4 ms·

It would be also nice if they made a repairable car, and not fill the landfills... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-tVM9lz4h4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

It would be also nice if they made a repairable car, and not fill the landfills... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-tVM9lz4h4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-tVM9lz4h4

xedeon 5y ago
Yeah, that video was primed for clickbait. The picture of the repair bill they showed was from 2019 for a completely different car. Both Rossman and Rich Rebuild’s channel are complicit. There’s always more to the story. https://twitter.com/petteri_bergius/status/1438452122526310401?s=21 https://twitter.com/petteri_bergius/status/14384521225263104...
- barbazoo 5y ago
  There has been a follow up video by RichRebuilds where explains (and regrets) what he did. It doesn't change anything about Tesla's stance against 3rd party repairs and their reluctance to do anything other than a complete battery swap in that case.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    I mean, if a part isn't supposed to be opened up to be serviced, then them doing so would increase liability in case they botch the repair or it later catches on fire. If the part was on a smaller scale, say replacing a mosfet on the ADAS unit when the service techs are only allowed to replace the full ADAS unit, would it be the same story?
  - ajross 5y ago
    It may not change the individual fact, but it quite clearly doesn't support the ridiculous hyperbolic generalizations about a "non-repairable" car upthread either. Look, cars are complicated. Manufacturers write repair manuals and stock parts based on expected failures. Not every conceivable failure is going to be in those manuals. In this case there was a valve that was part of "The Battery Pack" as far as the manual was concerned, but that had a localized failure more that could have been repaired with a targetted replacement of a single part. And it wasn't in the manual. And yeah, that's sort of an engineering failure. They should have anticipated this low-hanging-fruit kind of repair (just as they do for other very common stuff like brake calipers or shocks or whatnot). And they didn't. Shame on them. But that's not a systemic failure. They just didn't write it up. What are you really asking for here? That Tesla empower its local service centers to do their own engineering work on a 400V electrical system and decide for themselves how to disassemble and reassemble the battery pack in a safe way just to save a handful[1] of battery replacements? Does that sound like a good idea? Seems like we'd be right back here with entirely different (and IMHO more justified) anti-Tesla safety flame wars. [1] So far as anyone can tell, this is in fact the only such valve that has failed on a wild Tesla. It's not like these things are dropping everywhere.
    - jcims 5y ago
      >What are you really asking for here? That Tesla empower its local service centers to do their own engineering work on a 400V electrical system ... Yes. This is what certifications are for. > and decide for themselves how to disassemble and reassemble the battery pack in a safe way just to save a handful[1] of battery replacements? No. See above. The Tesla fleet is aging every day. This type of repair is going to become much more common and the lack of recourse is going to start to decimate the used car value. If Telsa's long game is to sell trips and not cars it might not be a terrible plan.
      - ajross 5y ago
        > Yes. This is what certifications are for. No... no, it's not. Manufacturer certifications are designed to provide liability protection for repairs done by people given training on how to make specific repairs to specific systems. What you're asking for here is for someone to independently determine that this valve can be replaced in isolation from the battery it's attached to. That's not the same problem at all, and good luck getting an insurer to cover that kind of nonsense under a "certification" contract. > This type of repair is going to become much more common and the lack of recourse Again, that's just simply wrong. Small part repairs are routine and common in the Tesla world just as they are everywhere else. The overwhelming majority of repairs don't involve replacing the battery pack! This controversy was about a very specific small part that happens not to have an individual part number nor disassembly spec. And maybe it should! But your generalization is just silly. Tesla doesn't treat repairs any differently from any other manufacturer, period. You got sold a line that matched your priors.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jdsully 5y ago
  The model 3 price is $13,500 just for parts which still fits with the theme of the story. Arguing over invoices is just a diversion from the real issue of repairability. Everyone agrees replacing the battery is crazy expensive - especially when a simple fix is possible.
  - xedeon 5y ago
    That narrative is really not true. Tesla provides the resources for repairs and parts just like other U.S. auto manufacturers. Anything that deals with the high-voltage (HV) systems need to be certified for obvious safety and liability reasons. Tesla Parts Catalog https://epc.tesla.com/en https://epc.tesla.com/en Service and Diagnostic website https://service.tesla.com/ https://service.tesla.com/ You can access "Service and Repair Information" and even "Diagnostic Software" and pay by the hour, day, month or year... Some manufacturers won't even provide some of these to individuals and only makes them available to dealerships. My friend and I just performed maintenance on our Model 3s. We changed the A/C filter and cleaned the condenser and serviced the brakes. I just ordered the parts from the Tesla app and did everything in my garage.
