As expensive as a new car is, it almost seems like a loss leader now to get you locked into exorbitantly expensive repairs at the dealership’s service department. That’s the reason a lot of us still try to do as much of the maintenance and repairs on our cars as possible — it’s just too darn expensive to pay someone else to do it.
Case in point: this story about a hapless Tesla owner who faced a massive repair bill on his brand new car. [Donald]’s tale of woe began when he hit some road debris with his two-wheel-drive Model 3. The object hit penetrated the plastic shield over the front of the battery pack, striking a fitting in the low-pressure battery cooling plumbing. The plastic fitting cracked, causing a leak that obviously needed repair. The authorized Tesla service center gave him the bad news: that he needed a new battery pack, at a cost of $16,000. Through a series of oversights, [Donald]’s comprehensive insurance on the car had lapsed, so he was looking at funding the repair, approximately half the cost of a new Model 3, out of pocket.
Luckily, he got in touch with [Rich Benoit] of The Electrified Garage, one of the few independent garages doing Tesla repairs and customizations. The video below is queued up to the part where they actually do the repair, which is ridiculously simple. After cutting off the remains of the broken fitting with a utility knife, [Rich]’s tech was able to cut a thread in both the fitting and the battery pack, and attach them together with a brass nipple from the plumbing section of the local home store. The total bill for the repair was $700, which still seems steep to us, but a far cry from what it could have been.
Hats off to [Rich] and his crew for finding a cost-effective workaround for this issue. And if you think you’ve seen his EV repairs before, you’re right. Of course, some repairs are more successful than others.
It just shows that the whole electronic car thing is like mobile phones – not made to be repaired, and just buy a new one very few years.. See https://hackaday.com/2021/07/15/recycling-will-be-key-to-the-electric-vehicle-future/
Though I agree $700 seems a bit high we do have to remember 1) you are paying for their expertise 2) they had to flush and redo the coolant (and we don’t know how expensive its..) 3) they are doing a fix that they are standing behind.
So market pricing is fine! Of course, now many of us on HaD have seen this, we would just do it ourselves (I for one didn’t know it was so low pressure)
But the right to repair is critical..
You could say “made not to be repaired”…
Price included towing it cross 3 states as well
Now you make it sound downright cheap.
Like all new products, there will be growing pains in their design. I would also point out that Telsa is still inexperienced in car design. Non-Tesla EVs have different issues because they took different approaches in designing them. Are they better? Well, time will tell.
Tesla is not only new, they’re downright negligent in the Ford Pinto sense.
The only reason they’re not getting a class-action lawsuit on them due to the self-combusting batteries that light up too fast for the rescuers to get to the crash site, is because they cars are much too expensive for the general public to own. Some individuals have tried, but Tesla bought them out of court.
Point being, Tesla uses battery chemistries which they know are more prone to thermal runaway, that have marginal fire safety, and instead of admitting the faults and using better cells like the rest of the industry they just cross their fingers for good luck.
Same as with the Autopilot. Their argument that it’s safe is based entirely on the ambiguity of weak statistical evidence – kinda like playing Russian Roulette and saying “Well I’ve won for the past five rounds so this gun must be safe.”
Apparently, they don’t train Official Tesla Mechanics on detailed repair, just replace entire sections of the car.
yep, the car has three parts. Battery, motors, or the whole car.
I mean, these things shouldn’t be that complex, its a battery, 2 (or 4) motors, and a control unit.. Much of the complexity in a ICE car is gone.. They shouldn’t be that hard to repair..
And what idiot designer put a break off plastic part on the bottom of the car that could easily be impacted by something?
>these things shouldn’t be that complex
Whoever believes that anything more complicated than a hammer will not be complex by the same token is a fool. Even the hammer has at least three parts. Some people believe it would have two – the head and the handle – but they’d forget the wedge that keeps the two together. That’s the problem with thinking in top level concepts and “in first principles” where everything looks easy and straightforward.
