The full story is told in the video: This is/was a very early, first-generation Tesla Model S. He imported it from the US to Finland before you could buy Teslas in Finland.
The battery began to wear out, so he replaced it with a non-Tesla, third party battery. This was later damaged, and Tesla refused to fix it, both because it had a non-Tesla battery inside it, but also because Finnish service centers are not equipped to repair US specification Teslas.
Why he decided to then blow it up... well that must be a Finnish thing. He did remove the batteries and motors first, though.
I worked to blow up a toilet for Dave Barry’s edification[0] a little while ago[1]. While it was fun, we were picking up porcelain for years after. Do not recommend.
Compare this to Honda. I bring my car to the dealership for a repair and they see non-OEM parts on there. Surprise! They still repair it! It's amazing!
I think you may be comparing Apples to Oranges here. Battery is to a Tesla what Engine is to a ICE Honda. Try asking Honda Dealership to fix a non Honda Engine that's started acting out.
I have never heard of a dealership repairing the part that is not oem. If you bring a tesla with non oem battery they may still repair your brakes. They will not repair the battery.
In the end, this is one of the fundamental issues with this new approach to the car market: manufacturers aren't satisfied with providing final goods anymore, and consumers are forced to buy cars as services.
Creating a car that inevitably becomes unusable, unless you essentially spend money enough to buy a mid sized sedan, that's genius from a market perspective, not so much for consumers.
Yeah it's why I probably won't ever be buying an EV. The technology and repairability needs another decade or more to mature. I have no interest in paying indefinite rent to use a car.
The technology and repairability needs another decade or more to mature.
The technology, repairability AND SUPPORTING INFRASTRUCTURE needs another THREE OR MORE decadeS to mature.
The biggest barrier to widespread use of EVs is the almost complete lack of supporting infrastructure. How many countries in the world have electrical grids robust enough to support daily charging of tens or hundreds of millions of EVs at the one time? How many countries of the world have sufficient, widespread charging stations that can handle hundreds of EVs per hour?
We have those facilities for ICEs today, all over the world, even in remote hard-to-reach off-grid locations. For EVS? Practically negligible.
That's the market and competition evolving. Nobody is willing to leave the money on the table now that they see consumers will accept it.
Steve Jobs popularized this model with the iPhone, and now it's permeating throughout all industries. Everything is becoming a service with the means to tax all economic activity involving the product.
Consumers rent forever. Third parties pay for access. Monthly recurring revenue.
What's fundamental what again? There has never been an automobile without expendable, serviceable parts. Sometimes you need new bearings, u-joints, cv-joints, tires, piston rings, catalysts, whatever. Batteries are not different.
Batteries degrade over a fixed amount of time, no matter the measures taken. A traditional, well maintained engine would last far longer than a battery, and the repair costs are usually amounted in a gradual manner, i.e. traditional engines don't usually require large investments to keep running, but EVs do.
In other words, not many people can afford EVs in the long term right now. Hopefully this will change, but the current state of things is what it is.
Many pro-green or geeks love Tesla yet don't realize it is overpriced and has huge delayed negative externalities like worn batteries and non-repairable. We already have better alternatives than Tesla for decades...called "Toyota". Cheaper to buy and maintain. Quality is superb. If I want to test drive Tesla, now we know where to rent it.
What is the deal with Toyota? They never really sold a lot of cars here in Europe, but used beaten up Toyota are worth their weight of gold. It seems like a cult.
Every manufacturer is capable of making quality cars, you just have to choose the correct model.
Your complaint here isn't about repair, it's that battery chemistry isn't a user-servicable component[1]. You have to buy a battery from someone. It turns out that packs are complicated devices and hard to replicate. It's not that Tesla has some kind of insidious DRM on their packs, it's just that there aren't any third party sources. There probably will be eventually, but there aren't yet.
This is different from the world of piston engines, where a talented machine shop (drawing on a century of evolved conventions in engine and vehicle design) can make replacement parts for basically anything.
[1] Potentially you're also complaining about price, because replacement batteries for a 2013 Model S are competing in a market with new parts for a car that retails for $140k. Replacing an EV battery is expensive for the same reason that EVs are expensive: the market wants more than the manufacturers can provide.
