Tesla owner received a $21,000 bill after the battery was damaged by rain | Hacker News Reader

Tesla owner received a $21,000 bill after the battery was damaged by rain

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74 pointsbelter58 comments

It would be lovely if the article actually included some basic facts about the situation. Such as:

- How many inches of water is a Tesla rated to be left standing in, before major damage could occur?

- Are there locations in the chassis and bodywork that you can inspect after flooding may have occurred, to see whether the water got that deep?

- In heavy rain, can the various drainage paths on the exterior be overwhelmed (especially if there are some leaf litter and/or spiderwebs in the wrong spots), resulting in water draining into places where it can cause serious damage?*

*If this sounds impossible to you, ask a few older VW owners.

> In heavy rain, can the various drainage paths on the exterior be overwhelmed (especially if there are some leaf litter and/or spiderwebs in the wrong spots)

My mom's Chevrolet Kalos got so bad in autumn that plants started sprouting out of the built-up fallen leaves under the hood. This was an actively used car driven almost daily.

After that I started manually clearing those areas after washing the car. The amount of leaves you'd get out of a tiny little area shocked me every time. No way so much crap could fit in there and yet it did. Very easy to forget just how hollow areas under the bodywork are in a car.

I wish there were more details on the failure point, how did the water get in the battery? I can see it not being covered if it's something like they ran something over that put a giant gash in the battery, but if it's a 'the seal failed' that should 100% be a warranty issue.

You ask too much of modern journalism to do anything other than write rage bait that doesn’t even get copy editing.

That's why I'm not an early adopter. There are a lot of things we're learning about the long-term viability of today's EVs. We have a lot of experience with electric motors, but that's about it. We're using lithium ion batteries in new and novel ways and exposing them to environments for which we don't have a lot of experience. We're using new gigacast manufacturing techniques that auto repair shops are saying they can't easily repair without having to re-tool and re-train. There's electronics galore all over these vehicles (and new ICE vehicles, too) that I'm not sure of their longevity in practice.

I say this because we know these motors are good for 400,000+ miles. The average American drives 13,500 miles per year so that works out to a 30 year service life I'm not confident at all the rest of the car will last anywhere near that long.

A high percentage of 2012 Leaf's and Model S's are still on the road, many with 200,000+ miles.

And a lot of the fear of battery degration is caused by the early Leafs which didn't have any battery conditioning, and probably less mature battery management as well.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37907519

Your comment is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37918690 :)

Discussed here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37907519

That has to be a good portion of the cost of the car. Electric cars are still not a cost effective form of travel, especially when if they break you can be hot with a bill like this. Fixing that car cost 5k more the my current car cost in full. Ridiculous! As is the fact normal Scottish weather broke a Tesla.

The chinese ones are incredibly cost effective. Our government just decided to ban them.

Are they constructed better too?

No. But they are on-par for the most part. Often with better more 'featureful' software.

But have fun getting them repaired as they have even less infrastructure then Tesla.

Ukraine has shown us we can't take dependencies on non-democratic countries like Russia and China.

and yet we continue to be dependent on both

Russian sanctions cannot last forever, they have too many resources the West needs

and as for China, tell me where your Apple products are made

> Russian sanctions cannot last forever, they have too many resources the West needs

Do they though? I'm not trying to be snarky, I really don't know what you're referring to. Russia's main exports are weapons and energy products. The west doesn't need their weapons. They might want their fossil fuels to lower prices, but that's not essential.

Once you factor in the externalities, private motor driven vehicles are not a cost-effective form of travel.

> Electric cars are still not a cost effective form of travel,

In my experience when you buy an electric car you are buying a battery.

The car is "thrown in". So an important cost is amortising the cost of the battery

So I really do want the battery protected.

And if battery technology improves and cheapens weird things are going to happen in the car market

The biggest manufacturer is BYD (?) and they are a battery maker

Interesting times

I disagree. Electric cars are expensive but that's because there's not really a second hand market. You're paying new car prices. When you compare them to a new ICE car you're paying maybe £10-20k extra, but then you don't have to pay road tax (in the UK at least) or for expensive petrol. I expect they probably last longer too though that remains to be seen.

