Tesla bills customer $21000 for driving through the rain while they're still in warranty🤦

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AI Summary

In this video Louis discusses a Tesla Model Y owner in Scotland facing a $21,000 repair bill after water damaged the car's battery during rain, despite no extreme driving conditions. The presenter critiques modern industries, including automakers like Tesla and tech companies like Apple, for prioritizing full component replacements over cost-effective, component-level repairs. He argues this trend discourages problem-solving skills, inflates costs for consumers, and reflects a broader cultural shift away from troubleshooting and ingenuity.

Key points include:

1. Unjustified Costs: High repair bills (e.g., $5,000 Ford taillight replacements) highlight systemic issues with corporate repair practices.
2. Design Flaws: Vehicles and devices often lack durability for everyday use (e.g., cars failing in rain, MacBooks susceptible to humidity).
3. Societal Impact: Over-reliance on replacements stifles innovation and resourcefulness, critical for addressing real-world challenges.
4. Call for Balance: Advocates for a middle ground—safe, sustainable repairs without excessive costs—emphasizing the environmental and economic benefits of fixing rather than replacing.

AI Transcription

Hey everybody, how's it going? I hope you're having a lovely day.

Today, I would like to discuss a story about a major automaker who is gonna be charging one of their customers over 21,000 US dollars for the crime of driving their car while it was raining.

There is an issue that's going on nowadays and it's not just with one automaker and dare I say it is not just with one industry where for the most part, we're not interested in actually opening things up anymore. We don't care to understand how things work. We don't care about fixing the actual problem with what we purchase. What we do is we just replace everything.

And if things continue the way they are, if you're having an issue with the oil in your car, well, I guess it's time for a new car. 30 to 50 years ago, we had some level of comfort with opening something up, troubleshooting, diagnosing, figuring out what the problem is and actually fixing it in a cost-effective, economically viable way.

But now more and more, whether we are talking about a laptop where you are gonna be billed over $1,800 to replace everything inside of a $1,300 device when the only thing it needs is replace screen cable or we are talking about a Ford F-150 where you're gonna get charged over $5,000 for nothing other than a bad taillight. The issue that we have here is nobody seems to care about fixing the actual problems with devices anymore.

And this is an excellent example. This comes here from Scotland with the Tesla Model Y. It says a Scottish couple is facing a $33,000 repair bill, which is about $17,000 in Brexit dollars and $21,000 in freedom dollars over here. So they left home to enjoy dinner on October 7th and arrived at the restaurant with no issue. But say their electric car wouldn't start once they returned to the vehicle around 10 p.m.

The couple alleged it took nearly five hours for Tesla's roadside assistance to tow the car to a dealership, which by the way, if you're used to using Tesla service, waiting five hours to actually get services, by their standards, sadly not bad.

After the car was inspected, the couple was told that the battery was damaged due to water ingress. And a replacement will cost $17,000 Brexit dollars, which is about $33,000 Scottish dollars or $21,000 freedom dollars, more than the third of a price of the SUV. That's despite the couple denying having driven it through any huge puddles or anything like that, let alone submerging it underwater.

Now, I'm just gonna throw this in there as somebody who has run a liquid damage repair business for 15 years. In the words of Dr. Gregory House, lovely show on Fox for a long period of time, everybody lies. 99% of the people that say they've never spilled water on something are just full of shit. You open the device, it smells like, you know, coconut flavored coffee, and there's like brown liquid residue, and you ask them, you know, where do you usually use your laptop? They tell you Starbucks, and they tell you that they didn't spill anything on it. Virtually everybody lies.

That being said, this is an automobile. Automobiles are driven outside. It rains outside, and sometimes there are roads where the water may be up one or two or three or four inches during a serious storm. And if you have engineered a vehicle that costs over $50,000, that cannot drive in the rain, that is a serious problem.

It is already enough of a meme that in 2023, MacBooks have the same amount of liquid resistance that they did back in 2008. It is a meme that if there is humidity that enters a MacBook, that for four years running, they have put the 51 volt rail for LCD backlight right next to a 1.7 volt rail for EDP video signal that goes directly to the CPU, so that when it's humid, you get 51 volts zapping your CPU.

But that is a MacBook. And while it is unacceptable for a MacBook to be made like that, a $2,000 MacBook is different than a $50,000 vehicle. We tend to expect our vehicles to have some sort of liquid resistance, but more importantly, if that liquid resistance fails, and it fails in a part that costs $21,000, we expect that you actually try to fix the $21,000 part rather than simply swap it out with a new one.