    - jdsully 5y ago
      The provide some parts and some documentation but nowhere near the extent of legacy manufacturers.
      - xedeon 5y ago
        Do you have some legitimate examples? Please share them. HV parts excluded as I stated above. Here is an example of an owner ordering a 2021 center console from Tesla so he can upgrade his older model year car. https://youtu.be/6TOnzrrkxDc https://youtu.be/6TOnzrrkxDc I’ve done many other retrofit upgrades and repairs to my Teslas.
5faulker 5y ago
They are no true sustainability advocate at this point, and this is an element of opportunism in this as well.
- aww_dang 5y ago
  Yes, but the green angle still sells and government subsidies are still being paid.
- epistasis 5y ago
  Without a huge reduction in their use, it's really hard to square car use with human health. For example, most damaging air pollution, and the most microplastics in ocean near SF, comes from tires. EVs don't fix that. And then there are all the health problems that come from requiring people to use a car to visit friends, or get a loaf of bread, or really do anything. Cars are killing us in many ways.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    80-90 years of mobility or 85-95 years trapped in one place is not a hard choice to make, especially when 60+ of those years are still in the future. Yes, the pollution from cars is terrible. I lived by a major freeway for three years. No, the solution is not to give up all their benefits. For one thing, SF could actually enforce air quality standards inside apartment buildings, especially those near the freeways. Also future storm drain systems could be designed to settle out microplastics (many storm systems do have settling/collection ponds anyway).
    - epistasis 5y ago
      The choice isn't cars or no cars, that's a completely false dichotomy. The choice is to legalize other forms of mobility beyond a car. People in the US are so car-addled that when I suggest something like this, they can't even imagine a life where they can buy groceries without using a car. It's quite shocking!
      - 5y ago
elif 5y ago
that is not really different from Ferrari or McLaren or any other of the fastest cars on the planet. EDIT: i'm being downvoted but these manufacturers build machines capable of extreme performance, and have interest in maintaining their reputation. If you think i'm exaggerating, there are repairs where you are required to ship your car to the McLaren or Ferrari factory. The Ferrari FXX is not allowed to leave the track ever.
- dr_orpheus 5y ago
  I think you are being downvoted because it is not a completely apt comparison. While Tesla does make luxury/performance cars, they are also used as people's primary means of transportation, not just track cars like the FXX (or the Enzo which I believe is the road-legal equivalent). So they are less like Ferrari and McLaren where I can't any new car for less than six figures and more on par with Audi/Lexus/etc.
  - elif 5y ago
    I'm not sure why it isn't apt? a performance part has to perform under certain constraints regardless of the MSRP of the vehicle. Daily Driver ferraris and mclarens are also laughably expensive to maintain as /the norm/ Unlike this defective battery which is /an exception/ also the "going to landfills" bit is really FUD. Tesla repairs your vehicle by installing a new battery, and tesla recycles the old battery themselves. The loop is as small as possible and there is no landfill in it.
    - vonmoltke 5y ago
      Ferrari makes about 8,400 cars a year, almost entirely assembled by hand. McLaren produces just shy of 5,000 per year. Tesla is currently producing about the combined number per week. Ferrari and McLaren cars are a very exclusive club. Ferrari, to my understanding, explicitly limits production capacity to maintain that exclusivity. The practices of these two companies are in no way comparable to the practices of a large-volume automaker.
      - 5y ago
aequitas 5y ago
Not to defend Tesla, and I don't know the details. But very likely that old replaced battery would remain with Tesla and they would scrap it for parts or otherwise recycle it into a "refurbished" part to be sold again. Might be they would ask more than $16000 for the repair if you decide to keep the old battery yourself. Other companies apply this as well, it's an economics of scale thing. It's not worthwhile (ie: profitable) for them to have every technician in every service location educated to a high enough level to do low level troubleshooting on every model and every part, it's much cheaper to hire people that can swap out modules and ship those back to a central facility. There you have people that do nothing all day then troubleshoot all parts they have been specifically trained for, repair them and sell them as refurbished. A lot would probably still end up on the landfill. And whether the customer sees any discount in repairs due to this "optimisation" is debatable. But right now you hardly have a choice, I hope that will be changing.
tacobelllover99 5y ago
I agree it should be more repairable. However please don't spread ignorance about how that would have just ended up in a landfill because it wouldn't have.
cronix 5y ago
My father had this complaint about just about all cars manufactured post 1985(ish). Up until then, he, himself, could repair his own car for most issues with a basic set of tools that most people already had in their houses. Then they started putting computers and proprietary parts in, making it so that he had to take it to a dealership or repair shop who had the specialized multi-thousand dollar equipment to read the chips. Define "repairable." It was still repairable, just not by him.