Overall I doubt a new electric car is more expensive than a new petrol car.

I'm curious, have you done the math for UK given current electricity and petrol prices?

This is highly region specific, but with the current prices of electricity across most parts of Europe, I'd be surprised if you could break even before the battery goes.

MG4 EV is £30k new (for the "SE Long Range). Let's compare it to a Ford Focus which is probably roughly equivalent? That's £28.5k for the base model.

So you don't need to save a lot. Even at today's prices you will save that in a few years depending on how much you drive.

I didn't know EVs in that price range existed to be fair, when I was comparing different options, it seemed like a common gap between ICEs and EVs was at least 10k, usually 15k.

I'm not a car nerd so I don't really know if those two options are comparable without diving into it, but if the gap really was that small, I'd definitely change my mind!

Original article https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/edinburg...

[dupe]

More discussion over here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37907519

I live in Edinburgh and one of the first things I noticed when I first came here was how many Tesla's there are. I put some of it down to a dealership in a central swanky street with rich footfall (gone now). Things snowball. We get a lot of "weather" in Scotland. Not quite as much rain as Glasgow and the West, but plenty. And there has been some torrential (really, monsoon-style) rain on occasion recently (past two or three years really). I've rarely seen so much water come down so quickly.

However, I would still assume a Tesla was waterproof! Something seems odd about this.

I swear I remember Tesla bragging about how they can turn into boats during deep water emergencies. The wheels being used as propellers, and the chassis being light enough to float. Feels like a fabrication of my mind now that I'm thinking about it...

Oh it's a fabrication of a mind, just not yours.

you might be thinking of Elon’s claim that the CyberTruck would be semi-amphibious

Multiple videos of that sort of thing happening came out. Tesla driving threw high water. Musk commented something that for a short period they could float but in general they said this wasn't a supported features and don't do it.

Then for the Cybertruck Musk said it should actually be able to float. But it was said as 'we are shorting for this' not 'this is a feature count on this'. As it stands this would void warranty.

Tesla certainty not ever suggested that they could turn into boats in emergency situations.

> Musk commented something that for a short period they could float but in general they said this wasn't a supported features and don't do it.

Musk also said "the driver is only in the seat for legal reasons - the car is driving itself".

We need an almanac for "Which Musk statements are to be taken at face value, and which aren't"...

https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/20/11975452/tesla-model-s-fl...

Almost certainly there are multiple problems here.

I can imagine a scenario where debris or running over a curb damaged the undercarriage in a way that would allow water to enter the battery compartment if the lower part of the car was submerged (say, going over a somewhat deep puddle in the road).

There are enough Teslas out there that if 'rain' damaged the battery, we'd see tens of thousands of these issues constantly happening. I'm not saying Tesla isn't at fault, or there isn't a design issue, but it's probably some edge case.

BIK rate on EVs is 2% in the UK & there are probably a lot of finance/IT types in Edinburgh who were happy to funnel their income into what was effectively a half price car if you were a higher rate paying consultant. For a while Tesla was the only real EV option available in any kind of numbers.

might this be covered under insurance? a flood of sort?

There was an amber “do not travel” alert out for rain/floods, so I’m sure they’ve got “weasel room”.

Edit: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weat...

Link for the downvoter

If Tesla can’t make a chassis that keeps rainwater away from the battery, then they shouldn’t charge their customers for it when the battery inevitably has water ingress

You went very quickly from 1 headline to 'inevitably'.

There are five million Teslas on the road. Here we have a story about a single Tesla with a flooded battery compartment.

This sort of issue happens on every type of car. It's not routine that a Ford F150 has a cracked block that leads the engine to hydrolock, but it does happen, and Ford doesn't cover the damage 8 years later.

That's why organizations like Consumer Reports are important.

E.g. if Tesla batteries only last X years and you plan on keeping your Tesla for Y years, then knowing that leads to better decision making.

