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A line worth explaining rather than just stating
Yes to the twelve-volt side, and all of it. No to anything inside the traction system. Those two sentences cover almost every telephone call about an electric vehicle, and the second one is not negotiable.
This surprises people. A battery-electric car has a conventional low-voltage battery, conventional lighting, conventional body modules, a conventional network between them and a conventional set of accessory circuits — and every one of those fails in the ordinary ways. A flat twelve-volt battery on an electric car is one of the commonest faults there is, and it strands the vehicle exactly the way it would strand anything else, because the contactors that connect the traction pack cannot close without it.
All of that is normal work and it is done here: parasitic drain, charging of the auxiliary battery, harness faults, connector corrosion, network faults, a camera or a tracker that was fitted badly. A hybrid is the same picture with more of it.
The propulsion side runs at several hundred volts direct current, and direct current at that voltage does not behave like anything else on a vehicle. It requires a specific qualification, insulating gloves and tools rated for the job, an isolation procedure carried out in a particular order with the vehicle locked out, and instruments meant for it. None of that is improvised, and none of it is something to be careful about instead of trained for.
It is also a physical hazard rather than an expensive mistake. Getting a twelve-volt job wrong costs a module. Getting this wrong is a different sentence.
The honest version is not "the orange cable" — although the orange cable is a good rule of thumb and the reason it is orange. The line is the whole propulsion system: the pack and its enclosure, the contactors, the inverter, the drive motor or motors, the on-board charger, the DC-DC converter's high-voltage side, and every cable and connector between them.
Anything the low-voltage system does around it — telling it to wake up, reporting a fault about it, supplying the module that supervises it — is ours. Anything carrying the traction voltage is not, and it does not become ours because the vehicle is already on the ramp and the job would be quick.
Not inside a traction system. We work on the twelve-volt side of electric and hybrid vehicles — the battery, the lighting, the body modules and the accessory circuits — and not inside the high-voltage traction system. Several hundred volts is a different trade with its own qualification, its own insulating equipment and its own isolation procedure, and a boundary that moves when a job gets interesting is not one.
Who does: a workshop whose technicians hold the high-voltage qualification nobody here holds, or the vehicle's own dealer network. We do not do that work and we do not sub-contract it out under our own invoice.
It stops, and you get a telephone call. That is the same rule as any other job here going past what the written note said, and it applies with more force to this one because the reason for stopping is not commercial.
What you are left with is the hour, the measurement, and a clear statement of which side of the line the fault is on. We do not go past it and we will not be talked past it — but knowing which side of the line a fault sits on is itself worth having, because it saves an owner from three more workshops looking at the wrong thing.
The twelve-volt side of an EV is ordinary work, and it is ours
The symptom check takes about three minutes and gives you a written summary of which circuits would be tested first and why, with the hours and the published rate against each. It is an indicative scope and not a diagnosis — nobody has seen the vehicle — but it is a better opening than a blank contact form. If you would rather skip it, the telephone works.