Repairing My Tesla Model S Has Been a Nightmare | Hacker News Reader

Repairing My Tesla Model S Has Been a Nightmare

fool.com

283 pointsCorrado165 comments

A few observations:

1. This is precisely why it's important to legislate right-to-repair. This is why auto manufacturers are required, by law, to continue to manufacture replacement parts for their cars, long after they have stopped being sold. Hopefully, Tesla can get this figured out.

2. Soviet auto manufacturers had this exact same problem. They were incentivized to sell cars, not spare parts - so finding parts for repairing your broken Lada (Which was just as likely as not to be broken as it rolled off the assembly line) took a breads-and-fishes miracle.

3. What does this have to do with stock picks... Oh.

Why didn't people just make a business of buying ladas and and selling the parts?

Soviet Russia didn't exactly support the entrepreneurial spirit.

fair enough :\

Maybe not in a traditional sense, but they did have a pretty robust black market

And as I hear the stories, this did happen. Cars are tough because you can't do a mechanic's job without tools and some obvious space, but there are at least stories of people getting cars and parting them out at a profit. (Similarly, there are stories of tank "repair" in WWII happening by taking finished tanks meant for service and stripping them for parts to repair multiple other tanks.)

One of my favorite anecdotes is from an old episode of Car Talk. A woman called in to ask if the following was ok (I'm paraphrasing from memory):

"So my neighbor, who's from a former Soviet Bloc country is a great guy who helps me out when my car breaks down. One time my battery is dead, so he offers to jump start my car. While I look on baffled, then shocked, he unscrews his car's battery from the mounting, then flips it over and presses the contacts directly to my car's battery. It started though! So is that safe?"

To further paraphrase the guys' responses... "Oh god no!!!" They further went on to point out though, that at some point when your life is dangerous and hard as a kind of background state, the little things stop even grabbing your notice.

The degree of black marketeering in the USSR was just... staggering. Systemic. Understood to be "how the system works". Sometimes though you get tragedies like Vladimir Komarov.

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."

http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/co...

I recently watched a documentary about the space race, which mostly focused on von Braun and Korolev. As I was watching it, it seemed like the Soviets had a huge advantage of secrecy. The Americans never knew what they were doing. But perhaps the constant media attention for the US held them accountable.

Going further off-topic, the fact that Korolev died because he spent years in a work camp due to the dumbest of political spitefulness is just depressing. From what I can tell, Korolev could have single-handedly won the space race for the Soviet Union - too bad they killed him.

One may wonder that one should be worried that the more the media profess their political independence, the less likely it is to be true.

I honestly don't know what you're trying to say.

Could be a "retcon" but I always heard we (the US) opened up the media on our space program as a sort of "marketing program" to show how awesome we were (on the world stage generally and specifically to the Soviets).

I'm pretty confident there's some truth to this. The core reasons may have had less to do with marketing than practicality, but at a minimum the government saw an opportunity and grabbed hold.

As for the lack of initial secrecy, that may have just been a practical consequence of why we won. NASA and JPL opened subcomponent development to private industry. At least in propellant development, this meant both research contracts and a general understanding that someone coming up with particularly good products could expect a massive government payout.

It produced great results and even got private investors to foot a large research bill. It also had the consequence that the work was rather less secret than it might have been - especially the failures, which were generally shopped around to other buyers if they had any interesting properties. But it worked out pretty well overall: even with Russia getting info about US efforts, the rate of new research was still impressive enough to be thoroughly competitive.

Anyone looking for an internal account of the (propellant) story might enjoy Ignition. It's free here, though Chrome can't handle the pdf: https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...

Space programs had immense propaganda value in those days. In the US, we rewired our whole primary education system in response to Sputnik. Then we structured our lunar exploration program as an unsustainable "race" for the sake of showmanship rather than science.

This is one of the handier arguments to use against moon-landing deniers. If the Russians had the slightest reason to believe that we weren't doing exactly what we said we were doing, they'd still be laughing at us.

> Then we structured our lunar exploration program as an unsustainable "race" for the sake of showmanship rather than science.

The entire Soviet space program was an unsustainable exercise in political showmanship, and 'Me first!' moments.

Consider the visiting cosmonaut program, the first woman in space (Who was also the... last woman in space, for the subsequent two decades.)

Consider the secrecy surrounding launches (To avoid getting egg on your face, if the mission fails/is aborted...)

Fortunately (Or unfortunately), if it weren't for political showmanship, neither country would have had a space program.

If the battery turned upside down was sealed would it be okay to do this?

I've only ever bought "maintenance free" sealed lead-acid car batteries. Presumably it would be okay to use one of these upside down for a brief couple of minutes.

I've bought two gel-acid sealed batteries that claimed they could be mounted and used upside down.

You don't want sparks near the terminals of a bad battery, it can cause a small explosion that showers you in battery acid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93acid_battery#Risk...

  he unscrews his car's battery from the mounting, then flips it
  over and presses the contacts directly to my car's battery.
  is that safe?

Electrically, it's not all that different from using jump leads - there's the same risk of sparks, the same voltage and load involved.

There is a risk of battery acid leakage from flipping the source battery, but that depends on the type of battery - a sealed unit is unlikely to leak.

There's also a risk of injury from being so close to the engine bay when it's started - say, if your hand came into contact with a moving part like a belt or a fan - but again, that's dependent on the layout of the engine bay, and those risks are generally clearly visible and obvious.

It's certainly not "normal" practice for the western world, but there isn't really all that much risk in it. And it turns out Americans do it too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcYjJcEZuOA

Also there's some potential for damage to electronic components like the ECU by connecting terminals in the wrong order (i.e. not +ves first). And sparking. Lots of chance of that, more than jump leads which (unless you're incompetent) aren't going to be making and breaking contact several times while you wiggle the battery around trying to make it fit.