Wonder if this has anything to do with Elon supposedly asking his engineers to remove some plugs that prevent water ingress (page 280 of Walter Isaacson's book)

I really had high hopes about Tesla as a company when they released Model 3. It was revolutionary and I was big fan. But then this English diver “incident” happened. Ok, funny things happen and I tried to forget. And ignore continuous weird tweets from the owner. When I was able to afford one they removed ultrasonic sensors… And I understood, that this brand does not align with my understanding of ethics and technology.

And they tried to paint removing it as a "feature" too.

I love my Tesla but I will jump as soon as another car gets functional autopilot and compatibility with the Supercharger network.

Tesla has a functional autopilot?

I've been reading the Elon Musk book, I'm about halfway through. Some of the things in there, I'm surprised Musk was happy to admit to — they're intentionally cutting corners to reach self-imposed "milestones" on number of cars shipped in a given year, or reducing how waterproof their Solarlink roofs are in order to get more installed.

This is the kind of thing that belongs in a damning exposé on a shoddy company, not a book promoted by the CEO.

> This is the kind of thing that belongs in a damning exposé on a shoddy company, not a book promoted by the CEO.

This was the same with LTT recently, there was footage of their employees saying that they were rushed to create videos, that they'd "never been truly happy with a single video they did", that they "wished they were given more time to do things properly", etc., etc...

And then I realized that this was official footage, that LTT themselves released as content!

I think the press actually devalues their ability to criticize Tesla/Elon when they push stories like this, where something out of the ordinary happens to one person. What used to be a common journalistic intent of "let's find out who else this might have happened to" is completely gone, replaced by sensational clickbait titles.

This is a Scottish person driving in conditions that would never be encountered by over 99% of the Teslas out there. People who love Tesla don't care about this. People who hate Tesla/Elon will add this to their data points of why they will never buy one. The person with the $21k bill will pay it and move on with the rest of us.

When you shill so hard you should disclose you have a stake

> This is a Scottish person driving in conditions that would never be encountered by over 99% of the Teslas out there.

I don't know if this was meant as a sarcastic remark; I assume that the share of Tesla drivers that live in rainy places is more than 1%

There's no way this was caused merely by excessive rain. Water does not leak into the battery compartment without physical damage.

The linked article doesn't mention it, but there must have been some sort of physical damage at some point.

> The linked article doesn't mention it, but there must have been some sort of physical damage at some ...

Do you have any information we dont have? Otherwise you are just speculating to defend Tesla.

There's a ton of Tesla customers who've experienced some variation of minor battery problems that turn into full replacements, this isn't a new issue. This poor guy hit some debris that broke a coolant hose connector into the battery pack which Tesla said destroyed the whole battery pack.

https://www.carscoops.com/2021/07/tesla-quoted-16000-for-a-r...

This is why quality matters and when Tesla fans dismiss obvious quality issues, this is what they're excusing. Water should not be getting anywhere near the top of the battery and if it does, it shouldn't destroying the entire battery.

I'm not trying to support or dismiss any quality claims, merely trying to point out that a news article premised on "this happened to this one person" is lazy journalism, and has virtually zero impact on changing anyone's mind (pro-Tesla or anti-Tesla).

If there is a quality control issue with some product (cars or otherwise), a worthwhile journalist would examine the larger trend and try to tell both sides of the story. To some extent, it's a reflection of the shorter attention spans and reactionary nature of today's readers.

> This is a Scottish person driving in conditions that would never be encountered by over 99% of the Teslas out there.

What are you basing this on? I can't draw the same conclusions, and I see no evidence for it.

> What used to be a common journalistic intent of "let's find out who else this might have happened to" is completely gone, replaced by sensational clickbait titles.

> > A similar incident occurred last year when a Canadian Tesla owner was told it would cost $26,000 to get a replacement battery for his vehicle, Fox Business reported.

A similar incident occurred last year when a Canadian Tesla owner was told it would cost $26,000 to get a replacement battery for his vehicle.

This is probably what actually happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzA0U53HF2g

I watched a video on Youtube of someone driving their Tesla through water that is up to its hood. Nothing seemed to happen to it (it was able to drive away). Supposedly the batteries are sealed, but I'd never test that doing it. This car was so deep in the water I'd be worried it would wash away; I guess it's so heavy that it doesn't happen.

https://youtu.be/tzA0U53HF2g

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