They tell us that one day we will all drive electric cars, even if we don’t want to. Ten, twenty, fifty years, after the de facto disappearance from the sale of cars with internal combustion engines through various emission regulations, such cars will gradually disappear from the used market. So even the last “refuser” will have to buy an electric car if he doesn’t want to drive his cared for a veteran.
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But used cars are always associated with the risk of breakdowns, which in most cases customers of new cars do not have to deal with. For electric cars, the debate is mainly about battery life; all manufacturers give it a several-year warranty, but we won’t find out what it will look like in ten or fifteen years.
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At Tesla, however, there are already enough eight- and nine-year-old cars in the world today to talk about long-term reliability. The American youtuber Tyler Hoover bought one of these – he is 8 years and 4 months old and has driven 97 thousand miles (156 thousand km) -. After a few weeks of carefree driving, an unpleasant surprise awaited him, connected with her battery.
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Suddenly, a fault appeared, due to which it is possible to charge it only to a range of 49 miles (79 km). The normal practice of the carmaker in such a case is to replace the entire battery. This would not be a problem if the car was under warranty – the service would simply give the car a new battery free of charge and refurbish the old one and use it somehow.
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But if the car is not under warranty, which has been the case of this Tesla for four months, according to Hoover, replacing the battery in a branded service costs $ 17-20 thousand (370-436 thousand crowns), which is a “mechanical total” for this particular piece – it does not pay off fix it. Without the possibility of cheaper repairs, the car would become a donor of parts.
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According to him, the reason for the error message on the display is the so-called Batterygate. About a year ago, Tesla released a software update for the S Models that it delivered to them over the Internet, and after that update, the batteries of older models began to fail on a large scale. But then the vast majority, if not all, were still under warranty, so people didn’t mind that much. On the contrary – at the end of the warranty, their car received a completely new battery.
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The problem is only with capacity, not performance, as Hoover shows in the video. So is it just a software problem? Most likely not – and it will probably be possible to remove it much cheaper than a whole new battery for almost half a million crowns.
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However, there is also the Rich Rebuilds channel on YouTube, the founder of which is dedicated, among other things, to the repair of Tesla cars, and for this purpose he also opened three professional services, in which a total of four former Tesla employees work.
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According to the technician, one of them can happen with a Tesla battery, and it happens quite often that the cable at one of the modules comes loose, which deters the battery. Its software will then reduce the charge level for security reasons. The technician also said that the cost of the repair could be about $ 1,000, ie less than 22,000 crowns.
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“And this is a problem with Tesla and other automakers that sell electric cars or hybrids. … When anything happens to a battery, they want to replace the entire battery instead of repairing it, ”Hoover said in the video.
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The Rich Rebuilds channel is about something similar in its recent video. An unnamed driver of the new Tesla Model 3 ran over a mess on the road and damaged his battery. The brand service wanted to replace the entire battery for $ 16,000 just because it was unable to repair the damaged cooling hose.
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Refrigerant was leaking, the control electronics detected a problem and did not allow the car to function properly – for safety reasons, this is understandable. But if your cooling hose breaks in a conventional car, you won’t replace the entire engine, only the hose. And Rich’s service called The Electrified Garage fixed the problem for $ 700 (15,000 crowns). However, we may ask why the battery is made in such a way that overcoming a clutter on the road will damage it.
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In the video, Rich also deals marginally with the probable problem of Hoover’s Tesla. In the time from about 5:00, he says that a customer came to him two months after the end of the warranty, which was charged only for a range of about 45 miles (72 km). The new battery was supposed to cost $ 20,000, but Rich’s service was able to find the faulty module in the existing battery and replace it together for a quarter price.
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It must be added, however, that the mass use of electric cars is still in its infancy. We can therefore speculate that the more old electric cars there are, the greater the demand for their cheaper service and the greater the supply of independent repair shops in which car mechanics with electrical engineering will work and will be able to repair batteries.
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