The order in which you connect the terminals has nothing to do with preventing electrical damage. The reason why you're supposed to connect jumper cables in a particular order is for safety. When you connect just the positive, it doesn't matter if you accidentally brush the other end of the cable against the body or ground of the other car. Then the only thing left to connect is ground and if you accidentally brush the ground lead up against the body then it isn't going to matter as you're trying to connect that lead to ground. Also, the reason why you connect the last lead to a well grounded part of the engine away from the battery on the god car is because that's the only connection that creates sparks. Sparks around a bad battery are a bad idea. Batteries regularly create some Hydrogen and Oxygen gas, normally it doesn't produce that much at all and it gets vented out of the battery but with a bad battery it might have very little electrolyte left and it might have multiple cells filled with a bit of acid and a lot of explosive gas. If that spark ignites any explosive gases in the battery it will probably crack apart the plastic casing and shower you with battery acid.

There's the same amount of sparks but now instead of the sparks being on a grounded part of the engine away from the battery the sparking occurs right at the terminals. The problem with bad batteries is that it might not just be dead, batteries will vent hydrogen and oxygen and on batteries that lost most of the electrolyte in a cell they might have enough hydrogen in them to blow the battery apart and throw acid over the person jumping the battery.

Also, the risk of battery acid leaking is probably a good bit better than you might think. If you just grab a run of the mill car battery there's a very good chance that it's just a regular old wet cell battery with an open vent so it'll leak acid if you turn it upside down.

More and more i find myself thinking back to a claim that Lenin asked Marx about the latters thoughts about turning Russia communist, and Marx scoffing at the idea.

This because Marx envisioned the transition happening after capitalism hit a crisis, where upon the workers would take over and continue to operate the factories within the existing supply network (more coops, less central planning).

In the USSR however it seemed one got more akin to the old Ford factory, where raw iron and coal came in at one end, and finished Model Ts rolled out the other.

Thus there were no independent sub-suppliers of parts, everything was made internally as needed, and nothing more.

For some reason, at first, I thought it was a comedy bit.

Yes, this was one of the places where Lenin diverged from classical Marxist thought. Marx argued that society would slowly and naturally evolve towards socialism as workers gained experience and "class consciousness" from struggling with their capitalist bosses. Lenin argued that the slow evolution Marx had predicted was not actually happening, so a "vanguard party" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism) of highly committed activists and intellectuals was needed to drag the workers into the socialist future they stubbornly refused to realize they wanted.

In retrospect this can be seen as a turning point in the process by which communism, a philosophy devoted to letting the masses rule themselves, turned into Soviet communism, a system in which the masses were bossed by party elites as hard or harder as they had been by the old czars and capitalists.

Ah yes, vanguards. Worked so wonderfully in France, Russia, and Egypt. Yep, that's sarcasm if you can't tell.

What i am referring to in each instance is the French revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and the various fundamentalist groups around the middle east that follow some interpretation of Sayyid Qutb's philosophy.

Red Plenty (by Francis Spufford), a novel about economic planning in the USSR, is an excellent read and characterizes the information problems at the core of the failure of central planning.

You would have had trouble finding the parts or finding parts for the machines to build the parts. Or finding the parts to build the machines to build the parts to build the machines to build the parts.

I hope you get the idea.

Because you couldnt just walk into a shop and buy a car. You literally had to have a car buying permit, which might take years to get. Because of this, used cars could cost singificantly more than a brand new one from a shop.

Old Soviet joke:

"I want to sign up for the waiting list for a car. How long is it?" / "Precisely ten years from today." / "Morning or evening?" / "Why, what difference does it make?" / "The plumber's due in the morning".

The easiest way to get spare parts was simply to steal them. Cars were frequently stolen off the street and stripped. Factory workers would smuggle in old parts, fit them to cars on the production line and smuggle out the new parts. The spares that were available invariably ended up being funnelled off into the black market.

See also the Soviet black market for blown light bulbs:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/02/mar...

This, sir, is hilarious btw.

Also, a friend of mine from Moscow IRL 90's once said the electricity went out because the power lines were stolen.

I think 2000s Iraq had thieves steal the power lines, too.

In the UK cable thieves thieves are a problem for telecoms and rail industry attaching a 4x4 to one end and dragging the cable out is one popular technique.

This some times all messes up the power for trains

Because, just like concert tickets, there weren't enough cars, and they were sold at below-market price.

This meant that people would pre-order vehicles years in advance - and had to get extremely 'creative' when it came to keeping them running. (As jdietrich alluded to.)

The other problem with cars is that given 10 broken vehicles, there is high likelihood that 4 of them have the same broken part.

This is still a problem in Cuba, Ladas are still really common over there, I just can't imagine all the hacks they must do on a daily basis just to keep them running. I spent my last vacations in Cuba, one day I met a really nice taxi driver who owned a Lada, he asked for my E-Mail and asked me to let him know of any Lada parts seller.

As far as I can tell, it's a myth that manufacturers are required to continue making replacement parts for any particular period of time. A manufacturer needs to be able to fulfill its warranty obligations, which they usually do by manufacturing spare parts for at least as long as their customers have warranties, but that's it.

This is definitely something Tesla needs to fix and soon. It shouldn't be hard, so either I'm missing something or they're doing as you describe in (2) and prioritizing new production over spares.

A particular problem for Tesla seems to be that basically every quarter now they desperately focus on producing new cars to hit their production targets, which then just grow exponentially for next quarter..

They seem to have been doing this since they started, or at least since the Model S came out. They don't seem to have much trouble generating orders, so they're running flat out all the time. Seems like they ought to reserve a few percent of their production capacity for repair parts, even if it hurts the delivery numbers a bit.

I guess when demand way outstrips supply, they don't have much incentive to, unfortunately.

Their attitude towards repairs will lead to a drop in demand when Tesla's get a reputation of getting stuck in the shop for long spells. By then, it will be far too late to do anything - (see Jaguar)

Then again manufacturers drive down costs by reusing parts across models, so often you can find the part even though the model you are driving is no longer being sold (never mind warranty).

And at least with mechanical parts, there is always the option of third parties making parts. Its quite a different story when talking custom chips and firmware.

Consider the humble window wiper. More often than not these days it is not mechanical, but a electric motor driven by a chip hooked up to the CAN bus.

Similarly the central door locking and electric windows are likely to be on a single card pr door hooked up to CAN and an electric wire (the one in the driver side door being a bit more elaborate as it has controls for all the doors).

