This is why I will probably sell my Tesla when it gets even close to the 50k bumper to bumper warranty. Used car prices for Teslas are awesome, I could sell it to Carvana for more than I paid for it I think right now.
I'm already having a load of trouble this morning getting a flat fixed because it has a slow leak and the tires have the acoustic foam inside them that prevents using green slime. Tesla wants $81 to fix it- if I drive an hour and a half to a service center.
I love the gas savings but I don't want to drive a John Deere that can't be worked on when things go wrong.
> getting a flat fixed because it has a slow leak and the tires have the acoustic foam inside them that prevents using green slime
I had the same issue with Costco and another tire shop refusing to patch a nail in my 2020 Model Y tire.
I tried a Discount Tire - they fixed it within a few hours for free, with a smile. They only asked I consider purchasing from them when I'm in the market for new tires.
8 minutes, and someone already hit the downvote button? Parent isn't wrong, a patch (and especially a plug) does decrease the structural integrity of the tire, no controversy there. From my previous life as an auto mechanic, many times some of the strands of the steel belt(s) will be broken. And what used to be a solid sheet of rubber now has a hole in it. IIRC, plugging a tire at a minimum knocks off a speed rating.
That's not to say I haven't driven a plugged tire until it's bald. And that's not to say that I wouldn't tell my sister to go ahead and get that pricey tire patched. But if you think that repaired tire is now as good as new, you are wrong. Would I do a track day on a repaired tire? Would I whip my Tesla up to ludicrous speed on a patched tire? Would I ride a plugged motorcycle tire any further than I have to? Fuck no. If I can afford a track day, I can afford a new tire.
Why can’t tires do away with air and use some dense, never flat material? I’ve always wondered, I’m sure there is a good outside physics answer though surely.
Your keyword there is "dense". Rotating weight on a vehicle is basically: bad. But nothing is lighter than air, amirite?
John Dunlop didn't invent the pneumatic tire, but he put it into production. Dunlop's son was getting headaches riding his tricycle, so John D. softened the ride (as pointed out by sibling comment).
And so using air gives us three things that apparently haven't been found with any other material in combination: minimal weight, cushioning, and it can support the weight of the vehicle. If it needs replacing, one need only find an air compressor.
Mostly due to weight, but absorbing impact is another big feature. An air filled tire can absorb a lot of minor road imperfections, a solid tire bike or roller blades can give you an idea of wat a solid tire care would be like.
I took option to have the Tesla mobile tire service come to my house. I had several screws in one of my tires, and one was too close to the sidewall to plug. The guy in the van showed up to my house and had the full tire removed/mounted/balanced in about 15-20 minutes. I had to pay for the tire and service fee (obviously) but it was incredibly fast and convenient for me. I found the whole process impressive.
The tire needed to be replaced regardless, and no shop around me had the exact tire in stock, so I would have had to wait and I needed to be able to drive safely (without screws in my tire) for work travel requirements. Most shops won't give you a discount on a single tire anyway, and Tesla's price on the tire was cheaper than Discount Tire Direct on eBay. The fee to replace the tire was $20, which is in line with a normal tire shop (mounting and balancing 4 tires is usually $60-80 in my experience).
The Tesla rep on the phone said I am out of the area for that service. I don’t think I would have paid the extra anyway. I’m too cheap to pay such a markup for fixing a flat out of principle alone.
I know you're probably kidding, but plugging a tire doesn't require removing it, and while lying down on dirty ground might be helpful, it's not a terribly sweaty activity either .
It certainly does on my car, we don't all drive vehicles with pickup truck levels of wheel well clearance...
And the few times I've aided others with installing a plug, attempting it without removing the wheel first just made it more difficult, sweaty and dirty, than had we just taken the wheel off for better access.
hm. kay. I've not had any reason to use my plug kit myself so far, but the 2 times I had a slow leak, on front tire they just had me turn it at a nice sharp turn for good access, and on the rear one, they jacked it up nice and high without removing it.
It's a different story in a gas station parking lot with just your space saver jack. Personally I'll always prefer working from above a removed wheel where I have more mechanical advantage and can avoid laying on the ground.
Sometimes you do get lucky on the fronts though, if the puncture is near the outside edge. Especially if your vehicle has a lot of caster presenting more of the wear surface at full lock.
But either way, we're deep in the realm of "sounds too much like manual labor to me" for someone drawing the line at attaching a can of green slime to the valve stem and pressing down the button. Wheel on or off, it ain't happening.
There's nothing really magical about the tire foam that is Tesla specific. Shops should be able to fix them by cutting out a piece, but some don't want to for one reason or another.