- ch4s3 5y ago
  Cars made back then were easy to fix in a sense, but broke often, got terrible gas mileage, and were largely death traps in any crash over ~45mph. There are certainly parts of modern cars that should be easier to fix yourself, but in a lot of ways they're less difficult to repair. The engine compartments are smaller, and the engines have more parts which means it takes longer. However if you can hook up and read the OBD2 system codes you get a lot of diagnostic info that was never previously available. This can mean you send a lot less time redoing work. The real limiting factor is space. If you're not averse to Quora, there's a nice discussion here https://www.quora.com/Why-are-modern-vehicles-so-difficult-to-fix https://www.quora.com/Why-are-modern-vehicles-so-difficult-t....
- pengaru 5y ago
  From the 70s to 80s cars were a complete shit show as they had smog control systems tacked on. Your father's sentiments are more applicable to pre-70s vehicles, before smog control laws arrived. By the mid 90s things settled down and were much simplified, thanks to the computers and electrification of most actuators. You just treat the engine control module as a black box, with a small handful of easily tested sensors. I'd take any 90s car over most post-smog ~pre-obd era vehicles, your father's complaint strikes me as more an irrational fear of computers. There's a definite sweet spot in the 90s where computerized cars still have throttle cables but extremely simple and minimalist computerized engine control systems vs. years prior.
- bityard 5y ago
  I've heard this a lot, that cars stopped being repairable by the Average Joe (and Jolene) once they started putting computers in them. After having worked on my own cars' weird problems and watching a lot more car repair YouTube videos than I'd like to admit, I have to say a lot of that is just bunk. Not all of it, just most of it. Yes, cars got a lot more complicated. Yes, there are a few parts on them that the shadetree mechanic has no chance of fixing on their own, such as an automatic transmission or the car's security system. (Those parts, you either replace the whole modular unit, or pay a specialist/dealership to repair.) But for the most part, they are still _systems_ and they are still _understandable_ and repairable. The key is that you have to have the willingness to learn how these newfangled systems work. To make it a computer analogy, it's like an old COBOL programmer complaining that you can't fix modern computer programmers because everything is Javascript now. It's my observation that over the decades, the mechanical components of cars (the engine and transmission) have gotten extremely reliable while the electrical and computer systems are where most problems occur. That means you have to understand the basics of electronics and electricity in order to troubleshoot these kinds of issues. I know a few motorcycle guys who can rebuild a whole engine for fun on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but the moment there's a slight electrical problem with the bike, they throw their hands up and trailer it into a shop. On the diagnostic front, the good news is that auto makers have standardized on a lot of things that actually make it _easier_ for independent shops and home-gamers to work on modern cars. For instance, all cars have an ODBII port and CAN bus through which you can (at a minimum) read diagnostic codes and read live data through with a dirt-cheap reader. More advanced scan tools can graph live data from every sensor on the car, communicate with the car's various modules, perform diagnostics, and other fun things. These cost more of course (hundreds of dollars) but can still cost under one trip to the repair shop depending on the issue if you're willing to put in the effort and time.
slownews45 5y ago
What a total scam that kind of clickbait video is. There was that lemon law lawyer as well trying to go after tesla - also a scam. I think one difference - Tesla doesn't seem to rollover for these scams as much as others do. Ie, they went after that lawyer, who'd pulled the same stunt on LOTS of other car companies. And won. And the whole Rich Rebuilds stuff - I used to follow him, but it just devolved into a Tesla gripe fest. Ironically, while folks like Rich says Tesla is not opening stuff up enough they are going to have regulators breathing down their neck for every fire they have (most are things like household not car electrical wiring when clueless homeowner runs a high resistance socket onto their house wiring). With 500K vehicles, the last thing they need to be focusing on is making these type of clickbait folks happy (Rich Rebuilds etc). In terms of making frankenstein battery packs the way Rich says they should be made. 1) The BMS for these things has pretty tight tolerance. 2) The swap certain cells out is a disaster waiting to happen. "No, the "remove a cell" thing is not a "fix" either. The result is the same, it just takes longer. Removing a cell is literally creating an SoC imbalance on purpose and it's idiotic that people who don't understand the Tesla BMS push this." https://twitter.com/wk057/status/1437607772959428608 https://twitter.com/wk057/status/1437607772959428608 "I can't believe this is being touted as a fix. You can't replace individual modules in an S/X pack. There's no way to match them well enough for a long term fix. Might last a few months, but will invariably die again. Have tried it a half-dozen times. Best run was about a year. " So we have folks pushing straight scam repairs here on HN as a way to tarnish Tesla.