> As far as I can tell, it's a myth that manufacturers are required to continue making replacement parts for any particular period of time.

But aren't there laws that protect and allow for aftermarket parts to be manufactured and sold by others? If there are alternatives to OEM parts, consumers aren't trapped my OEM production decisions, as long as there's enough demand.

This is definitely something Tesla needs to fix and soon. It shouldn't be hard...

Ensuring that people get competent service and a good experience one step removed, remotely, is hard. That could be helped by fostering a customer culture of "do it yourself" then super-enabling customers and local service providers with great access to information, along with good logistics/fulfillment.

There was a Tesla battery teardown posted a while back where they weren't using properly isolated tools/equipment. This was from people who supposedly work on EVs for a living.

I'd be really nervous about letting someone work near 400V/1500A that wasn't trained to understand how to safely operate in that type of environment.

Isn't that the kind of problem that tends to short[sic] itself ;-)

I don't mean "do it yourself" in terms of the actual working near 400 volts. I mean "do it yourself" in terms of diagnosis and "supervising" the logistics of a repair. If you need bodywork, Tesla could easily facilitate tracking down the parts and the bodywork/assembly procedures on their website. If your local mechanic isn't so search savvy, then the owner could have access to the same site to act as a facilitator. Heck, they could build a stripped-down project management for the repair project into such a site.

1500 Amps???

Indeed. There's a crazy amount of current going through these things. Apparently the limit used to be 1200A, and beyond that, traditional fuses don't work well because the metal vaporizes and starts conducting electricity even after the fuse wire has melted. To get to 1500A they created a computer-controlled pyrotechnic fuse. That's what enabled the "ludicrous mode" that you can get on their high-end cars.

Good service overall is a tough problem, but ensuring adequate parts availability doesn't seem like a particularly difficult thing. Keep a small stock of every part at a warehouse somewhere, ship it out to shops that need them when they ask.

Reliably getting parts to a shop in days could be tough. Reliably doing it in weeks shouldn't be. That these repairs take so long tells me that they have no stock, and sit on their hands for a long time before making any.

Having worked for several European manufacturers, I can tell you the R&D division producing cars is small compared to the the aftermarket.

A few of the challenges: - which parts to produce and when - how many - how to ensure there is stock everywhere (shipping is not an option on a large market, as it is too costly) - how to make sure everybody knows how to mount the part - how to guarantee that your official spare parts are used

Saying it is "hard to keep up with the demand" is a marketing way of saying "we are not good at manufacturing".

Like software, it is easier to design the right car than fixing it after. But fixing defects or accidents is a necessity that no good design can prevent.

Having the right to repair won't help when there are no parts with which to conduct repairs.

I'm a fan of the right to repair my own gadgets and cars, but that wasn't the underlying cause of this delay (unless, of course, you are a skilled sheet aluminum worker who could produce the appropriate pieces).

Having specs, and dimensions, allow 3rd party or diy replacement. As is, we are flailing in the dark.

But the availability of spare parts influences the resale value of the car (at least in India) which in turn influences the buyers of new cars to buy from manufacturers who provide spares at a reasonable price (Ex. Maruti in India). But I guess people who buy Teslas wouldn't focus too much on the resale value though.

You do realize that the recently discussed Nebraska bill has a carve-out for automotive sector, right [1]?

Large industries with well-established lobbying efforts will always find a way to exempt themselves from even sensible sounding legislation (possibly because of unintended consequences that could cripple their business model).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676324

1. I support right-to-repair.

2. A friend is a huge Telsa fan, and the body repair service use written-off Telsas for spares to fix damaged cars regularly. The parts required for the OPs repair would almost certainly have to be pulled from a new chassis on the line, or a written off chassis.

3. The stock price is volatile, and the "market" reacts to negative stories all the time.

Copying my post from the reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/5y3fwe/a_very_...

Can confirm. I was in an accident 5 months ago [1] and still don't have my car back. The body shop finally got all the parts a couple weeks ago and finished up the build, but because it's all newer revisions of those parts, the car is refusing to boot up. It's been sent up to Tesla to get it serviced by them.

Honestly, I don't know when I'll get it back at this point. Good thing I got a P90D...

I love the Tesla service folks. They're some of the best. They are just ridiculously overwhelmed.

And my follow up comment today:

Actually, as a follow up, it appears Tesla Decatur (here in Georgia) has gotten to my car today. I have been getting notifications of software update failures from the app over the past few weeks. I just got some failure notifications now and the car says it's at the service center. And I just got a successful update notification, so I guess they've fixed it.

Still, it took about 4 months to go through all the hardware work and end up with this software problem. Tesla Parts was the big choke point in the whole process.

Looks like the Tesla Decatur team is down to a 1 week response time, which bodes well for Elon's claims.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/55oibb/welp_i_...

I did not know this existed until recently, but you and the article poster probably have a very good claim for diminished value and loss of use. Basically non use of your high-end car for many months.

I recently created a short online quiz for a law firm in Florida that checks to see if you have a claim. It was a completely new area of law that I did not even know about. It does email your contact info at the end - in case you want to be contacted.

Anyways if anyone is interested it is at http://www.diminishedvalue.law/quiz/ and is based on Florida law.

I am not trying to hype the firm. There are other firms that do the same thing. I just happen to know about this one.

I think you might have wanted to do some input validation: http://imgur.com/a/510dc

I prefer sites not to validate fields they have no need for programmatic use of.

Every validation has a few users who don't pass. Names longer than expected, people with no surname, phone numbers with an "extension" code, addresses with no house number, email addresses xyz+2@8.8.8.8, etc.

Validate only what you need to to make your service work, and when you do, use an official validation library rather than baking your own.

I was made aware of that by the body shop who is doing the repairs. I plan on filing just as soon as I get the car back, which looks to be soon.

Did they provide you a car during this time?

No, because it's not Tesla doing the repair. However, I bought a replacement Tesla instead. I will be Turo-ing and selling the original vehicle after I get it back.

That is... dedicated.

What's that definition of insanity again?