I definitely would try to avoid going to the service center for it. Discount Tire tends to be better.
A few more years of depreciation and getting hit with a bill like this could mean your insurance company salvages your title. Probably good to pass this live grenade of a car to someone else before that happens.
The more I see stuff like this, the more I'm convinced that life is measurably better, less costly, less stressful and less complicated by owning something like a $9000 used Toyota Corolla.
Unless you have a truly ridiculously high salary/net worth and can afford to buy something like a model S plaid edition on a whim, for fun. At which point you're into the territory of people who do things like buy Nissan GT-R for fun and then pay aftermarket modification shops to make $65,000 of additional enhancements to them.
Tesla was and remains a luxury car. I don't think the Model 3 changed that. It's competition for BMW or Mercedes, not Toyota. Luxury vehicles are notorious for their long-term dealer driven maintenance costs. What Tesla has over its luxury competition is likely more reliability and less of those costs. But the same "you have to get it done at the dealer and it's gonna milk you bigtime" philosophy seems to prevail.
I don't think it's intrinsic to EVs, is what I'm saying. But more to how Tesla has positioned themselves re: market segment.
e.g. the Chevy Volt is now in its 10th year and only now are people starting to have real difficulties with gen-1 10 year old Volts and battery packs and getting GM to service and replace them. Prior to that it was just smooth sailing. Most are not seeing serious degradation and the warranty has been excellent on them up to 8 years or so. A third party market is building up around older Volt battery servicing in some cities, despite not many Volts having been sold.
I think it's entirely feasible we will see the equivalent of a fully electric Toyota Corolla in the next 5-10 years. I don't think Toyota will make it though.
As a fellow "always going to buy a cheap but reliable older car" driver I can attest that it is in fact the least stressful car buying / owning experience ever. If you need a car for the actual "moving your body to and from places" it can't be beat.
* Parts are always available and inexpensive for the mass-market models and any repair ship can get you sorted.
* If I get into an accident the most I can ever be out is $8-10k but with depreciation more likely $4-5k.
* If they don't offer you 0% interest you just buy the car outright.
* Insurance is cheeeeap because the car isn't worth anything and it's not the kind of car anyone will drive fast or target for vandalism or theft.
* You can buy cars with high mileage and still easily get another 100k miles out of it. If the thing is a scrap heap by the end who cares?
I was this way until I got married and my neighbors wife nearly got killed in her ~2010 model lexus suv by an inattentive driver running a red light @45 mph t-boning the drivers side with 1 ton truck. She's lucky she wasn't seriously maimed and fully recovered. A 2020 Lexus might have avoided the hospital trip entirely based on the difference in crash tests for drive side impact. I'd rather my wife be in a at most 3-4 year old BMW, Lexus, Volvo, etc than a late model cheap car for the sake of my piece of mind alone.
I used to be in the camp of buy a cheap, old reliable car, until I realized just how much safer cars made in the past 5 years are vs the older ones. Cars are getting much safer, and I'll happily pay 5-10k more just for the insurance of reducing the chances of me being maimed or killed in an accident.
This may be good advice today, but will it hold five years from now? Ten years from now? Eventually, the delta in death rates per mile traveled will be indistinguishable from zero - either because safety improvements will no longer be significant, or because we have gotten the death rate so low that the difference between it and zero will be negligible.
We're currently at a point where 15-year old vehicles have ~144 deaths per million registered vehicles [1], and 5-year old vehicles have ~40 deaths per million registered vehicles [2]. Sure, you may be willing to pay a premium to get 40 down to 10, but are you willing to pay as much of a premium to get that 10 down to 2.5? 2.5 down to 0.6?
The demographics of those who drive 15 year old cars and those who drive 5 year old cars are very different. I'd bet that the 15 year old demo contains more reckless/intoxicated drivers (i.e. young people)
Yep, my wife rear-ended a delivery truck in our older Audi and totalled it -- with the kids in the car; everyone was OK, but after that she would not consider anything that didn't have collision avoidance systems and safety at least as good as the Audi we had. I'm glad she wasn't in our older Kia. There would have been injuries.
Exactly. Though I will say there are lots and lots of people who get cars they cannot afford or pay stupid money for ones, and there's way more of them then people who can afford more but choose the cheaper car.
Money well spent honestly. I've gotten in two accidents (one of them a t-bone) in cars made 2010ish and I thought they did fine both times with us walking away with minor bruising and a sore neck. But I can absolutely respect that.
