I have a first-generation Honda Insight. It's sixteen years old and still going. At about 110K miles, the power pack failed, someplace in the Central Valley of

I have a first-generation Honda Insight. It's sixteen years old and still going. At about 110K miles, the power pack failed, someplace in the Central Valley of California. Honda (I guess some zone office) had it towed 50 miles to the nearest dealership, which happened to be in Bakersfield. They then replaced the power pack without charging me for it. Now, I knew I was an early adopter. I knew this could happen. I was prepared to pay for it. And Honda decided to treat me like an early adopter. (They sent the old power pack back to Japan; I suppose they wanted to inspect it.) It never occurred to me to slag them in the media, or try to get a class action suit going, or some such foolishness. I was stuck in "the desert" for a few hours. But it might have made a good story. The media love stories about design defects in cars, and the big car companies' coverups play right into those stories. If it bleeds it leads. These EVs don't need oil changes. So the temptation may be to treat them like Soviet tanks and never maintain them. That seems a bad idea. They still have rubber seals on ball joints. They still have pads on the disc brakes. All that stuff is expendable, and needs to be looked at. Tesla is right to debunk this "big story." One guy who could have been using a 20-year-old jalopy pickup truck experienced a typical failure and turned it into his fifteen minutes of fame.