1.2M-Mile Tesla Model S Is on Its 14th Motor, Fourth Battery Pack
insideevs.com
insideevs.com
I'd be trading my car in for a different brand if this happened to my car!
It didn't go the distance. It's on its 14th motor and fourth battery pack.
Put another way, 14 motors over 10 years is 8.5 months per motor. At a rough estimate, you're getting somewhere around 2-4 thousand hours per motor.
Imagine replacing the engine in your car every 9 months. Or the transmission, or clutch, or any major mechanical component. We'd call that car a lemon.
On the other hand, 2.5 years per battery pack isn't too bad. With the kind of abuse shown here, I'd expect them to last closer to one year.
The model S has two motors, so you're off by a factor of two. Each of the two motors is smaller than the gearbox, so I'd say it would make more sense to compare it with a fairly small ICE part, not with the much larger engine.
But even that doesn't make much sense, because what happened is that he got a series of duds until they found the problem and fixed it. Taking the average lifetime of a dud and a good engine, as you do, isn't going to tell you much about either of the two kinds.
Why would size matter? Without a motor/engine a car goes nowhere. It makes sense to compare engine to motor in that context.
> But even that doesn't make much sense, because what happened is that he got a series of duds until they found the problem and fixed it.
14 duds in a row?
> Taking the average lifetime of a dud and a good engine, as you do, isn't going to tell you much about either of the two kinds.
You're right. But taking the 14 duds vs the usual 0/1 for a production ICE car going the same distance certainly tells us a lot.
> Some early Tesla Model S EVs were known to have issues with their rear motors. This particular Tesla suffered from this. The rear motor was replaced thirteen times, so if we include the original that it came with, that's fourteen motors over the course of about 1.2 million miles.
> Most of the replacement motors were actually refurbished units and the problem there is that Tesla didn't know the real issue so it didn't know how to properly fix the motors. Some of these replacement motors failed very quickly. Some were covered under warranty, while others were not.
Many ICE cars have several electric motors, e.g. to lower/raise the windows. Why would you expect the electric motors in an EV to behave like the ICE rather than the electric motors in an ICE in terms of maintenance requirements? "Expect replacement after x hours of operation" etc.
Again, that's a lemon.
Article also says 130.000 miles per year average, that's 360 miles per day. That alone is 6 breaks per day assuming he drives 7 days per week. The guy is practically half his life in the car (like a truck driver).
A negative one. So the motor in a Tesla does not last for long.
I expect the failures were pretty bursty and front-loaded.
Maybe that's okay considering the relative cost of replacing an electric motor versus an ICE drive train, but it doesn't sound great. I would have expected 120k per motor at least.
So, let's assume that the car is being driven much harder than the guy claims. Should that result in 14 motor replacements?
TFA explains the reasoning behind the motor replacements (design flaw).
Batteries are also increasingly recycled, either as units or as their components.
Lithium is often mined from saltwater pumped out of the ground and evaporated in ponds. We can also extract it from seawater if desperate, so there's a price ceiling. It's only a few percent of the battery by mass.
Iron is mined, along with the nickel, manganese, aluminum, and so on. Steel is alloyed from several mined elements.
Cobalt is also mined but has a lot of negative externalities so we've moved to chemistries and cathodes that are cobalt-free or use relatively little.
Carbon, oxygen, and phosphorus have many sources.
> Cobalt is also mined but has a lot of negative externalities so we've moved to chemistries and cathodes that are cobalt-free or use relatively little.
Who is “we” in this sentence? Is there any way to guarantee “cruelty-free” cobalt? Or are the world’s manufacturers forced to source it from mines in conflict zones?
Hope you’re just unaware of the situation and need to be educated, and not just willfully ignorant.
That’s an average though, you can use your own solar panels to charge your Tesla and achieve practically zero emissions.
I'll spot you some maintenance and transmission work and let's call it 4 to 1. Still off by a factor of 3, but at least not an order of magnitude.
The thing is though that you're comparing a statistical anomaly against a different statistical anomaly and you can't do that math. It does not make sense.
You have a guy who has driven a truck a long way and what's notable is how well the truck has put up with it (versus everyone else who has tried to treat a Tundra the same way), versus another guy who is notable for driving his car a similar distance, full stop.
There's going to be a couple Tesla drivers out there that get 300k miles out of one pair of engines. They just haven't made the news yet.