Yeah. I bought a used Honda Civic. It had 38K miles on it. I did replace the battery - $140 with a 3-year unconditional warranty and 7-year pro-rated warranty, and oil changes - $50 including tire rotation and that's it. My last oil change was a year ago and it's about due for another. The parts are universally available, dirt cheap, capable mechanics abound, and the insurance is super cheap. It's the way to go for me.
If you are concerned about part and maintenance costs, then a car favored by tuners is a pretty good bet for repair. Its amazing the amount of parts you can get for the Honda Civic.
Given some of the manufactures are starting to sell crate electric motors, I am a lot more interested in the Ford F-150 Lightning and anything Honda builds than Tesla given the repair stories of time and expense.
Nobody is writing news articles about people who drive their Teslas without any issues. I’ve had my model 3 for over 2 years, not a single issue, no oil changes, no maintenance done on it whatsoever. 25k miles.
The article isn't really about regular maintenance or other Tesla cost-of-ownership issues. It's about older Teslas that are out of warranty and the sometimes extremely high repair costs that come with battery replacement and repair, which are especially expensive due to Tesla service practices (replacing the entire battery).
It seems like Teslas (and other EVs) have a different typical cycle of costs than typical ICE cars. In the ICE world, maintenance and repair costs start fairly low, then become moderate, and eventually moderate to high ("I'm tired of throwing a couple grand at this car every 6 months, I'll just put that towards a new car", says the American consumer). EVs start with incredibly low cost maintenance, then continue with incredibly low cost maintenance, and then even more low cost maintenance ... until WHAM! the battery bill hits.
This isn't really a surprise to folks who have been paying attention to electric cars, but as more and more people go EV, it seems newsworthy to point it out, as well as to encourage Tesla to play nice with third-party repair shops.
I think the "wham!" battery bill is an outlier for telsas. It's more normal to have a gradual range degradation. I've seen cars with > 300k on the odometer that work fine.
Yes but my point was that situations like these are the exception not the norm, usually these batteries degrade slowly and you should be able to get at least a few hundred thousand miles out of them before it needs to be replaced (assuming you took care of it properly).
Nobody's writing new articles about people getting their Toyota's parts replaced either, because there's a robust marketplace of parts and service providers that can get the job done.
What's remarkable about Tesla (but should be entirely obvious) is that given their small market share relative to ICE vehicles, this marketplace doesn't really exist. Your options are to 'wing it' with DIY or somewhat iffy greymarket fixes (such as the one described here), or deal with Tesla, which from an outsider's perspective seems to have some severe quality and customer service issues when it comes to maintenance and repairs.
> which from an outsider's perspective seems to have some severe quality and customer service issues when it comes to maintenance and repairs.
From another outsider's perspective they have these same issues when it comes to just getting you a decent car in the first place. Some big tech influencer was posting on Twitter the other day about how he was accepting his new Model Y even though it was a piece of crap, because he was worried he'd get an even worse piece of crap if he sent it back based on photos he'd seen from other Model Y owners. Seems real cool...
That is what happens with electric cars, they are maintenance free, for most people.
That was the main reason car dealers did not want to touch an electric car, they make more than half of their income from the repair shop, and they know with electric cars that business is mostly gone.
New business will be created, though. Changing the batteries, balancing them when dead, putting a new technology when batteries improve,or improving the driving assistant will be necessary.
Thats kinda the story of me with my ICE cars too. Oil changes take 15 minutes twice a year and its a drive through where I don't even have to exit my car. I make up for that time and more with the savings from it only taking sixty seconds to juice up the car.
I've also owned cars for a long time, from new to 300k miles, and typically the expensive fixes that start to creep up are due to components wearing out. Things like rubber seals in the suspension, brake lines rusting out due to the salt used on the roads or a manufacturing defect leading to premature rust, electrical harnesses needing replacing. I don't think electric cars are immune to these issues since they have nothing to do with the powerplant, usually that part of the car is bulletproof in my experiences if you buy from reliable manufacturers like Honda.
The unfortunate thing about oil changes is unless you're DIYing them or have a reliable mechanic overqualified for oil changing, every one is a risky diceroll of some oil changing lackey putting their ham fists on your vehicle and wrecking something.
From cross-threaded drain plugs to unnecessary access holes cut in aero panels out of laziness, there's enough examples out there to be concerned.
Very true. I don't know why more cars don't have top-side oil filters, because it would make DIY oil changes so much easier.
Even when I lived in an apartment with no garage, I could easily change the oil in my car (mk4 VW Jetta TDI) out in the parking lot. I use an oil extractor to suck it out the dipstick hole, and since the filter is front and centre, I don't need to get under the car at all. In fact, I've never removed the oilpan drain plug.