The battery of an electric car, in concept it’s not complex, but a battery pack with 8,000 cells, arranged in modules, connected with coolant loops, pumps, heaters, plumbing, fans, fuses, safety switches, fire breaks, attachment points and internal struts, armoring, sensors, circuit boards, connectors, cables, cable conduits, nuts and bolts… and in each of those we can go into much further detail, such as defining what kind of plastic you have for the shielding of a wire, whether it’s straight wire, or braided for lower skin effect losses due to the PWM carrier frequency of the motor drive…
The main problem is that EVs are black boxes where magic things happen. You can’t for example check the state of the battery like dipping an oil stick into the engine – even the manufacturer won’t know what’s happening inside there without ripping the whole battery apart – so a problem like a loss of coolant may result in damage that sets your car on fire three months later, and nobody has any way of knowing (e.g. the crash tested Volts that caught on fire two weeks later). Hence why the default fix to ANY problem with the battery is just to replace the entire battery.
There are OBD bluetooth adapters that allow you to check the dipstick as it were. tes•LAX ios app. Others for android.
Shows all CAN bus info. Battery coolant loop temperature and flow. Drivetrain coolant loop temperature and flow. Evaporator target temperature. Evaporator temperature. Highest cell voltage/temperature, lowest cell voltage/temperature. HV pack voltage, power. Drivetrain power use. Can even tell if it’s actively conditioning the battery pack.
It’s not closed. One only needs to install an app to access the CAN bus messages.
Sparkfun also sells an OBD adaptor that will work.
In new cars, the CAN bus you see through the OBD connector is “fake”. And the real bus is likely encrypted. I don’t know if this is sold already, but this is state of the art in development departments now.
having used it in practice myself, your advice might indeed apply to other vehicles. kind of ignorant comment tbh.. search engine suggestion
@Markus: any more info on that? Wow, just wow. After losing the “you’re not allowed to read out your own car” battle they’ve gone this road…
Having personally done the install of an OBD adaptor on a TSMR M3, and firsthand witness the reading out of realtime CAN bus data on an operating vehicle.
The one in the front of the car isn’t what you’re looking for.
The one you want is in the center console between the two front seats.
It requires prying off a panel, ENSURING THE CAR HAS FULLY SHUT OFF, disconnecting the existing harness, and connecting in a Y splitter so the microcontroller or bluetooth adaptor can be connected. If you disconnect the harness while the HV traction battery contactor is still engaged, you’re gonna have a bad time.
https://youtu.be/A5U_VorWHtc
Above video is 5 minutes and completely documents the process of installing the Y splitter to the existing OBD(2) port. Other vehicles might indeed have no option to access the CAN bus. The vehicle discussed in the article does indeed have an option.
>There are OBD bluetooth adapters that allow you to check the dipstick as it were.
The point was, there is no such dipstick because even the manufacturer doesn’t know what’s going on inside the battery cells – there are no sensors to detect their state of health non-destructively. The information you get out of the car’s data system is based on model estimates over the battery’s use history, which has nothing to do with reality when something unexpected like a loss of coolant happens to the battery.
Your assertion that it’s too complicated to safely repair a battery pack is not going to fly so well on a site dedicated to hardware hackers, as that just adds to the fun. What is the point of all the sensors and safety in the battery pack if even the manufacturer who gets constant telemetry from the car wouldn’t be able to take the pulse of the battery pack via diagnostics software. It should be trivial for them to know if any of the cells we subjected to excessive temperature due to coolant issues because many of those sensors are temperature sensors distributed through the pack. I would hope the repair technician would be able to visibly inspect that the coolant did not get anywhere that could cause issues/ be able to clean up spilled coolant, and it should also be possible with good engineering to enclose the cells so that one could determine if they were subjected to dangerous mechanical stress / shock via sensors as well. For the volts that caught fire, NHTSA reports it was due to the fact that they did not depower the battery after crash, combined with leaking coolant which then dried/froze forming a short circuit. Doesn’t seem to be a repair safety issue to me.
