Page 12 - IAV Digital Magazine #537

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
By Fred Lambert
A Tesla Model S owner in Finland decided to blow up his electric car with dynamite after it needed a battery replace- ment, which Tesla said was going to cost $22,000.
There’s not a lot of information about how much an electric car, or especially Tesla vehicle, battery replacement costs.
It’s a hard ques- tion to answer since the vast majority of Tesla battery replace- ments have been done under war- ranty.
Early on, Tesla offered eight-year unlimited mileage powertrain war- ranties for Model S and Model X.
With Model S pro- duction starting in 2012 and higher volumes not com- ing until 2014, only recently have those vehicles
start-
ed to come off their powertrain warranty. We have seen quotes from Tesla for bat- tery pack replace- ments between $20,000 and $30,000. That’s a lot of money, but the good news is that Tesla’s bat- tery packs have been known to last a long time.
I have a Tesla Model X that had a battery pack last for more than 300,000 miles.
However, even if the problem is not necessarily bat- tery degradation, the battery packs
sim-
ply fail some- times, and it’s expensive to replace those early packs.
We recently reported on a case where a Model S owner was told by Tesla that he needed a $22,500 battery replacement.
That wasn’t really an option since it’s basically equivalent to the value of the vehi- cle.
Fortunately, the owner managed to find a third- party repair shop the fix the battery
pack for
a fraction of the cost – though the fix is somewhat controversial in the Tesla repair community.
Now we learn of a similar case in Finland where Tuomas Katainen, a 2013 Tesla Model S owner, had a battery pack that was out of warranty fail, and Tesla asked for the equivalent of $22,000 USD for a battery pack replacement.
Katainen didn’t like the value proposition con- sidering
used 2013 Model
S vehicles go for about 35,000 euros in Finland and he didn’t have access to a third-party shop to fix the pack.
What options does one have at that point? Quite a few actually: You can try to find a used battery pack, you can sell the car as non- functional and still get decent money for it, or you can sell it for parts.
But Katainen decided to go a different way.
He reached out to YouTuber Pommij ätkät, a channel known for blowing things up, to strap 30 kg of dynamite to the electric vehicle and blow it up: That sounds like a rea- sonable solution to an expensive battery replace- ment.
To be fair, they did remove the non-functioning battery pack and other expensive
parts, like the electric motor, before blowing up the car.
Obviously, I don’t support this as a solution, but I def- initely feel for early Model S owners in his situ- ation.
One thing to keep in mind for EV naysayers that like to use this as “proof” that EVs don’t work, the high battery replacement cost is mainly for early vehicles that were produced in lower volumes.
It’s more expen- sive to have bat- tery replacements for those vehicles.
Battery pack replacements for higher-volume vehicles like Model 3 and Model Y are expected to be much less expen- sive when they will be needed off warranty, and also battery technolo- gy is improving, which makes them last longer.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Tesla Owner Blows Up His Model S With Dynamite Over $22,000 Battery Replacement