I agree being anti-repair is bad, but what car manufacturer isn't at least somewhat anti-repair? Or do you never plan to buy a car at all? Also, isn't Tesla significantly better than most manufacturers in this regard, in that everything but the high-voltage system has parts available for anyone to repair?
While I agree with what you say, the reason I find the current situation completely wrong is that I remember it used to be very different. I remember the times when people were fixing their own cars. Granted, certain aspects became complex and should probably be fixed by authorized service for the sake of safety of passengers, but you have to admit things went way too far.
Does GM fix Corvettes that have had LS swaps? Does Ford fix Mustangs with third-party crate engines?
This was a privately-imported US-spec Tesla with a non-OEM battery, being driven in a country in which almost all vehicles have special cold-weather packages. That is especially important on lithium batteries.
My daily driver is a 2000 Jeep Wrangler. The rear axle was damaged when I bought it, and I replaced it with a Ford 8.8” axle assembly and fabricated my own adapters for it. A few weeks ago the parking brake stopped working correctly and I didn’t have time to fix it myself, so I dropped it off at a local dealership. They had no trouble repairing it, despite the fact that my Jeep came ORM with rear drum brakes and now has disc brakes on the rear.
Most US dealerships will service any make or model of car. Most of them sell used cars of a variety of makes, and will gladly take the business to service them.
Anyone who has replaced their phone battery knows that Li-ion just fundamentally wears out each and every time you charge/discharge it.
The chemistry is only good for a number of charges. This is also affected by temperature, I'm sure that in a cold nation like Finland, the batteries wear out faster.
You can hide this by making redundant cells and with some intelligent software to wear-balance the cells. But eventually, the physical chemistry of the lithium ion just wears out. You can't stop physics.
Yes as do the walls of a cylinder is a gasoline engine, and every moving metal part. but of course by
now they tend to last for 20 years or more so nobody cares.
There are mitigations steps you can take with an EV: don’t keep it fully charged for long, don’t supercharge too often, store it in a garage and keep it plugged in so it can regulate the pack temps without cycling it. One problem is I don’t know how you can evaluate the health of a pack when buying used.
> Yes as do the walls of a cylinder is a gasoline engine, and every moving metal part. but of course by now they tend to last for 20 years or more so nobody cares.
None of those parts cost $22,000+ to repair though, like a Li-ion battery that's fundamental to the electric car.
We all know how to repair cylinders, pistons, or even engine-lift, transmission repairs or whatever. All those costs are well calculated and well known.
After 932 miles? Something seems off as this seems like something that should be covered under warranty. Although granted the year of the model makes me think Gizmodo has a typo here and maybe it’s 93 000 miles? That would put it as just outside the warranty in terms of age.
It's a 2013 model, I assume he bought it used (with many miles on it) and then drove it 932 miles before running into problems.
Unless maybe he bought it new and stored it without driving it for eight years, until the warranty had expired, and then ran into problems when he started driving it?
No. It was a used car from 2013. The number of miles on the car (and therefore, the charge/discharge cycles) is not reported. I drive about 10,000 miles/year, others closer to 20,000. So the number of miles on that car is probably 80,000 to 150,000 or so.
> There is either more to this story or one of the worst customer service stories in history.
Lithium makes up a tiny portion of the battery cost - Nickle makes up a much larger fraction of most BEV batteries, and removing the Nickle cost is most of why LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries are more affordable and starting to be the dominant battery in EVs.
Readit News
The battery began to wear out, so he replaced it with a non-Tesla, third party battery. This was later damaged, and Tesla refused to fix it, both because it had a non-Tesla battery inside it, but also because Finnish service centers are not equipped to repair US specification Teslas.
Why he decided to then blow it up... well that must be a Finnish thing. He did remove the batteries and motors first, though.
0: https://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/2008/04/we-have-ne...
1: https://youtu.be/yMQO8SuWDzk
I'm finding that it's still upwards of $10,000.
And don't get me wrong, our second car is Honda Pilot. It's OK, but it's no Tesla.
No, I won't be buying one of those, and I will be keeping my Honda as well.
The multiple views of the explosion will probably follow Tesla for the next decade, which they likely deserve.