> if even the manufacturer who gets constant telemetry from the car wouldn’t be able to take the pulse of the battery pack via diagnostics software
The sensors are there to ensure the battery pack stays within nominal conditions where the wear-out models and estimates apply. The manufacturer doesn’t know, and cannot know what’s happening inside each cell, how exactly they started out, etc. because they don’t have any view into the battery chemistry itself without picking the cells apart and putting them under a microscope.
Once you know that the battery went outside of nominal conditions, what do you do with it? Is it still fine? Will it be fine for years and years? Your wear estimate models just encountered a discontinuity and their predictions are now garbage. Your dipstick is now broken.
Remember that the cells are all matched and age together, so you can’t just replace them arbitrarily. Then again, they’re all glued together with fire-retarding foam so it would be difficult anyways: replacing a group of cells in practice means re-manufacturing the entire pack, so the only fix to any problem is basically “replace the entire battery”.
A hammer has 4 parts. You forgot the user.
That puts new meaning to the expression “dumber than a bag of hammers”.
“The battery of an electric car, in concept it’s not complex, but a battery pack with 8,000 cells, arranged in modules, connected with coolant loops, pumps, heaters, plumbing, fans, fuses, safety switches, fire breaks, attachment points and internal struts,”
The entire engine compartment of a modern ICE is nearly as complex, and people still fix them fine. Oh, and they’re plenty dangerous, too! I mean, who *hasn’t* set a car engine on fire… (or is that just me?).
The main problem with EVs is that manufacturers don’t give nearly the information or parts availability needed to fix them. To be honest, it’s incredibly smart in terms of customer lock-in by Tesla, and why I won’t buy one.
The ICE is designed to be put together by people.
The EV battery is glued together as a single unit that is not supposed to be opened by mechanics. This is because there’s nothing in there you can really “fix” –
If some of the cells are bad, you need to replace the entire set because they are matched and throwing in new ones would make life difficult for the BMS. For example, if half the cells are old, half the cells are new, what happens when you put it in a fast charger? The difficulty in doing repairs to a battery pack is that you need to find matching cells and ensure they really are.
Other plain mechanical repairs you do inside the battery are an unknown factor that may compromise the safety of the entire thing.
Example: the mechanics forgot to add sealant silicon when they changed my timing belt, so the engine started dripping oil out of the valve cover. I replaced the gasket again and added the silicon myself because it was less hassle than taking it back to the shop. If the mechanic makes the same sort of “oopsie” to an EV battery, rather than leaving oil drips on the parking lot, the car turns into a roman candle some unknown time after the next time it rains.
I could build a complete ICE that’s glued together as a single unit, too. The decision to build a sealed unit is Tesla’s choice, not fundamental. Yes, of course, there are advantages to it, but they’re not *that* large. Tesla just tends to squeak out every percentage point it can.
“The difficulty in doing repairs to a battery pack is that you need to find matching cells and ensure they really are.”
Yes. And? So what? Are you trying to say there aren’t challenging fixes to ICE vehicles too? Head gasket repairs can be a joke, or they can be massive overhauls. Exhaust fixes can be 5 minutes or require taking half the damn car apart.
Are you really suggesting that Tesla, once they got a battery like that, would recycle the whole thing rather than just repairing it? Of course they wouldn’t!
“For example, if half the cells are old, half the cells are new, what happens when you put it in a fast charger?”
Same thing that happens when an ICE vehicle gets readings from its closed-loop sensors that don’t make sense – it falls back to an operating mode that works, but isn’t ideal. Sure, some people might find it a pain in the neck, but it’s an option.
“If the mechanic makes the same sort of “oopsie” to an EV battery, rather than leaving oil drips on the parking lot, the car turns into a roman candle some unknown time after the next time it rains.”
Mechanics *always* have the possibility of making a car go “kaboom.” I mean, they “oopsie” the brakes and you kill people. Screw up the axles and you kill people. F’crying out loud if they forget to torque the *lug nuts* right you kill people. Plus the dozen other ways you can turn a vehicle that’s literally carrying *gigajoules* of stored energy into something dangerous.
The reason why the mechanic screwed up in your case is because it’s not a fatal issue. It’s just a pain in the neck. Pretty much *any* shop has double-checks on high risk fixes.
