When most electric cars need fixing, they usually disappear into a dealer workshop for days and come back with a bill that makes you question the whole EV dream. ARIA, a bright blue prototype built by Dutch students, is designed to blow that model up by giving owners something carmakers have quietly taken away over the last few decades: the ability to pop the hood and fix things themselves.​

The idea comes from TU/ecomotive, a student team at Eindhoven University of Technology that has spent more than a decade building one wild, sustainable vehicle after another, including a car that literally scrubs CO₂ from the air as it drives and another made from recycled ocean plastic. ARIA is their latest provocation—a compact electric city car whose very name spells out the mission: Anyone Repairs It Anywhere.​

Instead of the usual sealed, monolithic battery pack buried deep in the chassis, ARIA uses six smaller battery modules, each weighing around 12 kilograms, that you can physically lift out by hand. If one module degrades or fails, you swap that single unit, much like changing the batteries in a TV remote, instead of replacing an entire pack that might still be mostly healthy. In a world where EV battery failures can mean multi‑week waits and repair quotes in the thousands, the students are effectively asking: why are we okay with that when a more sensible architecture is possible?​

That modular thinking runs through the whole car. The exterior is built from quick‑release body panels, so if you dent a door or crack a bumper, you don’t need to wrestle with a whole side of the vehicle or mask off half the car for a paint shop; you just unclip the damaged section and snap in a new one. Inside, the electronics and other key components are laid out as distinct, accessible modules rather than buried behind layers of trim, adhesives and proprietary fasteners. None of this is accidental: the team explicitly embraced “design for disassembly,” a philosophy that’s been gaining traction in sustainable product design but has been painfully slow to reach mainstream automotive engineering.​

To make all of this workable for people who have never opened a workshop manual in their lives, ARIA ships with its own small built‑in toolbox, clear paper manuals and a companion app that talks directly to the car. The app acts like a friendly technician riding shotgun: it runs diagnostics, explains what’s wrong in plain language and then walks you step‑by‑step through the fix, whether that’s swapping a battery module, changing a sensor or replacing a damaged panel. The goal is not to turn everyone into a mechanic overnight, but to lower the barrier to entry so basic repairs become about confidence and information, not about access to specialized gear or guarded service data.​​

Visually, ARIA doesn’t look like a stripped‑back science project. It’s a small, simple city car with clean lines and a compact footprint, but it also shows off a bit, with dramatic scissor doors that swing upward rather than out. The students say the prototype weighs around 650 kilograms and, on paper, could manage a commercial range of up to 220 kilometers—enough for the daily commute, school runs and grocery trips ARIA is meant to handle, rather than cross‑country road trips. That relatively low weight is part of the sustainability story too, because lighter vehicles use less energy and put less strain on their batteries over time.​

What makes this car more than a clever student exercise is the context it plugs into. In 2024, the European Union adopted a “right to repair” directive that forces manufacturers of certain products—like washing machines, TVs and smartphones—to provide tools, spare parts and repair information at reasonable prices, and to stop using software tricks to block independent repairs. Electric cars, however, were largely left out of that first wave, even though their batteries are among the most expensive and resource‑intensive components consumers will ever own. ARIA is intentionally built as a kind of rolling argument: if 30 students can design a modular EV in under a year, with hand‑replaceable battery modules and standardized components, what excuse do big carmakers have for turning modern EVs into sealed appliances?​

The status quo is convenient for manufacturers but brutal for longevity. Today’s EVs often integrate the battery tightly into the structure of the car, which is great for handling and crash safety, but terrible when something goes wrong, because it usually means lengthy shop time and full‑pack replacement even if only a small portion of the cells are the problem. Combine that with limited access to service data and repair tools for independent garages, and you get a landscape where scrapping a car that’s sound in every other respect can become the economically “rational” choice once a large repair bill lands. ARIA points toward a different economic logic: if you can cheaply replace a single module or panel at home, you extend the life of the vehicle, reduce waste and keep the total cost of ownership under control.​

The environmental upside of that shift is hard to ignore. Short product lifespans and hard‑to‑repair electronics are a major driver of the world’s ballooning e‑waste mountain, which is already estimated in the tens of millions of tonnes annually. Repair culture—everything from local repair cafés to online guides—has grown up as a reaction to that, but EVs have remained a tough nut to crack because of high voltages, proprietary designs and the sheer physical heft of the components involved. By proving that you can design an EV from day one around modular, user‑serviceable parts, the Eindhoven team is showing regulators and industry that “too complex to repair” is often a design choice, not an inevitability.​

It also fits neatly into TU/ecomotive’s track record of building concept cars that are less about hitting production and more about nudging the industry’s conscience. Past projects like ZEM—the prototype that captures CO₂ while driving—were designed to illustrate how far sustainability can be pushed when you’re not locked into quarterly earnings and model‑year refresh cycles. With ARIA, the provocation shifts from tailpipe and lifecycle emissions to something more intimate: the relationship between owner, object and the right to open it up, understand it and keep it on the road without begging permission.​

Of course, ARIA is a prototype, not a showroom car. It still has to face messy realities like crash regulations, mass‑production costs, warranty liabilities and the fact that not everyone actually wants to get their hands dirty, no matter how accessible the screws are. But as a proof of concept, it lands at exactly the right moment, when lawmakers are tightening repair obligations for other product categories and NGOs and consumer groups are pushing hard for those rules to fully cover EVs and their batteries. If and when policymakers move, ARIA will be sitting there as a tangible answer to automakers who insist it “can’t be done.”​

There’s also a cultural undercurrent to this car that resonates with anyone old enough to remember fixing a first beater in a driveway. One of the commenters under the original story puts it bluntly: good cars are the ones that don’t break, not the ones that are easy to repair—but we’ve drifted so far into disposability that repair itself feels quaint. ARIA doesn’t argue against reliability; it simply asks why, when failures inevitably happen, the only acceptable path is a sealed‑off service bay and an opaque bill. Giving people tools, information and a design that welcomes a socket wrench instead of fighting it is a quiet way of re‑democratizing the car.​

Whether a major brand takes this baton and runs with it is an open question. Some manufacturers are starting to experiment with more modular architectures and second‑life battery programs, and the incoming EU rules around battery durability and recyclability will tighten the screws further. But it often takes a scrappy outsider—or, in this case, a small group of students—to show what’s possible when you strip the platform back to first principles and ask how an electric car would look if repairability, not just performance and styling, sat at the top of the brief.​

For now, ARIA is a glimpse of an alternate EV future parked in a university workshop: lightweight, modular, a little bit flashy with its scissor doors, but fundamentally built around the idea that you shouldn’t need a dealership login and a six‑figure diagnostic machine to keep your own car alive. In a decade’s time, if swapping a tired battery module in your city EV feels as normal as changing a tyre, this unassuming student project from Eindhoven will look like one of the places the future quietly started.