I've never had an issue taking the car to a place like valvoline where oil changes are their bread and butter. I've only heard of that sort of stuff happening at dealerships where they might have highschoolers working above their heads in the maintenance department.
The first and only time I used such a place, the Jiffy Lube in Pacifica off Skyline, the smell of burning oil graced my driving experience for the better part of a week afterwards.
You see, I had brought quality Mobil 1 full synthetic oil in quart bottles, which the career oil changers didn't seem to understand how to pour without spilling everywhere. Pro-tip: the offset spout is supposed to be at the top, not the bottom orientation.
Oil changes are inherently a probable interaction with either children or clowns. And I'm saying this as someone who did oil changes as a summer job, back before I had a driver's license. The things I've seen... I pity the fool who relies on random third parties for maintenance. EVs are a potentially huge improvement in this department.
To be honest, you showed up with some weird bottle the people working there probably have never used and you got the expected results. You do something like that with anything and it would probably result in the same sort of situation. I've never had an issue. I know how to change my own oil and still pay people to do it. Not worth my time when its so cheap to have someone else do it in 15 minutes while I sit there looking at emails. I can get any expert or schmuck or handy relative to work on my car for a range of competitive prices. Legally I have to pay tesla $22,500 to replace a battery. Not much of an improvement for the consumer.
There's nothing weird about a 1-quart bottle of Mobil 1, it's the same basic form factor retail oil quarts have been sold in since they stopped being steel cans, i.e. before most Jiffy Lube employees were born.
The problem isn't the bottle, the problem is a combination of carelessness and incompetence. Which is what you're going to get with a high probability at these low-level positions, good luck with that.
Even without oil changes. Modern cars are amazingly reliable. I believe you could drive most of them to 50k km or even more without doing anything, but filling gas and washer fluid. Wouldn't do them much good in long term, but it is possible.
I know a guy that went 40,000 mi never changing the oil on a brand new Mazda 3. Eventually the engine started to fail. Amazingly Mazda replaced the engine for him, but cancelled his warranty after that.
He sold Mazda's for a living and literally had no idea the oil needed to be changed....
That might be relevant for the overall reliability of Teslas, but it's not relevant to how enjoyable the experience is of getting work done on a Tesla.
You must be mistaken. Most leases are for under 10k a year. 12.5k a year will a] cost you significantly more on a lease (you won't qualify for the cheapo $99/mo leases) and b] will impact your insurance.
25k over 2 years is over-average at least. I did 15k/year but I drove 75mi/day back then (pre-COVID).
New ICE cars are lower maintenance, for sure. But they're nowhere near 0-maintenance like an EV. I've spent like $250 on maintenance activities on my EV over 4 years.
Not having to visit a dirty gas station or repair shop (the than tires) is quite liberating.
Even old ICE cars can do 25k miles no problem. I've taken my '04 4Runner from 170k to 200k over the past 2 years, only major servicing was the timing belt replacement (scheduled for every 90k miles, ~$2k).
I had to replace the O2 sensor too, but that was about $50 IIRC, and it took me 15 minutes in my driveway after O'Reilly diagnosed it for free using OBD2. No $3k/yr "Toolbox" sub required.
A 10k lease lets you drive upwards of 200 miles a week. That is doable if you have a short commute and / or never use it for day trips or vacations.
Live outside of a small bubble, and it adds up pretty quick... then again, leases aren't very popular around here.
Certainly an EV will have less maintenance, but even ICE cars have practically zero maintenance outside of the occasional 15 minutes at a quick lube oil change place before they hit 50k miles. Not having to fill the truck up with gas would be nice, if it could last a day logging in the forest on a single charge.
Found the HN user that lives in a flyover state. :)
Average yearly mileage is greatly affected by where you live. Someone who lives in a rural area is almost guaranteed to put far more miles on a vehicle than a person who lives in the city. It's the difference between a 15 mile trip to the nearest grocery store and a 45 minute commute on open roads to taking the bus to work and only using the car on some weekends.
You can lower break wear if you drive a manual ice car too. On my stick shift for a freeway off ramp I only hit the brakes when going from 5mph to a complete stop at the end, the rest of the time I smoothly downshift and let the engine brake the car. There is just no chance a tesla that weighs twice as much as my manual little honda is wearing the brake pads less.
After years of headaches, my criteria for buying a car includes that it must have a huge after-market for parts and that I can bring it to pretty much any shop and get it fixed. Corollas fit that bill perfectly.