After finally getting to speak to a manager, he told me that the battery had water in it due to the fact that the weather in Scotland had been so bad. That was the issue. They said, and I quote, "it's not necessarily my fault, but it's not Tesla's to pay under warranty."

So he was under warranty with this vehicle, and he did drive it the way that a normal person would drive a vehicle. Yeah, I've driven my car in the rain. You've probably driven your car in the rain, dare I say it? You may have driven your car through a storm. You don't expect the water to destroy the vehicle.

He reminded me that there was a yellow weather warning in some parts of Scotland, one of the owners told Edenberg Live. If I had known the customer service would be so bad, I'm not sure I would have bothered buying the car. Do they know that we're in Scotland, that weather was not abnormal for living here?

And again, there's two issues here at play. The first is the idea that you're essentially building a product that is just fundamentally not built for the rigors of daily average everyday life that is going to be seen by the average driver. And secondly is the complete lack of component level repair.

This again really does mirror the way that Apple does business, and it also is mirroring the way that many other companies do business. And again, if you're somebody that is going to look at the electric car and go look at that liberal latte drinking sissy driving his Tesla, lo-lo-lo-lo-lo, you and your Ford F-150 shut up.

Look, it's the same shit. You over here with your Ford F-150 or F-350 diesel, turbo pro, whatever the hell that's rolling coal on a Tesla are paying $5,000 when your tail light goes out. Because here's the thing that's really important to get across to everybody watching this video.

There are people in the next generation, sadly, that genuinely believe that repair is stupid. It is a waste of time. And dare I say, I'd have even heard people from Gen Z say crap like, you must be poor if you care about this. Why bother?

Aside, aside from how ridiculous that is, this is going to be bad just for this, the fundamental ingenuity of our country. People who are open to taking apart a $21,000 battery and figuring out, ah, there's a corroded connector. Let's replace the corroded connector instead of replacing a $21,000 part are not only gonna be saving the customer money, but in the process of using that problem solving part of their brain, they are learning how to solve problems.

They are becoming more resourceful. They are becoming more intelligent. They are learning and training their brain to solve real world problems, which is exactly what you want from your population if you want them to be better at solving the many, many, many real world problems that we are facing right now, and that we will face into the future.

We are literally dumbing ourselves down in the process of accepting this into our culture. And it's something that needs to be fought everywhere, not just with Tesla, not just with cars, not just with Apple, with every company that seeks to do this because rest assured, as soon as one company starts doing this, every company does this.

It doesn't matter whether you have your electric car or your MAGA truck, at the end of the day, every company is doing the same thing. Again, as I go over in this video, it is infuriating. When you have a laptop that goes for $1,300, the manufacturer tells you it will be $1,800 to fix. And the only issue with it is a screen cable, which you can replace. And if you don't wanna replace the screen cable, you can just bend the pin.

There's this idea, and I understand, I know what I'm gonna see in my comments. What if the battery explodes? What if they open it? Who takes liability for this, that, and the other? And I understand that. I'm not saying that every single lithium ion battery should be fixed.

I am saying that a company charging more than $50,000 for a car should make a car that can go through the fucking rain. That's a separate issue altogether. But when it comes to fixing that battery, I'm not suggesting that every battery be fixed.

In my business, some devices are repairable, some are questionable, and some we open up and go, nope, not even trying on that one, because I know that there's just such a high chance of this not working again two weeks after I fix it, that I'm not gonna waste my time or the customer's time just to try to make a buck.

But that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is whole cloth issue with this part. The manual says, replace assembly, $21K bill for you. It doesn't matter what is actually wrong with this battery. They don't state what's wrong with the battery. They don't state whether the issue is, again, a connector and everything else is fine, or if every single lithium ion cell in that battery is completely corroded, expanding, and about to explode and go on fire.

Simple problem or large problem, it doesn't matter. And I know, again, safety is a concern. It genuinely is. But you have to understand that going in the other direction completely is ridiculous. Having a $50,000 car that goes through the rain that has a $21,000 repair bill, because our culture has shifted so far from the direction of having ingenuity, getting our hands dirty, opening things up, and figuring out what's wrong with it is not the answer either.