—
Look, to be clear – the insane thing about all of this is that Tesla wanted to charge him $16,000, for which they’d give him a new battery pack and *take his old one*. Even though his old one is *easily* worth probably $14-15K. Tesla already recycles like, 70% of the battery’s components once it hits end of life, and this wasn’t anywhere *near* it.
If you want to say “no, you have to just swap the battery” – that’s *fine*. But batteries should then have variable core values on the swap. Otherwise there’s a market opportunity out there that Tesla’s suppressing because they’re a monopoly.
That might not be so bad if a) the battery wasn’t priced at such a large fraction of the vehicle’s value and b) they actually had infrastructure in place to buy back the old battery at a decent cost for proper refurbishing or recycling. Otherwise, they need to have KISS burned into their brains.
Yeah, the problem is they didn’t even offer to buy the old battery back – but you can understand why: using the old cells to refurbish other packs is a hit & miss business and very labor-intensive to the point that it’s cheaper to just make a new battery.
>what idiot designer put a break off plastic part on the bottom of the car
Idiots who went working for Elon Musk, who kept breathing on their necks to get the design done regardless of design issues and problems. Straight from prototype to production.
Fixing something is not the same as repairing something in my book.
I class this as a fix, if it was done by the book it would be a repair.
Soon as you start fixing something going off piste and inventing our own parts or methods that are not the same as the original product it’s not a repair. it’s not warrantable. Certainly Tesla cannot do such “repairs” and maintain a 100K mile warranty for example.
That’s fine but I think the implied point is that designers and manufacturers should strive for a design that’s easy to repair. Everyone benefits, both in warranty and out. I think we’ve all heard about the whole drop this big part to get to the small.
“If it’s not authorized by the manufacturer, it’s not a repair” is a dangerous line of thinking. That’s certainly what all tech companies want you to believe, but that also means they can charge you whatever they want for “authorized” repair with zero competition. For one, current law sort-of agrees – Tesla cannot legally void your warranty because of that “unauthorized” repair, unless they can prove that the repair is what caused the car to break. The Right To Repair movement is currently working on making that situation even better, doing things like making it so that Tesla would HAVE to sell you that plastic fitting and give you basic schematics so you could fix the thing properly without their help. For now, this kind of repair works perfectly fine and is the best we can do.
You don’t need authorization. The point was whether the manufacturer itself would start adding bodges that don’t follow their own specifications. In other words, why the manufacturer refuses to do such fixes.
John Deere tractors…..
That the case for most manufacturers (beyond automotive), they only sell assemblies and not pieces. Honda does this for things like their front suspensions.
In this case, the assembly is the battery and those fitting are very poorly designed. They should have been metal tap fittings. If this becomes a common enough problem, then I suspect Tesla will revise their design.
Should have been, but you are not considering the whole picture: what if the designer was trying to avoid corrosion and deposits of the corroded materials in the coolant loop by using all plastic fittings?
First, Tesla need to fix that fragile plastic shield so this sort of problem is less likely to happen.
Just wait until Tesla disables supercharging on the car as it was not repaired in an approved Tesla centre.
https://electrek.co/2020/02/12/tesla-disables-supercharging-salvaged-vehicles/
That’s the least of his problems. He didn’t buy the car, it’s a lease.
He’s required to have full coverage and he’s going to be on the hook for the unauthorized repair when he returns the car.
Crazy story. I can’t imagine that’s really legal. When the car is bought by a customer, it is no longer in Tesla’s possession. They must not tamper with the customers property.
Whilst it’s a good story in the end result, I can’t but help wonder what’s happening here.
“…on his brand new car”
“…[Donald]’s comprehensive insurance on the car had lapsed”
Did he just get comprehensive insurance to drive it off the forecourt (do Tesla have forecourts?) Not sure how a brand new car’s insurance just lapses.
Missed a monthly payment
I’m afraid that goes for many dealerships these days.
The light in the needle ofmy speedometer needle was out. I’m pretty sure the dealer would have lovingly replaced the whole instrument panel for a few thousand euros.