I’m in the $9k used car camp. How much pleasure do you derive from your car? For me driving is somewhere between absolutely miserable to slightly uncomfortable and the things that determines where my experience falls outside factors such as how much traffic is on the road, how far do I have to be, how much of a hurry I am in, and how long I’ve been in the car. I’ve driven all sorts of things: trucks, suvs, sport cars, luxury sedans, jeeps, and the economy sedan. As long as I trust the reliability and the AC/heat is working none of other aspects of a car make it more or less pleasurable for me. Driving sucks hard stop.
The total cost difference between a base model Tesla and my $9k sedan is about $25k, and having an extra 25k in my brokerage account at my age reduces my estimated retirement age by 1 year. With the opportunity cost in mind owning a Tesla would actually reduce my overall pleasure from life.
What am I missing? How are people getting so much pleasure from their cars? Do people actually like driving? Do you live in a place with no traffic and perfect roads?
I used to be exactly like you. I drove mid-price cars (around 10k) and was 100% miserable. I could drive shorter distances around town, but I was completely worn out after 200-300km of continuous driving. When we got wherever we were going, I needed to take a good 30-45 minutes to rest my brain.
I bought a Hyundai EV about a year ago and I actually kinda like driving now. The electric drive train is somehow more logical to my brain. I tell it to go faster and it does without any fuss or noise. No switching gears manually or alternating engine RPMs from the automatic gearbox.
The best part is the lane keeping assistant and smart cruise. When I'm on a bigger road with proper markings, I can just lightly hold the wheel and the car does the annoying minutiae of driving.
Now I can easily drive 400km+ in a single day and not feel completely drained afterwards.
Something about the need to slightly manage the steering wheel every second while also maintaining a safe distance to the car in front of me drained my brain. I was unable relax at the wheel. Now I can focus on actually following the traffic around me.
Some of us get pleasure out of acceleration and 'sportiness' in our vehicles. And also creature comforts inside the vehicle. Maybe I'm a victim of marketing. But I feel like if I'm going to be spending thousands of dollars, I want to feel like I'm buying something ... fun?
That said, my "sporty" car is a Chevy Volt in sport mode, not a Tesla Model S Plaid. I'd still like to be able to retire someday.
I guess the question would be, if I have a $9000 toyota corolla with comfortable seats, good tires, the AC blows cold, the cruise control works properly, etc...
Would I gain what I subjectively consider to be $45,000 worth of additional comfort and pleasure by buying a model 3? Or $85,000 of comfort and pleasure by buying a model S?
If you think about the math of what one actually pays for a car like that it becomes much easier to stomach.
At the end of the day you still wind up with an asset that was 85k. If you bought say a 3/4 year old car and bought wisely, it will have minimum depreciation. So while you are certainly out more money, it's not like you've lost 85k, it's more like 10-30. Whereas you probably are only going to be able to sell your corolla for let's say 4. We're now talking about the comfort/pleasure of ~25k, but the cost between the vehicles of between 9k - 85k. Let's say you have this car for 5 years, the difference in ownership is 4/5k per year. If you can afford this, even if I'm off by a factor of 2/3, it's really not that bad.
At the same time, used cars are ones that have already taken that depreciation hit and prices eventually plateu (or even inflate regardless of condition if its a desirable car like an old porsche or a 2000s toyota land cruiser). I bet you could drive a $9000 used corolla for three years and sell it for $9000 afterwards, and it would have to be close to death for that car to ever be worth less than $5000, which is like the baseline for a used car without major mechanical issues.
as a data point I know somebody in Canada who bought a 12 year old mazda3 with 230,000 km on it for $3500, drove it in BC for two years, and sold it for the same they paid for it.
by far their biggest cost was the liability insurance.
Realistically speaking, there's 6 things my life I might have to randomly spend $22k on: my house or my family (5 of us). Adding another thing to that list would make my life much less pleasurable.
Your life must be pathetically short on pleasure if the choice of car substantially moves the needle, make some effort to diversify your sources of pleasure away from powered wheelchairs.
I don't know, there seems to be a lot of people who enjoy cars -- whether for looks, sport, status, collecting, fixing, restoring, etc. I don't think it's particularly surprising if I were chatting with folks at a party and someone would mentions cars as a hobby of theirs.
I think your charge could be leveled against most hobbies, especially collectibles. It seems a bit mean-spirited.
My Model 3 hit some road debris a couple years ago. It damaged the coolant line connector heading into the battery. Tesla replaced the entire battery for ~$15k, which probably could have been a $700 repair like that mentioned in the video.
That said, my insurance covered the cost without a problem and I had my car back in 4 days. I don't know if they took possession of the original battery or negotiated a different rate, but it sounds like Tesla makes bank on this kind of repair. $15k for a new battery pack, a quick turnaround from their service center, and someone gets the old pack which in all likelihood was perfectly fine.