It would be also nice if they made a repairable car, and not fill the landfills... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-tVM9lz4h4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-tVM9lz4h4

xedeon 5y ago

Yeah, that video was primed for clickbait. The picture of the repair bill they showed was from 2019 for a completely different car. Both Rossman and Rich Rebuild’s channel are complicit. There’s always more to the story. https://twitter.com/petteri_bergius/status/1438452122526310401?s=21 https://twitter.com/petteri_bergius/status/14384521225263104...

barbazoo 5y ago
There has been a follow up video by RichRebuilds where explains (and regrets) what he did. It doesn't change anything about Tesla's stance against 3rd party repairs and their reluctance to do anything other than a complete battery swap in that case.
- judge2020 5y ago
  I mean, if a part isn't supposed to be opened up to be serviced, then them doing so would increase liability in case they botch the repair or it later catches on fire. If the part was on a smaller scale, say replacing a mosfet on the ADAS unit when the service techs are only allowed to replace the full ADAS unit, would it be the same story?
- ajross 5y ago
  It may not change the individual fact, but it quite clearly doesn't support the ridiculous hyperbolic generalizations about a "non-repairable" car upthread either. Look, cars are complicated. Manufacturers write repair manuals and stock parts based on expected failures. Not every conceivable failure is going to be in those manuals. In this case there was a valve that was part of "The Battery Pack" as far as the manual was concerned, but that had a localized failure more that could have been repaired with a targetted replacement of a single part. And it wasn't in the manual. And yeah, that's sort of an engineering failure. They should have anticipated this low-hanging-fruit kind of repair (just as they do for other very common stuff like brake calipers or shocks or whatnot). And they didn't. Shame on them. But that's not a systemic failure. They just didn't write it up. What are you really asking for here? That Tesla empower its local service centers to do their own engineering work on a 400V electrical system and decide for themselves how to disassemble and reassemble the battery pack in a safe way just to save a handful[1] of battery replacements? Does that sound like a good idea? Seems like we'd be right back here with entirely different (and IMHO more justified) anti-Tesla safety flame wars. [1] So far as anyone can tell, this is in fact the only such valve that has failed on a wild Tesla. It's not like these things are dropping everywhere.
  - jcims 5y ago
    >What are you really asking for here? That Tesla empower its local service centers to do their own engineering work on a 400V electrical system ... Yes. This is what certifications are for. > and decide for themselves how to disassemble and reassemble the battery pack in a safe way just to save a handful[1] of battery replacements? No. See above. The Tesla fleet is aging every day. This type of repair is going to become much more common and the lack of recourse is going to start to decimate the used car value. If Telsa's long game is to sell trips and not cars it might not be a terrible plan.
    - ajross 5y ago