It would be interesting to know how spare parts work for a company like Tesla. Their sales, in terms of car counts, are huge for a company of their age but tiny relative to the greater auto industry, and many of their parts are niche things that may require special manufacturers.

What I would guess happened with these cases is that there's only one shop that manufactures some vital fob, and it has a lead time of N months when Tesla orders a batch of X bars- where N is potentially very large, because meanwhile the same shop might be in the middle of creating X*100 different fobs for GM and would need to re-tool their assembly line afterwards. Maintaining a reservoir of spare parts in that kind of environment would a guessing game, trading off the chance of this kind of fiasco versus the extra cars that could be made out of otherwise reserved parts.

For me, this is just more evidence that this a highly promising technology that isn't ready for me to invest in yet, as an owner of a Tesla vehicle. That said, even this guy who's had a nightmarish experience is essentially crying out for help, and still considering another Tesla purchase so... that says something too.

I'll wait and see, as I suspect many other people will, and hopefully Tesla can work these issues out before they come to define them.

There's nothing here about "technology" not being ready. There's no EV specific parts involved. This is just bad customer service and parts delivery.

You're right, I should have said "product" or something similar and made it clear that I wasn't referring to EV tech on the whole.

In the meantime, Toyota has plug-in hybrids.

And Chevy has all electric... and Nissan

And, while arguably not the sexiest of marques, their service organization is brilliant.

Even here (Way out in the boonies, a small island off the west coast of Norway), anything and everything I have ever needed to keep my nigh on 20 year old Toyota running has arrived the morning after ordering at 8AM.

Granted, I haven't needed any really exotic parts - but they still impress me. Heck, the body panels are even available pre-painted as they only imported a few paint codes in that model year!

I can see a number of valid reasons not to become a Toyota owner. Their service organization is not one of them!

>and still considering another Tesla purchase so... that says something too.

I think that is a little misleading. The author actually said "We are now questioning our Model 3 reservation."

That is still considering. Have they stopped considering? Have they cancelled their order and had their deposit refunded? No.

True but the fanaticism can wear out quickly. As a car company I think they're in for a tougher challenge than they've already had and done well with. They could end up being the Razr phone of cars. Cool. Everyone wants one. First with the style and some unique UX and hype. Then it wears off and competitors play catch up. They're more interesting as an energy/tech company for sure. Their strategy of going high end and cool and then moving to more mass market / Prius territory could pay off. But that's an even tougher space to compete in. Like the SaaS space - expectations seem to increase with a lower price point.

Not sure how often this happens, but if it is frequent, Tesla should simply offer to take the damaged vehicle as a trade-in toward a new model, and allow the owner to stop making payments until the new car is ready for delivery.

Not a scalable strategy, but surely a blog post like this one does tremendous harm to Tesla's brand reputation and so it's worth having a good (if costly) solution in place.

There was another Tesla repair story, where the guy had bought the floor model, or something. It was basically a lemon, and Tesla's solution was to offer to sell him a new car at the difference between the sales prices ($20-$30k, I think).

The people in this story also bought a discounted car. Personally, I'd be loath to spend a car's worth of money to trade "up" to another vehicle from the same manufacturer.

> Personally, I'd be loath to spend a car's worth of money to trade "up"

I completely agree. But they are put into a position where the car is completely illiquid as an asset and also offers no transportation value for an indeterminate amount of time, which limits the owner's ability to plan or pursue a reasonable plan B.

If the parts scarcity was expected to last 12 months and the cost of renting a loaner was $200/month, perhaps the owner would turn out to be better off trading it in and taking delivery of a new Tesla.

Another way to handle it would be for insurers to bake in the possibility of a year long wait for parts into the price of collision coverage loaner options. If the scenario is rare this insurance would be cheap.

I'm in a similar situation with SolarCity. Although mine is far less dire. There's been a billing snafu on our solar panels ever since we bought our house and took over their lease. We bought it in October. It's now March and they still have not resolved the problem and have no ETA on when it will be fixed. When I researched this issue, I found other customers who said it took 10 months for SolarCity to right the problem.

I get the impression these companies aren't putting as much resources into customer service as they should.

I recently had a very similar experience with my Model S, although it was a month as opposed to multiple months that the author faced. I had a front bumper issue, and by all accounts it was a minor collision (car was moving at around 4mph). Needed the bumper replaced, along with parts that sit behind the bumper. Tesla handed it over to a body-shop who (a) sat on it due to needed parts, authorized by Tesla, (b) took time to repair/assemble as only certified (by Tesla) technicians can work on the car, (c) the certification is apparently expensive and time-consuming so most body shops can only afford to have one technician at best to be certified, (d) this leads to large delays

I can't think of an easy solution here -- as an owner I'd like the car back in a shape that's as good as before, and certified by the maker. But the bottlenecks here seem to be with Tesla.

This is really unpleasant for the owner, but is fairly typical of boutique cars. If you drive a rare car, parts will be delayed and repairs will be expensive and take a long time.

Only having one repair shop is a problem, but is also due to Tesla being a low volume, rare car.

With the Model E, this should be a little better, but I expect these stories for the next few years. Similar to if you owned a Fisker or Koenigsegg or something, although those are much lower volume than Tesla.

I don't know how low volume or rare they are but for about the same $$ as a Tesla I could buy a brand new Mercedes S-class. Likely best service experience one can ever have, not to mention arguably the most luxe car ever

Mercedes has also had a hundred years to build up supply lines.

From the customer viewpoint, for the same amount of money, one has superior service and one doesn't. History as a rationalization is not a factor when my money is on the line.

No one is arguing as to why these issues emerge, they're just arguing that they don't want to subsidize them.

Exactly, had this been a Lotus or even a seemingly pedestrian Chevy SS, he's probably be in the same situation. Getting parts for my Australian-built Pontiac was often a frustration for the same reasons: rare cars are very difficult to source parts for.

Koenigsegg has, according to their Wikipedia page, sold on the order of a couple hundred cars total. Tesla sold 76,000 cars in 2016.[1] By comparison, in 2016, Mercedes S-class sedans sold about 18,000 in the US [2] and another 15,000 in Europe.[3] By number sold, Teslas are rarer than, say, an F150 (87,512 in Dec '16 alone!) or a Camry but they are actually more common, by a few thousand, than an S-class.