There aren't a lot of shops that know how to repair a battery pack (in most of the country anyway). With less than 2% of cars on the road being EVs that's not surprising, but as more are sold you'll see more come about. The insurance companies will be very motivated to reduce these kinds of claims, and with real competition Tesla will no longer be able to justify the practice.
That's because the old parts are worth money. Check how much extra they want if you request your old tires after getting new ones. Hey, they took money off! Because folks might want your old batteries but they sure as hell don't want your old tires.
At some point this is going to automatically cannibalize the used market once used teslas are ~$20000 and fill it with cars with replaced batteries and salvaged titles.
Before anyone types out a wall-o-text pearl clutching about how all mechanical systems are unknown black boxes and surely the indy shop couldn't have sufficiently fixed the issue without compromising safety you may want to look at the discussion from last time a similar thing happened. You can likely find something in there to copy+paste and save yourself some time.
I started out already on the side of "this is something a 3rd party shop could easily fix in a solid way" but after reading your link I'm actually less sure about that than when I started.
The case in this thread doesn't seem like a "we screwed a replacement piece on to fix the coolant leak" level fix like that thread, it sounds like serious work to the battery pack. I don't think it's pearl clutching to have concerns on $5,000 worth of unspecified repairs to a battery unit knowing Tesla does not hand out the information on how to properly service the vehicle to that level. I think Tesla should support this kind of fix by 3rd party shops though but barring that at the moment I think it's a fair question to ask.
If a 3rd party shop botches a battery fix and the car burns down killing all the passengers the headlines won't be "3rd party botch-job kills family in EV"
It will be "TESLA BATTERY FIRE KILLS FAMILY" and _maybe_ they'll mention the fact that the battery had 3rd party repairs in the middle of the article.
This is why companies don't want random 3rd party shops fixing sensitive stuff. No matter how good they are.
There was also a comment on the video that mentioned that the fix probably wouldn't last. The battery packs are a unit and they don't like it when pieces are older / newer than the rest of the unit. Tesla might know that while replacing a single cell would fix the immediate problem it would eventually cause the whole battery to shut down.
Maybe this is similar to when you have something really bad happen to an ICE motor (ie. broken valve), but you drain and flush the engine oil, which "fixes" the problem. And then 6 months later the engine grenades requiring a full replacement.
Drunk post : I live in Europe where cities are more pedestrian/public transporation friendly so I am biased but still, Ok, I couldn't afford a Tesla unless I ask the bank for money that I will have to reimburse over at least ten years (oh wait the bank won't give me that sum anyways) so my thinking is :
You bought an 100,000$ car so you can spend that sum on a car so you probably can spend 20,000$ on a repair years later. I get it it's overpriced but what you're paying for is not having to care on how/when it is fixed, you just call the number. Same reasoning if you have Apple hardware. If you're in the situation where you spend that sum on a car but you can't afford those repair prices you might have made a litle "caprice" just as my roommate who wanted a car and now is spending a thousand euros on his shitty second hand car each year (parking, insurance, repairs) which he can't afford. He should have stuck with freeriding public transportation imho.
My point being : Yeah Luxury is overpriced but that's the point. If you can't afford having status symbols, don't.
Are conventional ICE repair shops making it up on volume? For example, if you have 10 cars a day coming in for major repairs your prices look different than if its only 1 car a week. They have less volume to spread the fixed cost around, etc, etc. I'm sure there is plenty of gouging going on, just wondering if this is a missing piece to explain some of the disparity.
Dealers have repair hour lists. For example BMW N47 engine chain guides replacement (not the whole timing service, just a broken guide = slapping/rattling noise) is still an engine out/dropped gearbox job (timing chains are at the back of the engine) and might be charged as over 10 labour hours at >$100/hour + liquids + parts + diagnosis = usually $2-4K in US. Doesnt mean thats how long it takes, good mechanic can do it in under 2h.
I wouldnt call this egregious, its the cost of owning a stupid BMW(/1). It would take you those 10h or longer to DIY. Efficient mechanic will put car on the lift, drop engine on hydraulic lift engine table and be done in 2h moving to the next job.
/1 stupid because it was engineered for numbers and not real life use. Service intervals set by marketing - 15K miles engine oil changes, ZF transmission "lifetime fluid" LOL, all to appease fleet buyers with 3 year leases.
> “You have literally teenagers doing break and oil changes on $100,000 cars and the customer hops in these cars and drives 85 miles an hour on the highway. We’re trusting these repairs to people that don’t have a ton of experience.”