The seller of the car replaced it for free for me when I had to bring the car in under warranty to have the waterpump replaced.
8 years ago the fuel gauge pointer in my dash decided to point straight down, such that it was not a valid position to even point. Every mechanic or dealer I talked to wanted to first look at my float sensor to make sure that was fine, and if not send the entire cluster to the factory for 2+ weeks so they could program an authorized replacement with the right mileage for at least $400+mechanic time. I bought a set of 6 stepper motors for $15 and replaced the speedometer and engine temp sensor while I was at it. With spares. Honestly the new cluster for $400 did not bother me so much, it was the 2 weeks that I would not have a working car that annoyed me most.
Sounds like something the military would deal with.
https://youtu.be/KUimL241hNs
You will need a new battery pack every 5-10years anyway, look at your phone.
Nah, you can buy a nissan leaf with a battery pack that old and they’re not dead, just degraded. They also take very little care of their battery so aren’t a good example of how a modern battery pack will behave over time. Anecdotally looking on autotrader there are some 2011 24kwh leafs with 75% battery health and some with 50% that still get ~40 miles. For a country with an average daily mileage of half that those are still usable cars.
If your phone charged to 80% of its capacity, was protected from heat, didn’t sit at 100% charge or get a full charge/discharge every day then its battery would last a lot longer.
The battery chemistry of a cellphone or a laptop should be completely different from an EV. It’s optimized for the highest possible energy and power density rather than shelf-life or even safety (looking at you, Samsung).
I say should, because Tesla does the same trick with their batteries. They tried to adopt NMC chemistry instead of NCA, but couldn’t get the price low enough. NCA has a shorter shelf-life and is prone to self-combustion, but it also has greater power density for the “ludicurous mode” sub second acceleration which is the other gimmick that Tesla sells.
Others are simply using smaller batteries and lower power to offset the greater cost of better battery chemistries. In fact, the Nissan Leaf batteries are fundamentally more robust than anything in a Tesla. Nissan just thought they could get away without active cooling and heating in the first generations, which then resulted in cooked batteries and rapid capacity loss by just a few really hot summer days every year.
Also, “still gets 40 miles” is misleading, because the capacity fade on a battery is a self-accelerating process. Once it starts to wear out, the internal efficiency goes down and the damage done by each kWh of energy put through the battery results in faster capacity fade, which results in faster capacity fade…
When you model the wear-out mechanism of a battery as a logistic decay, there is first a period of slow decay where the battery looks like it’s going to last forever (the Tesla fanboy part of the curve), but eventually you reach the knee point where the decay changes from linear to exponential and you lose almost all the capacity in a fraction of the time it took to get down to that point. Usually the rule of thumb for the point where a battery goes “dead”, meaning it reaches the exponential decay region, is between 60-80% of initial capacity.
See:
https://www.gushenbatterys.com/news/why-does-lithium-ion-battery-capacity-decay-ac-7441527.html
That’s why, for a leaf battery that only does 40 miles to the charge, it’s already dead. It’s well into the final stages of capacity loss and you will have to replace the battery very soon.
I’d love to see some corroborating data but am having a hard time finding it. Gushen’s data says batteries should have <40% capacity at 4000 full cycles but Battery University doesn't push batteries to that many cycles. Got any other sources?
The number of cycles is absolutely dependent on the type of chemistry and how it is optimized for a particular use. It also depends on the relative charge/discharge levels and current, temperature, time… There is no universal standard or a definite number of cycles even for the exact same battery in different use cases. Some go as low as 500 and others go up to 20,000 cycles, and each case has its own compromises in terms of price, power, energy, shelf-life, safety…
The general point is that lithium batteries fail rapidly at the end because the solid-electrolyte interface gets blocked by the non-reactive junk that separates from the electrolyte and electrodes.
It’s kinda like the effect of sulfate crystals in lead-acid batteries where the plates get covered in a layer that insulates them from reacting. The greater the loss of reactive area, the more stress is concentrated on the remaining electrode areas, and the faster they degrade, leading to a self-accelerating decay.
