Our Tesla is sick
Jan. 9th, 2026 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nosrednaydujIt's possibly fatal. The battery compartment sprang a leak and water got in and corroded everything and it stopped running. It had an alarming message, when I turned it on it said "vehicle may not restart, service required". Fortunately I was on my way home, because in fact it did not restart.
Separately, and strangely coincidentally, it also had a coolant leak into the rear drive unit. Thinking that we should have been having regular maintenance on this car, but I didn't even know it had coolant. You kind of have to take the car apart in the front to even get at the coolant reservoir. With gas cars there is a standard schedule, but we didn't know about any schedule with this thing and we got it when it had 90,000 miles on it so any initial service would have been long past. It was pretty strange that both of these problems happened on the same day. There was a coolant low message, and I called Ken while I was driving saying "do I need to turn back home and take the train and be very late" (since it was a place that the leaf could not go) and he looked stuff up on the Tesla motors club website, and the considered opinion was that one should have it checked but it wasn't a fatal problem, and then on the way home there was this may not restart stuff.
So we currently have it at a non-Tesla third-party shop that does electric cars; the same place that did the heart transplant for our leaf three years ago. Unfortunately, they think the battery is not savable, and it will cost $15,000 to replace. If Tesla hadn't tanked, then the car would probably be worth enough to warrant making that repair. But it did, and the car is not worth that much anymore. And that's before we add the drivetrain repair which will also be thousands.
We might do it anyway if we can't find a replacement non-Tesla car that we like. We're going to look at a Subaru Solterra tomorrow.
Looking at the Solterra is going to cut into my protesting. So I'm just going to a thing in the morning at a nearby town rather than trucking into Boston, because the place that has the Solterra is only open 10-2. It's close enough to bicycle, and since the point is to find out if our bicycles go in the back of it, that's our plan. The Solterra costs $25,000 and is 8 years newer. We saw some for as little as $21,000.
Meanwhile we are driving a friend's Prius when we need to go somewhere the leaf can't do.
Separately, and strangely coincidentally, it also had a coolant leak into the rear drive unit. Thinking that we should have been having regular maintenance on this car, but I didn't even know it had coolant. You kind of have to take the car apart in the front to even get at the coolant reservoir. With gas cars there is a standard schedule, but we didn't know about any schedule with this thing and we got it when it had 90,000 miles on it so any initial service would have been long past. It was pretty strange that both of these problems happened on the same day. There was a coolant low message, and I called Ken while I was driving saying "do I need to turn back home and take the train and be very late" (since it was a place that the leaf could not go) and he looked stuff up on the Tesla motors club website, and the considered opinion was that one should have it checked but it wasn't a fatal problem, and then on the way home there was this may not restart stuff.
So we currently have it at a non-Tesla third-party shop that does electric cars; the same place that did the heart transplant for our leaf three years ago. Unfortunately, they think the battery is not savable, and it will cost $15,000 to replace. If Tesla hadn't tanked, then the car would probably be worth enough to warrant making that repair. But it did, and the car is not worth that much anymore. And that's before we add the drivetrain repair which will also be thousands.
We might do it anyway if we can't find a replacement non-Tesla car that we like. We're going to look at a Subaru Solterra tomorrow.
Looking at the Solterra is going to cut into my protesting. So I'm just going to a thing in the morning at a nearby town rather than trucking into Boston, because the place that has the Solterra is only open 10-2. It's close enough to bicycle, and since the point is to find out if our bicycles go in the back of it, that's our plan. The Solterra costs $25,000 and is 8 years newer. We saw some for as little as $21,000.
Meanwhile we are driving a friend's Prius when we need to go somewhere the leaf can't do.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-10 12:21 pm (UTC)https://xkcd.com/3192/