I know that's not an absolutely fair comparison, since I can't take into account parts commonality between models or model years with a Google search, but still - they're not nearly as rare as I expected. Tesla is going to need to work on their repair infrastructure a lot.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/3/14159292/tesla-q4-2016-deli...

[2] http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/mercedes-benz/merc...

[3] http://carsalesbase.com/european-car-sales-data/mercedes-ben...

Boutique cars usually have fanatical service, can you provide any examples?

> After three months had passed and the body shop had still not received all the necessary parts, we began reaching out to Tesla directly through their customer service channels, which serves as a liaison to the internal parts department.

That's the body shop's job (and failure), not yours. It's one downside of having "authorized" shops with only one in the author's area. In theory, the body shop should have a dedicated representative at Tesla they can talk to directly, and should escalate enough to get the parts long before the 45-day rental period available through the author's insurance limit was up.

> There were still a few outstanding parts, including bulb rivets.

Bulb rivets are common parts. You might not be able to buy the right ones at the local hardware store, but they're readily available from McMaster, Fastenal, Grainger, etc. And I guarantee that Tesla has buckets of them on hand. Again, the body shop should have taken care of this.

> It turns out that the 12V battery is also now in need of replacement, as it will no longer hold a charge (perhaps related to how long the car has been sitting idle?).

Did the body shop not know to recharge it occasionally? As far as I know as a non-Tesla owner, this 12V battery is always on, listening for the remote fob, monitoring the main battery, and so on. Of course it would become discharged after sitting for half a year, and apparently so deeply discharged as to damage itself. And as an ICE-car owner, there are other things that must be done to any car that sits for a long time. Perhaps the body shop is better at taking care of conventional cars and lead acid batteries, and just needs a little experience and education about lithium-ion systems?

> It also calls into question Tesla's ability to support its existing customer base, which is of critical relevance to whether or not Tesla can support a massively larger customer base. The company is still targeting 500,000 units in 2018. As many analysts and pundits point out, the mainstream is far less forgiving for this sort of thing compared to enthusiastic early adopters.

A massively larger customer base is probably easier to support, per customer. There are junkyards full of my exact car, and non-OEM manufacturers and parts stores with huge inventories of parts for it, and people who have repaired hundreds of cars just like mine. When thousands of mechanics have a half-used bag of Tesla panel bulb rivets in a toolbox drawer, things won't be held up waiting for the part. This is something that will probably get better with time, not worse.

> Perhaps the body shop is better at taking care of conventional cars and lead acid batteries, and just needs a little experience and education about lithium-ion systems?

Lithium-ion batteries are much less subject to drain over time if they're not being used.

The Model S uses a 12V lead-acid battery though(and subject to the drain and upkeep you mentioned), so I'm not sure why they author has been waiting on this bespoke, single manufacturer one. Unless maybe the connectors are non-standard?

The little 12V battery is a standard car battery form factor and connector. Most Teslas have a marine battery instead of a standard car battery, but that's not hard to find.

Yep, after a little research, it's a BCI 33 series. You'll find a few (if designed for starting current, not deep cycling) in any parts shop.

Wait. A Tesla car is literally a rolling lithium-ion battery pack, and yet it also needs a lead-acid battery too?

Yes. You want to isolate the main battery pack in a crash (400V applied to emergency workers is a bad idea) but you still want to be able to power some basic systems.

My understanding was that it had to be a Tesla battery or they might not re-certify the car.

Cite?

Tesla might not approve the repair (and thus not re-enable the car) if non-Tesla supplied materials are used in the repair.

Tesla reserves the right to refuse to activate cars unless repairs done to them are inspected, and even if you pay for the inspection, it might not be activated.

ref. http://www.teslarati.com/think-twice-buying-salvaged-tesla-m...

The original article 404's, unfortunately.

How exactly is that legal? Am I actually leasing the vehicle?

It probably isn't, and they know this, but good luck getting a court to agree with you on it.

You are leasing the software required to make the car work. Sadly, not terribly uncommon.

Which other car manufacture has disabled someone's car for getting it repaired without their approval? Heck, which car manufacture has to re-enable a person's car?

I don't know about cars, but this has been a battle with tractors for a while. The car industry is actually just playing catch-up.

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/08/17/432...

EDIT: The outcome of this was that the current DMCA exemptions includes language to circumvent such "protections" (including Tesla's here) for the purposes of repair and modification. See section III-6:

https://www.copyright.gov/1201/

> re-enable the car

Holy shit. Do they own the car, or does the buyer?

You own the car, but only license the software that actually makes the car run. So, no, not really.

That's the body shop's job (and failure)

...

Again, the body shop should have taken care of this.

...

Perhaps the body shop is better at taking care of conventional cars and lead acid batteries, and just needs a little experience and education about lithium-ion systems?

...

So the game, here, is to direct blame at the body shop and not Tesla?

The body shop Tesla certified?

It seems to me that if there are so few body shops, and Tesla must certify them (presumably to ensure the work is covered by warranty), then those body shops are in effect an extension of Tesla's business and it's perfectly valid to hold Tesla equally accountable for their failings.

> The body shop Tesla certified?

True. But Tesla doesn't have a lot of options, given the average body shop's reputation.

You are paying the body shop. My thinking is if the body shop isn't doing the job you paid them to do you don't do it for them, you complain to Tesla about their certified body shop.

No question about that. But I'd do that in addition to talking to Tesla customer service just to get the ball moving forward... after all, this isn't a crusade for this guy. He just wants his darn car back!

It's MOSTLY Tesla's fault, but it also sounds like the body shop wasn't really trying all that hard to keep them on their toes. My guess, as what most are saying here. Is that Tesla simply doesn't have those parts anymore, and has no way to produce them anymore. This might be the tip of a large large large class action lawsuit.

Actually it's not the body shop's fault -- I had a similar experience with my Model S. The parts are all special and tailored. The parking sensors, for instance, are unique and have to work with the car, which is by most accounts, non-standard chassis. For all of Tesla's forward thinking approach, they can streamline repairs by setting aside some parts.