I accept that as theory, I just want to see more data backing it up. Someone, somewhere must have put an 18650 in a charger/discharger and just run it until the cell’s dead, right? That’s not expensive to set up, 1C would see you hit 4000 cycles in a year but you could up that to 3C to speed up testing and run multiple in parallel for more data. So where’s the data or what do I google to find it? Lithium ion lifespan brings up lots of speculation or people pushing to low cycle counts.
As is all we have is a single short page with some sparse data and a plausible sounding explanation for the findings. It could be right, but a single test does not make good science.
Gareth, there are a handful of such tests you can find online, but here’s an actual lecture video with examples and data, “Why do Li-ion batteries die and can they be immortal?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qi03QawZEk
my 2013 nissan leaf has 155000km and still gets me to work. It’s winter time >-20C I need to charge at work or else not coming back. 86km total both way. For xmas 2019, my SOH was 91%
my uncle was at 101,000km with 100% SOH. I think it’s was 2013 or 15
Nothing unexpected. They start with some extra capacity and simply don’t give you the full battery range until the battery wears out – this masks the capacity loss until later.
For the Prius models with NiMH batteries Toyota stretched their service life by only allowing them to charge up to around 90% and calling that “full”. When it’s down to one bar that’s close to but not quite at the lower limit for NiMH chemistry. For 1st through 3rd gen (2nd through 4th if counting the original Japan only model as 1st) there’s a company selling a LiFe-Po4 upgrade kit. they figured out how to fool the control system into thinking it’s the NiMH battery but it charges and discharges the LiFe-Po4 battery more. That chemistry tolerates being discharged almost to zero without damage. Thus it can hold more usable charge while weighing 40 pounds less. They also have a kit for Lexus models that use the same NiMH modules as the Prius.
Tesla guarantees their “long range” or performance battery to 8 years or 120,000 miles to be at least 70% of original capacity.
I have a bit of sympathy for Tesla here, they have quite a bit of liability and responsibility here- a V3 supercharger can push up to 300KW into the pack. That is a huge amount of energy in a very short time. Which is why every Tesla has active cooling on the battery.
All those numbers are calculated to be just under the point where the battery would normally enter its exponential capacity fade. It has nothing to do with safety. They are basically guaranteeing the battery to the point it would last in normal average use, minus one or two years, and beyond that you’re on your own.
Liability just like Tesla Autopilot – Tesla says it’s always the drivers fault?
So that’s why it’s called a “service center” and not a “repair center”…
Nothing new. Authorised service centers are only able to replace parts until thing gets fixed althoughbthey don’t care if it really is fixed. I know first hand stories where car that was being repaired for weeks or months with no results was later properly diagnosed by sales man of other brand or by sending voice message by whatsapp with engine noise recording. And now that repairs include software updates they can expand faster than beurocracy in Parkinsons Law.
CUED
now get off my lawn!
The end user is leasing the car, and we have no idea what will happen when he returns the car with a repair not authorized by the factory. Tesla will discover the fix when they refurbish for resale, I would think. Who knows what happens then.
> The object hit penetrated the plastic shield over the front of the battery pack, striking a fitting in the low-pressure battery cooling plumbing. The plastic fitting cracked, causing a leak that obviously needed repair.
What a “genius” engineer placed easily breakable plastic parts underneath and even don’t bother to provide any steel protection for them? Is it a stupidity or intentional?
+1 Kabillion!
Terrible design.
A “value engineer”, with a mind to getting some sweet maintenance money off unsuspecting customers.
In the grand tradistion of Henry Ford famously scouring scrapyards to work out which parts of his cars didn’t wear out or break, so as to make future versions were less rugged and (of course) cheaper to manufacture, for the same sale price.
The earliest memory I have of anything being done to a car from when I was a child was my dad helping a neighbor doling some maintenance on a neighbor’s VW (not a beatle, but just as simple, and also had the engine in the back).
Unscrewed 2 bolts and men pulled the engine out by hand. It was back on the road in an hour.