Going from one extreme to the other extreme doesn't help us. We need to find a healthy medium and a healthy middle. We have a false dichotomy where people think that either A, you are safe, but your base repair bill is $21,000, or B, every repair is gonna set your car on fire and be horribly done, and it will be cheap.

There is a cost, and when people mention that safety is important and the repairs being done properly is important, as somebody who cares about the quality of the repairs that I do and cares about maintaining a 4.9 to five-star rating on Google Maps over a period of 15 years, I care.

At the same time, it bothers me when people pretend that there is no societal cost here. If we wanted to make every single car 100% safe, I'm sure that we could do that by putting more effort into the manufacturing process and making every single car $500,000.

Everything that we do in the real world involves trade-offs. If you get 0.1% more safety, but your bill goes from $400 to $21,000 when you drive through the rain, I would argue that that is a bad trade-off for society as a whole, and we have to remember that calculating these trade-offs is important rather than just wallowing it off by saying, I can't believe that you would consider fixing a battery, how would you know they're dangerous?

Driving a car is dangerous. Over 30,000 people every single year die in this country driving a car, regardless of whether or not there was an issue with their repair. And what I respect about people like Rich Rebuilds, I'll link his channel down below, it's an exceptional channel, is that when he does repairs on these vehicles, he tries to find the happy medium.

He is not gonna let a vehicle out of his shop that looks like it's gonna go on fire 10 minutes after he fixes it, and I respect that. But simultaneously, he's also not going to trash his $17,000 part because of an issue with a grommet or something like that, and that is what I highly respect about him, his channel is ethos, and that's what I'm trying to get people to understand again with what I'm doing with this channel, it's a bowl for this to be the default.

One of the things that I hope I accomplished when I did produce those 1,000 board repair videos was awakening in people's minds this idea that the unfixable can be fixable, getting people to think to themselves, I kinda wanna open that up and figure it out. I may not win, I may not get it to work, but if this idiot can do it on screen, then so can I.

I want to bring about a renaissance in component level troubleshooting, in people actually trying to solve problems rather than just replacing entire assemblies and giving up. That is what actually makes the world green, not claiming that you're green because you have some little fucking leaf on your website or a sustainability climate report that you release or because your car is run off of a battery instead of gas.

Every single company nowadays green washes the crap out of everything they do, and it's just tiring. It's tiring to read these nonsensical blurbs from corporate hypocrites. Whether it's a company like Tesla or Ford claiming they are green when they charge you $21,000 for driving through the rain or $5,000 to replace a tail light or a job ad that will say something like, we believe in the power of a truly diverse and inclusive workforce that requires you to have a bachelor's degree to get past the robot inside the computer that runs the ATS system because there's nothing more inclusive than requiring people put themselves in $50,000 of debt as a prerequisite to getting a basic-ass job that pays $40,000 a year.

You don't care about a diverse and inclusive workforce, your entire hiring system is created by bigots and then outsourced to AI so that you don't even have to take responsibility or accountability for your hiring system being bigoted. The AI did it.

It's tiring to read this garbage over and over again, and more importantly, it's even more tiring that we as a culture seem to have just become complacent and accept that this is the norm. What I want all of you to do is push back at every single instance, do not accept it as the norm from others or in your own life.

Be open to this, not all the time. You're not gonna be able to fix everything, you're not gonna be able to open everything, and I wouldn't even suggest that you open everything. All I wanna do is plant a seed. Consider trying to solve these types of problems at component level whenever you can. Just think about it. You don't have to do it every single time.

In my opinion, it's completely unacceptable for this to be the default, and I'm curious what you have to say. Let me know what you think in the comments down below.

Before I end the video, I'd like to introduce you to my new pet, Foxy. Foxy is a fox that protects my fish in my backyard from herons. I'm not allowed to do anything to the heron. I've looked this up. I can't even chase the heron with a broom. If I chased the heron with a broom, that could be construed as me endangering an endangered species and get me in trouble.

So I don't do anything to the heron. I say nothing to the heron. If I do anything to the heron that tries to eat my fish on my property, I'm screwed. However, if Foxy just so happens to defend my fishy, eh, what are they gonna do, write him a ticket, put him in jail for not paying his taxes?

So I've come to enjoy Foxy's company as have the fish. When the heron comes by and he looks at the fish as if he is going to eat them, Foxy looks at the heron as if he's gonna eat the heron. And that tells the heron that he should go the fuck away. Everybody wins.

That's it for today. And as always, I hope you learned something. I'll see you all in the next video.