The "Auto Dealer Lobby" in Texas has been saying this would happen for a while: http://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2016/05/20/texas-aut...

I assumed it was just the usual political grandstanding to keep Tesla out. Here we have an example of this happening.

That's not quite the same. The dealers there are talking about regular maintenance and repair, not post-accident body work. Tesla already allows third parties to do body work, and in fact won't do it themselves. Getting dealers involved wouldn't help in any case, since the problem is getting parts from the manufacturer.

And what's funny is I've been to a lot of dealers that refuse to touch body work too. They might say they do but they end up passing it off to a local company behind the scenes.

My experience as well. I tend to praise Toyota as Tesla Lite, but I've had one Toyota dealer just refer me to a body shop (although another did take over some work themselves).

One would think repair-parts supply chain was a solved problem.

But, not even Daimler-Chrysler can get it right. In 2014, my then-new Jeep Wrangler was rear-ended to the tune of $10,000 damage. It took nearly 2 months for the body panels to be available. And about 3 months for the repairs to be completed.

I have a question about this. I just bought a new jeep wrangler unlimited and a coworker recommended that I remove the spare wheel on the back of the jeep and store it in the cargo space. He said that in the advent of a rear-end collision the wheel gets rammed through the back door panels causing much more damage then otherwise would occur. Did this happen in your case?

I would recommend dropping by wranglerforum.com and asking that question. I've not heard that concern before.

That's a great, big "Maybe?"

If the collision might have otherwise hit the bumper instead of the spare AND was slow enough to not damage the bumper, I suppose that could happen. More likely to be true if you back into a stationary object than somebody rear-ending you. Most cars are going to be below the spare wheel of a Jeep. This is definitely an issue on smaller SUVs (RAV4, etc) because they are low enough that the spare gets hit by any full size truck/SUV.

In my case, I had a bike rack installed in the hitch. The rack (and bike) got bent up into the tailgate. The collision was bad enough to push my parked Jeep a full car length, bend the frame, twist the rollcage, damage the exhaust, tailgate, floorpan, both tail-lights, left-rear quarter, spare wheel, and rear window (soft-top). I was amazed the car wasn't totaled (probably would have been had it not been well-optioned and basically new).

In addition to the car, a $5000 bicycle and $600 rack were destroyed. And I hurt my ankle.

All by a freaking Smart Car with a driver to busy checking text messages.

Grrrrr.

I've been pretty fortunate with my Challenger (and the one before), between the two (2012 and 2016), I've had two rear bumper/cowls, a front bumper/cowl and front-passenger fender replaced. None of the 3 incidents was I without my car for more than 8 days.

Aside: beware falling mattress box springs on the highway, and getting rear ended while at a stop light sucks.

I got rear ended in my brand new Subaru Outback last year. It took two months to get parts for a car that's is manufactured in quantities of 400,000 per year in the US.

"To say that this whole experience has been traumatizing would be an understatement."

"We are now questioning our Model 3 reservation."

Just "Questioning" the next product purchase?

Does this mean that Tesla is the new Apple?

Without finding evidence myself, I'd like to know more about other instances of Tesla vehicle repairs. Right now I just have this sample size of 1, so it's hard to make a judgement about how Tesla deals with other customer's repair jobs. Is this just an anecdote of a rare occurrence and a customer service failure, or an example of a more pervasive problem? Would be good to know more.

I ran into someone (early Tesla, no automatic braking) and it took 6 weeks to get repaired by a 3rd party body shop. One week was wasted because the repair shop and the insurance company were failing to connect about getting the estimate approved. Two weeks were wasted with the car sitting at Tesla to get new airbags. The 3 weeks of actual body shop work could probably have been shorter, but obviously they didn't have a long wait for parts.

When I was 20 I owned a 1993 Toyota MR-2 that had a front clip from a foreign MR-2 Turbo. Loved that car. When the hose from hell blew and the turbo's springed rubber oil gasket needed replacing, it took me months to discover a single Toyota dealership in Australia (seriously) that had the part. When it wasn't broken it was great, though.

Owning a Tesla is all well and good while it's running. But you're limited by how you can refuel it and only one company can make the parts. Much like the exotic sports car, you simply cannot depend on being able to repair it yourself, so it should not be considered a daily driver. You should probably keep a $2,000 1998 Honda Civic in the garage just in case.

I recommend a 1990's era Honda Civic Del Sol. It's a great car and uses almost all the same parts as the Civic's and Accords of the era. It's a little 2 door sports car with a removable hard top, and the manual transmission version is supper fun to drive and gets like 33mpg. I got a 1994 with 89,000 miles on it a few years back for $2500 put another 50,000 miles on it and just sold it for $2500. Best car I have ever owned. I would be willing to bet the true carbon footprint of buying and driving an old del sol for another 100k is less then buying a new tesla and driving it for 100k.

I'm familiar with the Del Sol; I destroyed one's rear end when it stopped short in the middle of an intersection (my car's bumper was scratched) so for practical and safety reasons I recommend the 4-door Civic. But it's impressive that yours never lost value!

If I wanted a fun sporty cheap 2-seater, the only choice for me would be the Mazda MX-5. For $2.5k you can cruise over to the autocross track with the top down, beat a Corvette's lap times, and then cruise home all without breaking 30mpg. (Okay, so maybe you'll need either amazing driving skills or race tires to beat the Corvette, but it's doable ;))

I drove my del Sol for 14 years; most of that time, it was my only vehicle. Fantastic car until it tried to kill me. (Lesson learned: don't ignore noises from the front end.)

How hard is it really?

1. Stock spare parts based on accident actuaries.

2. When stock runs out, license parts manufacturing to 3rd party.

3. Offer trade-in incentives for crashed cars, lowing the overall "totaling" value, and use those cars for parts.

Tesla seems to have fallen into the same trap that many software companies do: chasing new customers at the expense of those who've already bought in.

The manufacturing seems to be quite problematic. On the one hand they have very specific requirements, and for the past three or four years have had a significant number of small issues that have held up production. On the other hand, both the massive amount of custom electronics and the aluminum unibody are uncommon, so few manufacturers will have experience with them.