My dad is now passed so I can’t ask what was that they needed to take the engine out for, but the point is, anyone can work on a well designed piece of machinery, as long as it was designed to be worked on.
I guess that Tesla is a PC now.
It’s not just the money saved, it’s the amount of waste avoided…
I can’t really blame Tesla for the battery replacement diagnosis; the potential and unknown liability surrounding an alternative fix simply could not be done by any large company. With that being said, the design and design philosophy is questionable.
Perhaps it would be a not so bad idea to put a metal “skid pan” (ie: armourplate) either on or as a replacement for that plastic panel, which obviously didn’t protect the sensitive parts inside the car?
Thing is, it’s like this in all of the auto industry. For a example an Alternator, the Diode pack dies and it’s only a 10 dollar part but if you were to take it to a Mechanic he would replace the whole Alternator charging the customer the full price of the alternator you can get at a parts store and BTW a mechanic has a dealer discount and gets it for cost. Tack on the labor and keeps the core charge. If the Mechanic is nice he might not charge a disposal fee.
The problem is no one wants to learn to fix it themselves and rather to pay some one to fix it then complain how much they had to fork over to have it done. At the same time the manufacturers rather train their repair techs to maximize profit for the manufacturer. Instead of going to the component level to fix it for peanuts they have them replace a whole module. I bet the 6 grand out of that 16 grand is what it costs for the battery pack and labor costs. The rest is markup.
Having repaired the diode pack in my alternator, I can understand the mechanic’s case.
It took me hours to wrangle the corroded bolts open, clean up all the junk and dust, then replace the diode bridge and put all back together, and in the end the alternator broke again because the voltage regulator corroded off a year later and I had to do it all over again. If you need to charge $50 an hour to run your business and pay your mechanic, it’s way more expensive to fix the alternator than to replace it.
Refurbishing broken alternators is cheaper done at a factory specialized for such jobs.
Counting by my own salary, replacing the $10 diode bridge cost me about $150. Of course, that’s me paying myself, but getting another alternator cost me $5 and 15 minutes to remove it from a junked car.
The $15,300 price differential between the actual (“which still seems steep to us”) $700 repair bill and the quoted price at the dealership is enough to put the car on a car transport, have it driven to the opposite coast, repaired, then driven back and still be well over $10,000 ahead. If this doesn’t create a market for specialty repair, I’m not sure what will.
As far as the actual price tag, it’s like the old joke about the guy hired to fix a big piece of machinery who then hits it with a hammer once, making it operate again, and sends a whopping bill for his services based on his unique knowledge of where to use the hammer.
Of that $700, $50 was parts and labor and the other $650 is for knowing exactly what to do.
Want a repairable product?
Take responsibility for your purchases.
Legislation, as in nearly all cases, is not the answer. Laws are easily circumvented and will inevitably have unintended consequences.
Tesla owners as a whole are responsible. I have no sympathy. It’s not like he didn’t know the company and how they designed the Model 3 to save money.
there aren’t enough pre 1970’s cars to go around, good luck finding something that’s not run by some sort of ecm. I settled for a car that basically just has engine management and that’s about it. But even then, most of us need something to drive, and not all of us can afford the time or space to hack together, or repair an older vehicle without these stupid flaws of computer controlled everything… According to your logic, it’s just as dumb to get into any vehicle that has electronic control over any of the primary functions, braking accelerating, etc. Due to their design they are simply flawed and subject to bugs and worse yet, direct attack. ie: some forms of regulation are going to be required. regulations are the reason that we have more fuel efficient cars, the gasoline is no longer leaded, safety standards have risen, etc.
I mean, you should expect that your car work and not burst into flames. because if your car was sold to you as a ticking time bomb, you wouldn’t buy it. So yeah, there may be unintended consequences for poorly written regulation, which is why regulation needs to be somewhat flexible and well worded and very pointed as to what it is to apply to and why it applies and under what circumstances. Not all regulation is good like this, actually most of it is not… but that’s why we have to pay attention and maybe revisit regulations on a regular (ha) basis.