G.a.r.y will doubtless be able to offer us his professional opinion here on the faults etc?