The other thing is.... very few of them crash. So there isn't a big incentive to invest the massive amount of time and money it would take to replicate and certify all the manufacturing with 3rd parties. It makes more sense to just let a few customers get fucked over.

What kind of country is this where insurance is not mandatory for owning a vehicle? He wrote that the other driver wasn't insured. So in the US, it's legal to drive a car without having insurance? My mind is blown.

This kind of thing would have cost me a maximum of exactly zero if it had happened here (Switzerland, but I'm guessing it's similar in the EU). Insurance is mandatory and the insurer of whoever caused the accident pays. Unless they flee the scene, but that's its own crime, so most people don't.

That said: We had two larger issues with our Model S so far, one time it had to be repaired in an Italian body shop while on holiday, but that was done in less than 48 hours. It wasn't even a Tesla service center, just one of their partners. The other issue involved the drive train, it started making whining noises after two years. They fixed that for free (new motor and drive train) and gave us a free loaner for a week.

One time it didn't recover from a software update and had to be towed -- again, a free loaner, Tesla paid for the towing and even had the vehicle brought back to our door because I was sick with a high fever and couldn't go pick it up. They usually make you pick it up.

Another time I snapped off the windshield wiper by accident because I'm an idiot, it was on our way to France. The service center in Geneva made room to fix this (had to replace the whole wiper assembly) and we were back on our trip less than 30 minutes after arriving at their shop unannounced.

So I guess it all depends on what's broken and where you are.

Disclaimer (do we need to have disclaimers for this now or is that just on Motley Fool?): I have Tesla shares and used to have Solar City shares as well, but the damn thieves switched my Solar City for Tesla at USD 290, so now I'm short 50 Dollars per share. Serious first world problems, eh?

So in the US, it's legal to drive a car without having insurance?

No, of course not.[1] The exact details by state. But there are many problems. Here are some off the top of my head:

1) maximum penalties for allowing insurance to lapse might be light, and if you're a bad driver insurance might be expensive to purchase. Even for much worse than a simple accident, the penalties might be light. For example, for quite a while a nearby city, Portland Oregon, was doing "catch and release" for actual car thieves (I neither know nor care if they still do it). What that meant is if they caught you driving a stolen car the police would write you a citation on the spot and then let you go. You would "promise" to appear in court some number of months later! The argument was that they didn't have enough jail space for such petty criminals.

2) you might be "judgement proof". If you have no assets, even if you are sued, then you just don't pay. People rarely if ever get put in jail if they can't pay a civil judgement. So why bother to continue to pay for insurance if you're driving a crappy car and you don't care what happens to anyone you hit?

3) You might not even have a license, or it might have been suspended for previous bad behavior. (And it's probably difficult to purchase insurance under those circumstances). So, what can the government do, suspend your already suspended license? That probably works about as well as "double secret probation" worked in Animal House.

4) I can think of many similar scenarios, but you get the point

In short, the USA is not at all as homogeneous a country as Switzerland. There are plenty of lowlifes around who just don't give a shit. And very little is ever done by the government to persuade them to change their behavior.

To protect themselves from such situations, many people add "uninsured motorist" coverage to their insurance policy. This means your insurer pays you even if the other guy doesn't have insurance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_insurance_in_the_Unite...

> "catch and release" for actual car thieves... they didn't have enough jail space for such petty criminals.

I suppose their jails are too full of those dangerous plant smokers. Priorities.

Wow, thanks for the explanation. That's a ball-of-yarn-shaped collection of problems :(

Here, if you don't pay your insurance premiums, the insurance company still has to cover for any damage you cause, until you return your plates (deregister the car) and I think you face a nice fine if you have unpaid premiums at that point.

This means insurance companies have a great incentive to hunt you down like hounds if you don't pay. I could see this working in the US, but I think the next part is also required for the trick to work:

Not paying is hard. If the insurance company goes to court against you, it can do things like demand that a part of your wage be seized in order to pay for your debt. There are cantonal registers of previous enforcements against someone (you get an entry there for any situation where a creditor requested and enforcement of payment). Having any entries in the register is social suicide because you'll have a much harder time finding an apartment (almost all landlords demand a copy of your entries).

So if you have no assets, you won't be driving a car for long, removing you from the pool of people who can cause damage. Plus, we don't put people in jail too easily (we only have capacity for ~7000 people nationwide, and about 6900 people out of a population of 8 million are in jail right now: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/crime-crimin...

I can't imagine the stereotypical American we know from bad TV to be in favor of so much government involvement, but I think the system works well. Of course it's ridiculously hard to get by in the (non-urban) parts of the US without a car, which again changes the whole perspective.

It's interesting that the two systems in place here produce such different results.

Vehicle regulations are not uniform even in Switzerland, by the way (e.g. in Zürich you don't pay tax on electric vehicles, in St. Gallen you pay by weight (!!!) for your heavy Tesla). But the insurance rules are the same for everyone.

I was considering getting a Tesla next year when my leaf is paid off, but had reservations about not being near a service center. This more or less solidifies for me that I shouldn't get one.

There will be more horror stories like this as Teslas are not maintainable by their owners, making them throw away vehicles. Last I read, Tesla service manuals are only provided as a subscription service to the public... and only in Massachusetts as the state has "right-to-repair" legislature forcing it.

What does this article about body work have to do with routine repairs?

Parts availability, right to repair, etc. A lot actually.

My initial impression of this brand was that they take customers very seriously. Everything from the design of the vehicle to their website appears customer centric.

This article is making me reconsider a future purchase of a Tesla vehicle.

Seems like a classic negligence law suit for loss of access waiting to happen.

I've been waiting to hear what repair and even general maintenance is like on these cars before I'd consider buying one myself. These cars are amazing, but I can't afford to buy a luxury car that I can't work on myself. Even if it's the fault of the infrastructure needing to be built up before cost of owning goes down, I'm forced to wait.

You will not be able to work on virtually any new luxury car. They are so technically advance that usually anything outside putting in fuel have to be done by authorised service.