Creating a car that inevitably becomes unusable, unless you essentially spend money enough to buy a mid sized sedan, that's genius from a market perspective, not so much for consumers.
The technology, repairability AND SUPPORTING INFRASTRUCTURE needs another THREE OR MORE decadeS to mature.
The biggest barrier to widespread use of EVs is the almost complete lack of supporting infrastructure. How many countries in the world have electrical grids robust enough to support daily charging of tens or hundreds of millions of EVs at the one time? How many countries of the world have sufficient, widespread charging stations that can handle hundreds of EVs per hour?
We have those facilities for ICEs today, all over the world, even in remote hard-to-reach off-grid locations. For EVS? Practically negligible.
Steve Jobs popularized this model with the iPhone, and now it's permeating throughout all industries. Everything is becoming a service with the means to tax all economic activity involving the product.
Consumers rent forever. Third parties pay for access. Monthly recurring revenue.
AT&T did the same rental scam until anti-trust shut 'em down.
Cost is.
Batteries degrade over a fixed amount of time, no matter the measures taken. A traditional, well maintained engine would last far longer than a battery, and the repair costs are usually amounted in a gradual manner, i.e. traditional engines don't usually require large investments to keep running, but EVs do.
In other words, not many people can afford EVs in the long term right now. Hopefully this will change, but the current state of things is what it is.
I would never in my life buy a car that can only be fixed in official company-licensed shops.
I have never gone to one of these overpriced shitholes in my entire car-owning life.
Every manufacturer is capable of making quality cars, you just have to choose the correct model.
This is different from the world of piston engines, where a talented machine shop (drawing on a century of evolved conventions in engine and vehicle design) can make replacement parts for basically anything.
[1] Potentially you're also complaining about price, because replacement batteries for a 2013 Model S are competing in a market with new parts for a car that retails for $140k. Replacing an EV battery is expensive for the same reason that EVs are expensive: the market wants more than the manufacturers can provide.
Dead Comment
This was a privately-imported US-spec Tesla with a non-OEM battery, being driven in a country in which almost all vehicles have special cold-weather packages. That is especially important on lithium batteries.
You can even bring your Mustang to a GM dealer.
My daily driver is a 2000 Jeep Wrangler. The rear axle was damaged when I bought it, and I replaced it with a Ford 8.8” axle assembly and fabricated my own adapters for it. A few weeks ago the parking brake stopped working correctly and I didn’t have time to fix it myself, so I dropped it off at a local dealership. They had no trouble repairing it, despite the fact that my Jeep came ORM with rear drum brakes and now has disc brakes on the rear.
Deleted Comment
The chemistry is only good for a number of charges. This is also affected by temperature, I'm sure that in a cold nation like Finland, the batteries wear out faster.
You can hide this by making redundant cells and with some intelligent software to wear-balance the cells. But eventually, the physical chemistry of the lithium ion just wears out. You can't stop physics.
There are mitigations steps you can take with an EV: don’t keep it fully charged for long, don’t supercharge too often, store it in a garage and keep it plugged in so it can regulate the pack temps without cycling it. One problem is I don’t know how you can evaluate the health of a pack when buying used.
None of those parts cost $22,000+ to repair though, like a Li-ion battery that's fundamental to the electric car.
We all know how to repair cylinders, pistons, or even engine-lift, transmission repairs or whatever. All those costs are well calculated and well known.
Unless maybe he bought it new and stored it without driving it for eight years, until the warranty had expired, and then ran into problems when he started driving it?
There is either more to this story or one of the worst customer service stories in history.
Coolest detonation sequence is the slomo that starts ~6:22.
No. It was a used car from 2013. The number of miles on the car (and therefore, the charge/discharge cycles) is not reported. I drive about 10,000 miles/year, others closer to 20,000. So the number of miles on that car is probably 80,000 to 150,000 or so.
> There is either more to this story or one of the worst customer service stories in history.
Tesla is well known to have bad customer service.
What's the modern cost comparison look these days between a hybrid and plug-in electric?
Lithium makes up a tiny portion of the battery cost - Nickle makes up a much larger fraction of most BEV batteries, and removing the Nickle cost is most of why LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries are more affordable and starting to be the dominant battery in EVs.