Considering that a break (sic) and oil change is a simple DIY task, it's no surprise that we trust teenagers with no experience to do it. I trust myself to do it, and I'm not a gearhead.
> But Tesla has done a great job of marketing the Teslas as a complicated piece of machinery that needs certified technicians to do repairs. Many basic repairs are impossible to do on its cars because of software locks. “Tesla, first and foremost, is a software company,” Benoit said.
How does this square with the oft-touted claim that other automakers are dragging their feet on getting rid of ICEs, because fixing them is a huge profit center for them? Are electric vehicles actually easier to maintain and fix, or not? And if they are, why does Tesla charge so much for these repairs?
As an end-user, I don't really care about whether or not a car-in-the-shop fix is a ten-hour job, or a five-minute one. What I care about is how much it costs me.
Agree, the argument is that many tasks on Teslas should be simple DIY tasks but Tesla has engineered away access so that they are no longer simple DIY tasks. As you quoted FTA: "Many basic repairs are impossible to do on its cars because of software locks"
See what some Tesla owners reported for bills for bills for brake replacements, which should be cheap and DIY-able, about $8500[1]
Sounds like typical Tesla engineering. Everyone knows that seized brakes are expensive, but constructing brakes in such a way that they will seize because of underuse is something that only Tesla would do.
My Kia managed to do that. But hey it cost half of Tesla so I shouldn't expect Tesla quality. Actually using them hard sometimes is something that can be learned.
Like the touchscreen that couldn't handle the temperatures in the passenger cabin when the vehicle was parked in the summer sun. Once again, Tesla's engineers chose a part that was wildly unsuitable for its use case.
All major auto manufacturers sub-contract parts of their cars to third parties. It doesn't matter who designed it, what matters is who slaps their logo on it, and ships it to the end user.
I, as a customer, don't have a business relationship with that subcontractor. I do have a business relationship with the manufacturer. They own the profits, and they own the problems. If the subcontractors they choose produce crap, it is reflected in ratings of their products.
Tesla didn't just go to AutoZone and pick up some brake calipers and pads. Tesla sent a specification to that third party, and they probably should have specified that the brake pistons don't seize in the calipers if the duty cycle is quite light.
Why can Tesla do it, but Ford, Toyota, Honda can't? I'm sure the latter would love to regularly charge twenty grand for a five-grand fix. What's the difference?
I can think of 6 different Toyota dealerships all within 40 miles of me. In addition, there are innumerable independent mechanics also competing for those service dollars. The invisible hand of the market responds accordingly.
Because Tesla has cultivated a reputation and consumer base where being high maintenance is ok and not particularly bad for the brand.
Toyota could do it too. And for a decade their blindly rabid fanboys would probably still be screeching about how they're the most reliable, facts be damned. and it would probably work quite well. And then when consumers wise up to the fact that they're being sold something on a premise and getting something else it would all come crashing down because high maintenance cars are not consistent with their brand image.
They do charge for a bunch of small fixes. Maybe not 25k worth, but repairs are a good profit center for dealerships. Dealerships are not fond of electric vehicles because they don't need much in the way of repairs.
The brands you mentioned also have a reputation for reliable cars that are cheap to repair.
Maybe if the comparison is done against the likes of Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Ferrari and so on, it would paint a different picture.
I think the feet-dragging comes more from the dealer network than from automakers themselves. Ford, GM and the like will still make plenty of money from offering parts for their EVs. Dealers however continue to show distaste in EV sales. Part of that may be the reduced service needs (no oil changes, transmission rebuilds, engine maintenance, etc.) that will lower their income, part may be from the sales side. That's been Tesla's argument all along for selling and servicing direct, and I think anyone that's tried to buy an EV from a Chevy dealer might agree.
I don't really want to take advice from a guy that can't tell the difference between break and brake when it comes down to a ticking time bomb of energy that can literally burn down your house when it charges poorly. IC cars can do this too but thankfully it's a lot more rare generally when they are just off.
I've really been wanting a nice electric car, but this scenario bothers me. You are holding the car when it goes out of warranty and you face a huge battery bill.
What to do? If the battery costs as much as the car is worth?
With the recent lifespan of ICE cars, they just seem better after 10+ years for this reason.
I think there's a non-negligible amount of people who thought or convinced themselves they bought something other than a luxury car. Once you see things through the luxury car perspective all the odd things Tesla does make sense, like overpriced repairs and software locking.
I am somewhat happy to see this. I have been thinking recently about what will happen to all the small mechanic businesses that currently employ so many with the advent of "manufacturer limited" electric vehicles.
Question about these battery replacements: Is Tesla crediting the user with the value of the battery being replaced? That battery has a boatload of perfectly functioning cells that I believe Tesla already uses for powerwalls and grid storage.