That is true, but I always figured Tesla was out of my reach until I heard about the Model 3, and it's non-luxury price tag.

Is it really a luxury car? A lot of people say you pay the price for the tech and not for the quality (luxury). Maybe it is a luxury car from the buyers perspective just based on the price.

Either way, the quality in a Tesla is not luxury. Many people say that and I agree with them.

By luxury I simply mean the 'drop it like it's hot' factor. I have a feeling people will look past a lambo to scope someone driving a Tesla.

You know there are places where they use Teslas as taxis right? I was picked up in a Tesla at the standard Schipol Airport taxi line.

Well, some places also use Mercedes as Taxis and Mercedes seems to be considered luxury in the US.

I guess they are not $200k Mercedes, however.

What I meant more is like you are spending $200k or whatever for the tech, but you don't get the quality you would get for $200k in a different car.

I personally find a Lambo more special than a Tesla, especially since they are pretty much everywhere now (here in the Bay Area at least).

General maintenance on my last two gasoline cars was: oil changes, windshield wiper changes, engine air filter change, oil filter change, new tires every 30K or so, new brakes every 50K or so, new shocks every 100K or so. Every 125K or so the engine mechanical thermostat went out on my GM, I needed two (lots of miles!) Every four to five years I needed a new starting battery. I can do the brakes myself its quite easy for the mechanically inclined and/or intelligent. The shocks require spring compressors and I fear failure so I went out for that. About every 100K I got tired of the old radio and got a newer one with better bluetooth or whatever, but thats a luxury hardly required. I'm about 40K into a toyota thats had nothing but oil, gas, and filters, literally nothing has broken or required unexpected service. I destroyed the oil pan on the GM around 100K by over-torqueing it, but thats not scheduled service.

So an electric needs suspension and tires and brakes and ... windshield wiper changes. So all work on an electric car would seem to happen in the wheel well, or replacing wipers. I think I can handle that. Everything else in my last two cars going back to the 90s has been IC engine related.

ICE Fluids:

Gasoline (or diesel)

Engine Oil

Engine Coolant (antifreeze)

Transmission Fluid (of one type or another)

Windshield Wash Fluid

Air Conditioner Freon

Brake Fluid

---

EV Fluids:

Battery pack Coolant (antifreeze)

Transmission Fluid (of one type or another)

Windshield Wash Fluid

Air Conditioner Freon

Brake Fluid

---

In an EV, you surprisingly only get rid of 2 fluids: Fuel and Engine Oil

I just had a turbo replaced on my turbo diesel van at 225,000k (140,000 miles). Definitely not something I felt competent doing myself. Brakes, oil filters, etc I can do.

It remains to be seen if an electric motor will do half a million kilometres without maintenance, or will the insulation in the motor breakdown, bearings need replacing. There's still CV joints too, or other drive-chain related components.

I'm certainly hoping electric vehicles will have reduced maintenance requirements.

The same type of motors used in EV's are already widely used in factory production lines, conveyor belts, pumps, etc.

There they run 24/7 for decades. Reliability is super high.

The controllers used in EV's have only been around in their current form for ~15 years, also used in factories for controlling big motors, but even they rarely see failures.

The new bit is the battery and associated computer system/sensors. That's where I expect possible reliability issues.

> The new bit is the battery and associated computer system/sensors. That's where I expect possible reliability issues.

Unlike mechanical systems, electronic systems are instrumented to the max, so Tesla can usually: (a) detect systematic issues, and (b) mitigate issues by software update to reduce stresses.

Good points. And if I'd taken the time to think about it, in the metal fabrication workshop I work in there are 27 electric motors within about a 30 meter radius of my desk, and we've never had to replace any of them, nor do any maintenance on them.

What exactly would you work on yourself with an EV? You can still swap the tires, wipers, etc. but there's no ICE to do anything on, and for the most part the motor and battery either work or they don't. EV drivetrains are way more reliable than ICE drivetrains as well, so your overall repair needs are going to be really low [1].

[1] http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2015/04/13/nissan-leaf-dr...

EVs aren't solid state.

There is a whole raft of preventative maintenance and repairs that are common with ICE vehicles.

Springs, shocks, bearings, brake fluid, transmission fluid, washer fluid, AC fluid, bulbs, brake pads and discs, suspension bushes, accessory belts, rubber hoses and rubber boots, regular greasing of suspension components etc etc.

Non-drivetrain maintenance can usually still be done by owners on EVs if you really want to. Out of curiosity, how often are you actually doing maintenance on your suspension? OEM components for springs, shocks, bushes, and bearings typically last 100k miles, by which point an average vehicle has seen several owners

A little reminiscent to me of experiences at restaurants. An otherwise excellent restaurant can be completely ruined experience-wise by a bad server. Ultimately your opinion is attached to the institution even though its liaisons are (perhaps) more at fault.

It's a shame really but ultimately Tesla has to own customer experiences, especially if they are working through third-parties unfamiliar with their product. Do they have plans to create electric-specific body shops or incentives to do so? It's certainly be warranted in areas where their vehicles are widespread.

> especially if they are working through third-parties unfamiliar with their product.

Why would Tesla say a third-party is certified if the third-party is "unfamiliar" with Tesla's product?

https://syonyk.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/is-tesla-building-thr...

I read that blogpost and decided I would never buy a Tesla unless there are massive changes.

Well, what did this guy expect? He bought a low-volume car, used, and then it was rear-ended. Getting body parts was slow. Tesla's only failure here is that they're not stocking a lot of sheet metal parts.

> Tesla's only failure here is that they're not stocking a lot of sheet metal parts.

That's a pretty big failure for a car manufacturer. I don't really understand why you're underplaying their issues and trying to blame the victim. It's all Tesla's and the body shop's faults. Entirely.

This really sucks and these type of repair delays are very common as my other colleague/owners have experienced. I can't imagine going back to enduring the 1 hr stop and go commute without Autopilot.

To the author, it was lawsuit time after 1 month. Sell your shares and sue immediately and cancel your Model 3 reservation.

A friend in the UK has a Tesla and his front screen cracked - took Tesla over two months to replace it :-(

What a royal pain in the ass.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11879869

Different article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com