Miami’s EV Garage is South Florida’s first independent electric vehicle service center, offering two locations and a lot of know-how on the new technology. We recently spoke with EV Garage Tech Lead Jose Roura about the new territory of servicing and modifying Teslas and other EVs, along with a handful of other topics.Roura has been working with EVs for over a decade, with past experience at Tesla and with BMW’s hybrid and all-electric offerings.
Many people didn’t want to be involved in it. It was new, it was different and people didn’t want to — they were happiest where they were. But I was always intrigued by it, and as I got involved with it, I saw the amount of research and development that these companies were putting towards this. So I saw the potential in this. Also, the competition behind it, because it was so new.
The most common that everybody’s familiar with is tires. Tesla drivers love their tires like we love our ice cream. Yeah, they love tires. There are alignments that we do frequently on vehicles, there are some aftermarket suspension components that we install to help with the alignment that helps a lot with tires, so they last a little bit longer. I mean, actually twice the length.
Those are the most common things we see here. Other than that, it’s just regular surprise things that we are not used to seeing.The one main thing for people who are fully considering purchasing a vehicle, so they’ve already done the research, now they’re actually considering it, is range anxiety. Some people are adamant and are like ‘No, I’ll never own an EV vehicle’ — until you get into one. But yeah, the main topic that I usually hear people talk about is the range anxiety.
And once you start seeing the benefits of it, with home charging — so basically, you’re refueling at home, you don’t stop at a gas station — it’s something you actually take out of your to-do list, it’s one less thing. You take it home, you plug it in, and you’re done. The next day you have a full tank and you don’t gotta fill it up again for four days, depending on your driving habits. So yeah, that’s one of the things.