      > Yes. This is what certifications are for. No... no, it's not. Manufacturer certifications are designed to provide liability protection for repairs done by people given training on how to make specific repairs to specific systems. What you're asking for here is for someone to independently determine that this valve can be replaced in isolation from the battery it's attached to. That's not the same problem at all, and good luck getting an insurer to cover that kind of nonsense under a "certification" contract. > This type of repair is going to become much more common and the lack of recourse Again, that's just simply wrong. Small part repairs are routine and common in the Tesla world just as they are everywhere else. The overwhelming majority of repairs don't involve replacing the battery pack! This controversy was about a very specific small part that happens not to have an individual part number nor disassembly spec. And maybe it should! But your generalization is just silly. Tesla doesn't treat repairs any differently from any other manufacturer, period. You got sold a line that matched your priors.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jdsully 5y ago
The model 3 price is $13,500 just for parts which still fits with the theme of the story. Arguing over invoices is just a diversion from the real issue of repairability. Everyone agrees replacing the battery is crazy expensive - especially when a simple fix is possible.
- xedeon 5y ago
  That narrative is really not true. Tesla provides the resources for repairs and parts just like other U.S. auto manufacturers. Anything that deals with the high-voltage (HV) systems need to be certified for obvious safety and liability reasons. Tesla Parts Catalog https://epc.tesla.com/en https://epc.tesla.com/en Service and Diagnostic website https://service.tesla.com/ https://service.tesla.com/ You can access "Service and Repair Information" and even "Diagnostic Software" and pay by the hour, day, month or year... Some manufacturers won't even provide some of these to individuals and only makes them available to dealerships. My friend and I just performed maintenance on our Model 3s. We changed the A/C filter and cleaned the condenser and serviced the brakes. I just ordered the parts from the Tesla app and did everything in my garage.
  - jdsully 5y ago
    The provide some parts and some documentation but nowhere near the extent of legacy manufacturers.
    - xedeon 5y ago
      Do you have some legitimate examples? Please share them. HV parts excluded as I stated above. Here is an example of an owner ordering a 2021 center console from Tesla so he can upgrade his older model year car. https://youtu.be/6TOnzrrkxDc https://youtu.be/6TOnzrrkxDc I’ve done many other retrofit upgrades and repairs to my Teslas.

5faulker 5y ago

They are no true sustainability advocate at this point, and this is an element of opportunism in this as well.

aww_dang 5y ago
Yes, but the green angle still sells and government subsidies are still being paid.
epistasis 5y ago
Without a huge reduction in their use, it's really hard to square car use with human health. For example, most damaging air pollution, and the most microplastics in ocean near SF, comes from tires. EVs don't fix that. And then there are all the health problems that come from requiring people to use a car to visit friends, or get a loaf of bread, or really do anything. Cars are killing us in many ways.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  80-90 years of mobility or 85-95 years trapped in one place is not a hard choice to make, especially when 60+ of those years are still in the future. Yes, the pollution from cars is terrible. I lived by a major freeway for three years. No, the solution is not to give up all their benefits. For one thing, SF could actually enforce air quality standards inside apartment buildings, especially those near the freeways. Also future storm drain systems could be designed to settle out microplastics (many storm systems do have settling/collection ponds anyway).
  - epistasis 5y ago
    The choice isn't cars or no cars, that's a completely false dichotomy. The choice is to legalize other forms of mobility beyond a car. People in the US are so car-addled that when I suggest something like this, they can't even imagine a life where they can buy groceries without using a car. It's quite shocking!
    - 5y ago