It's directly in the swim lane of the entire battery recycling/full use lifecycle conversation.
There's going to soon be a very healthy aftermarket in people adapting tesla batteries for bespoke projects and electrifying classic car chassis. People are scooping up salvage Teslas right and left for this stuff.
I'm wondering how shady the service is being. "We have to replace the battery for 22k", OK do I get to keep the original battery component?
Neither. For technical and historical reasons, Tesla can, and customers do not seem to care... until they do.
(Exactly as with Apple products, but Teslas cost an order of magnitude more, so it's possible that Tesla will burn up customer goodwill faster; on the other hand, John Deere farming machines, which can cost a magnitude further at hundreds of thousands of dollars, are still purchased by customers as well, even with the John Deere right-to-repair and computerization issues.)
Are these unwise choices that customers are making? It's probably only unwise when something goes wrong. ;)
But people have bought many other expensive-to-repair vehicles (and other delicate machinery, like watches) for hundreds of years, so Tesla isn't exactly unique in that respect.
what you save in gas, will lose in repairs!!
I have driven all sorts of sports cars, trucks, rvs etc. Nothing so far has beat 10k corolla. At the end of the day, traffic/road condition, AC and a decent music system gets me to inflection point. After that, it barely moves the needle for me.
Tesla is not that different from any consumer device company: Priority #1 is shareholder value and they have nothing to gain by making repair easy. In fact, by making things easy/cheap to fix they are going to loose a ton of revenue. But by locking things down they can prevent both 3rd party parts AND 3rd party labor.
The long term solution might be for Tesla to offer longer leases, renewable warranty or other kind of recurring deals. Something like that would create a situation where all parties benefit:
- Tesla engineers can truly focus on reliability, repairability, sustainability
- Shareholders are happy about a reliable recurring revenue
- Customers get cheaper/faster fixes and have no reason to fix things themselves
> Tesla recently released its Toolbox, a set of diagnostic software that will tell a repair shop or Tesla owner what’s wrong with a car. Anyone can purchase access to the Toolbox but it costs $3,000 a year or $100 for 24 hours. But diagnostics are only half the issue.
> Replacement Tesla parts have to be installed by a certified Tesla dealership. Which begs the question, how did Benoit and his team replace Hoover’s battery? “We have alternate means of getting into things,” he said. “We don’t necessarily need the Toolbox in a lot of cases, but it would make our lives 10 time easier…Tesla is locking down more and more access to cars. There’s a lot of things that you used to be able to do that you no longer can do. They’re definitely tightening restrictions.”
Am I reading this right, that the problem is solved by a $100 charge for a tool that could easily be passed on to the consumer?
They imply the toolbox isn't all that's needed but then say “We don’t necessarily need the Toolbox in a lot of cases, but it would make our lives 10 time easier"
Sounds like they're loosening restrictions, not tightening them?
> Which begs the question, how did Benoit and his team replace Hoover’s battery? “We have alternate means of getting into things,” he said. “We don’t necessarily need the Toolbox in a lot of cases, but it would make our lives 10 time easier"
It certainly sounds to me like they're saying if they had the toolbox they would not need the alternate means to replace the battery. I recognize the previous passage says otherwise. But this part is a direct quote from the mechanic.
The quote doesn't make sense either. Why would you not purchase something that costs $100 if it makes your life ten times easier? This thing is surely paying for itself if what they say is true.
On the other hand, it seems this toolbox thing was released in response to right to repair laws in other states.
edit: also don't conflate cost to fix with price to repair. The bulk of the $5k is almost certainly labor. If $100 makes the job easier, it will probably cost the consumer less than $5k.
Yes, but if independent shops can either do this for $5k or do it with a faster/easier diagnosis for $5.1k, that’s not a bad situation for either the shop or the car owner. It doesn’t sound terribly far off from the indie-vs-dealer choices I make as an ICE auto owner.
Sure but the quote was hand picked by parent, the core of the article and the meat of the (cost) complaint is not the toolbox access but the part replacement.
Ah. I didn’t get the impression from the article that $5k was unreasonable, other than that the price should come down as technical mastery spreads to more independent shops.
In the video, Rich notes that the "Toolbox" is limited in scope to things like simple body panel replacements -- definitely not things like battery repair.
I'm already having a load of trouble this morning getting a flat fixed because it has a slow leak and the tires have the acoustic foam inside them that prevents using green slime. Tesla wants $81 to fix it- if I drive an hour and a half to a service center.
I love the gas savings but I don't want to drive a John Deere that can't be worked on when things go wrong.