Servicing and repairing electric cars requires new skills

AS A STRINGFWEVVICEV of high-performance cars thunder round the twists and turns of Hockenheimring 1 circuit, in south-west Germany, a stripped-down vehicle at an adjacent Porsche customer centre offers a peek inside a speedy but far quieter way of getting round the track. Christian Brügger, a product engineer with Porsche, a sports-car maker that is part of the Volkswagen group, points to the edge of a large black box in the centre of the vehicle’s chassis. “This”, he says, “is where the knife goes in.”The box is a 93kh battery. The chassis belongs to a 260kph Taycan, Porsche’s first fully electric vehicle (). Cables, bright orange in warning, snake across it to a pair of motors and other electronic gubbins. As many a mechanic, professional and amateur, knows, fiddling with the 12 system of a typical internal-combustion engine () can give you a nasty electrical jolt. But this battery delivers 800. Though it is fitted with safety systems, that is enough for a knockout punch that could kill you.