elif 5y ago

that is not really different from Ferrari or McLaren or any other of the fastest cars on the planet. EDIT: i'm being downvoted but these manufacturers build machines capable of extreme performance, and have interest in maintaining their reputation. If you think i'm exaggerating, there are repairs where you are required to ship your car to the McLaren or Ferrari factory. The Ferrari FXX is not allowed to leave the track ever.

dr_orpheus 5y ago
I think you are being downvoted because it is not a completely apt comparison. While Tesla does make luxury/performance cars, they are also used as people's primary means of transportation, not just track cars like the FXX (or the Enzo which I believe is the road-legal equivalent). So they are less like Ferrari and McLaren where I can't any new car for less than six figures and more on par with Audi/Lexus/etc.
- elif 5y ago
  I'm not sure why it isn't apt? a performance part has to perform under certain constraints regardless of the MSRP of the vehicle. Daily Driver ferraris and mclarens are also laughably expensive to maintain as /the norm/ Unlike this defective battery which is /an exception/ also the "going to landfills" bit is really FUD. Tesla repairs your vehicle by installing a new battery, and tesla recycles the old battery themselves. The loop is as small as possible and there is no landfill in it.
  - vonmoltke 5y ago
    Ferrari makes about 8,400 cars a year, almost entirely assembled by hand. McLaren produces just shy of 5,000 per year. Tesla is currently producing about the combined number per week. Ferrari and McLaren cars are a very exclusive club. Ferrari, to my understanding, explicitly limits production capacity to maintain that exclusivity. The practices of these two companies are in no way comparable to the practices of a large-volume automaker.
    - 5y ago

aequitas 5y ago

Not to defend Tesla, and I don't know the details. But very likely that old replaced battery would remain with Tesla and they would scrap it for parts or otherwise recycle it into a "refurbished" part to be sold again. Might be they would ask more than $16000 for the repair if you decide to keep the old battery yourself. Other companies apply this as well, it's an economics of scale thing. It's not worthwhile (ie: profitable) for them to have every technician in every service location educated to a high enough level to do low level troubleshooting on every model and every part, it's much cheaper to hire people that can swap out modules and ship those back to a central facility. There you have people that do nothing all day then troubleshoot all parts they have been specifically trained for, repair them and sell them as refurbished. A lot would probably still end up on the landfill. And whether the customer sees any discount in repairs due to this "optimisation" is debatable. But right now you hardly have a choice, I hope that will be changing.

tacobelllover99 5y ago

I agree it should be more repairable. However please don't spread ignorance about how that would have just ended up in a landfill because it wouldn't have.

cronix 5y ago

My father had this complaint about just about all cars manufactured post 1985(ish). Up until then, he, himself, could repair his own car for most issues with a basic set of tools that most people already had in their houses. Then they started putting computers and proprietary parts in, making it so that he had to take it to a dealership or repair shop who had the specialized multi-thousand dollar equipment to read the chips. Define "repairable." It was still repairable, just not by him.

ch4s3 5y ago
Cars made back then were easy to fix in a sense, but broke often, got terrible gas mileage, and were largely death traps in any crash over ~45mph. There are certainly parts of modern cars that should be easier to fix yourself, but in a lot of ways they're less difficult to repair. The engine compartments are smaller, and the engines have more parts which means it takes longer. However if you can hook up and read the OBD2 system codes you get a lot of diagnostic info that was never previously available. This can mean you send a lot less time redoing work. The real limiting factor is space. If you're not averse to Quora, there's a nice discussion here https://www.quora.com/Why-are-modern-vehicles-so-difficult-to-fix https://www.quora.com/Why-are-modern-vehicles-so-difficult-t....
pengaru 5y ago
From the 70s to 80s cars were a complete shit show as they had smog control systems tacked on. Your father's sentiments are more applicable to pre-70s vehicles, before smog control laws arrived. By the mid 90s things settled down and were much simplified, thanks to the computers and electrification of most actuators. You just treat the engine control module as a black box, with a small handful of easily tested sensors. I'd take any 90s car over most post-smog ~pre-obd era vehicles, your father's complaint strikes me as more an irrational fear of computers. There's a definite sweet spot in the 90s where computerized cars still have throttle cables but extremely simple and minimalist computerized engine control systems vs. years prior.
bityard 5y ago
I've heard this a lot, that cars stopped being repairable by the Average Joe (and Jolene) once they started putting computers in them. After having worked on my own cars' weird problems and watching a lot more car repair YouTube videos than I'd like to admit, I have to say a lot of that is just bunk. Not all of it, just most of it. Yes, cars got a lot more complicated. Yes, there are a few parts on them that the shadetree mechanic has no chance of fixing on their own, such as an automatic transmission or the car's security system. (Those parts, you either replace the whole modular unit, or pay a specialist/dealership to repair.) But for the most part, they are still _systems_ and they are still _understandable_ and repairable. The key is that you have to have the willingness to learn how these newfangled systems work. To make it a computer analogy, it's like an old COBOL programmer complaining that you can't fix modern computer programmers because everything is Javascript now. It's my observation that over the decades, the mechanical components of cars (the engine and transmission) have gotten extremely reliable while the electrical and computer systems are where most problems occur. That means you have to understand the basics of electronics and electricity in order to troubleshoot these kinds of issues. I know a few motorcycle guys who can rebuild a whole engine for fun on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but the moment there's a slight electrical problem with the bike, they throw their hands up and trailer it into a shop. On the diagnostic front, the good news is that auto makers have standardized on a lot of things that actually make it _easier_ for independent shops and home-gamers to work on modern cars. For instance, all cars have an ODBII port and CAN bus through which you can (at a minimum) read diagnostic codes and read live data through with a dirt-cheap reader. More advanced scan tools can graph live data from every sensor on the car, communicate with the car's various modules, perform diagnostics, and other fun things. These cost more of course (hundreds of dollars) but can still cost under one trip to the repair shop depending on the issue if you're willing to put in the effort and time.

slownews45 5y ago

What a total scam that kind of clickbait video is. There was that lemon law lawyer as well trying to go after tesla - also a scam. I think one difference - Tesla doesn't seem to rollover for these scams as much as others do. Ie, they went after that lawyer, who'd pulled the same stunt on LOTS of other car companies. And won. And the whole Rich Rebuilds stuff - I used to follow him, but it just devolved into a Tesla gripe fest. Ironically, while folks like Rich says Tesla is not opening stuff up enough they are going to have regulators breathing down their neck for every fire they have (most are things like household not car electrical wiring when clueless homeowner runs a high resistance socket onto their house wiring). With 500K vehicles, the last thing they need to be focusing on is making these type of clickbait folks happy (Rich Rebuilds etc). In terms of making frankenstein battery packs the way Rich says they should be made. 1) The BMS for these things has pretty tight tolerance. 2) The swap certain cells out is a disaster waiting to happen. "No, the "remove a cell" thing is not a "fix" either. The result is the same, it just takes longer. Removing a cell is literally creating an SoC imbalance on purpose and it's idiotic that people who don't understand the Tesla BMS push this." https://twitter.com/wk057/status/1437607772959428608 https://twitter.com/wk057/status/1437607772959428608 "I can't believe this is being touted as a fix. You can't replace individual modules in an S/X pack. There's no way to match them well enough for a long term fix. Might last a few months, but will invariably die again. Have tried it a half-dozen times. Best run was about a year. " So we have folks pushing straight scam repairs here on HN as a way to tarnish Tesla.