Here's the big problem, you see this message, it says maximum battery charge level reduced and when i plug in this car, it only lets me charge up to 50 miles before it cuts itself off and unfortunately, since i'm out of warranty according to the searches battery replacement On these cars, seventeen thousand dollars twenty thousand dollars, so it completely and mechanically totals out the car rich. Please please, please, please help me despite uh our last meeting, not being on the best of circumstances uncle rich. Please help me uncle rich you're. My only hope welcome to movies garage, the dumbest automotive channel in all of youtube, and i am back in the tesla game.

With this 2013 tesla model s performance. I purchased this for the next card, truck that we're filming in a couple of months and unfortunately well it completely bricked on me, but tesla is really a big deal right now. Their model s plaid. This model is now the fastest production car in the world.

A 0 to 60 of 2 seconds with an asterisk, and this is well the tesla model, s plaid great, great, great, great granddaddy right here. The first performance variant of the tesla model s - and i was really excited to get it and actually had a few great weeks with it and then something well horrifically failed on this car and it's something that should be easily fixable. But it's not at least with tesla. Now i know you all are following or you've at least seen all of my complaints in recent months about the explosion in car values.

Basically, anything cool has shot way up in value, but there are some exceptions and one of them is this: if you recall the last tesla i bought in 2018 was the cheapest tesla model s in the usa and i paid 33 500 for it. A thousand over the asking price, so i could actually secure it, and that was for an 85 model that wasn't a performance, a 2012, a very early car and it was still under its battery and drivetrain warranty at the time that was eight years now. They have depreciated quite a bit and i think that's because of the tesla model - 3., a new, cheaper tesla with a much longer range than these original teslas up to 400 miles or so versus these 230 with the 85 kilowatt battery. So it kind of forced these cars down even more, where i paid thousands and thousands and thousands less for the slightly newer way.

Cooler performance variant of the model - s the more luxurious big, daddy tesla. Now this one is slightly out of warranty, which is a big issue we'll get to in a second. But if you buy a later sold 2013 or a 2014, you can buy them with some confidence of a warranty, and there are plenty of examples for under 30 000. So now you can get the model s that elon said: wouldn't depreciate.

This cost ninety thousand dollars new uh for under thirty thousand dollars pretty easily, and it is a fantastic deal and it felt like a fantastic deal for me for a couple of weeks because of how cool it is. It has absolutely everything, unlike the old one, that i had and the reason why i got rid of the old one really wasn't because of me. It was my wife's daily driver. She was my fiance at the time and we didn't have this big garage, so the car had to sit outside and she really didn't like messing with the charging thing.

Even though i had a plug installed at the old house, the the quicker charge, whatever volt plug it, had to have a long extension cord to go outside and get plugged in, and the fact that it just sat outside meant the battery was draining to keep all The electronics and the batteries cool so if you're outside and it's 100 degrees outside the car, can lose like 10 miles or more per day, just keeping all of the electronics cool. So she would drive to work and it would lose battery power at work. Drive home sitting the driveway, it would lose power, it almost went completely dead a couple of times because we were out of town and the charge got really low, and it was just too inconvenient for her for a daily commute, even though it meant zero cost and Fuel and now she drives a big, thirsty range rover for me, i really like the idea of having an electric car around to to take the kids to school, to just boink around town and since i have plenty of other things to drive, i'm not tied to One car, if i'm stuck wanting to take a long road trip or something else so a tesla, was on the radar for me. Maybe a model x, the cheapest one in the usa, but they're still pretty expensive, the falcon-doored suvs and since there's the occasion to do this with car trek, six five is not quite out yet it'll be out in a month, but the next one we're going to Film comes out in december, it'll be with this car.

The theme i'll keep secret. The price i paid will keep secret, but it'll make sense why i got this tesla other than an excuse for me to own one, but unfortunately well it's not working, but more on that in a bit before we dive into this 20 000 issue. That would mechanically total this tesla if i were taking it to the tesla dealer and it's an issue not just with tesla, but with all hybrid and electric car manufacturers. I'd like to thank auto tempest for sponsoring this video and car trek.

Auto tempest, as you know, is the best way to search for a used car nationwide. If you're looking for a used tesla, you want to cast a wide net and you can find them all over the country using every single major listing site and putting it on one source. One place auto tempest auto tempest saves you so much time searching for cars, especially if you're looking for something specific say. You want something with a manual transmission or a particular trim, or a particular color, so many options, auto tempest has just like all the major listing sites, except it combines it all in one place: you're not putting the same thing in over and over and over again Using auto tempest is also really fun.

The active shopping for cars is just a fun thing to do that. I do every day and you doing that on auto tip is clicking the link below make scooby's garage and car trek possible so searching for cars. A very fun thing makes this and car trek possible. So why not do it? Just click below support me and my general sponsors and car trick, so i was able to cheat a little bit because i still have access to dealer, wholesale sources and auctions and this one's being sold by carvana carvana sells a lot of used, teslas and they're buying A lot of cars right now, so their wholesale is very, very active.

And when i saw this well, i thought that's pretty cool because it's performance and very cheap. It has a minor accident on the carfax 97 000 miles, but it's a performance model with every single option, obviously modified. Quite a bit too. You can see the smoked headlights, i'm not a big fan of the highly illegal window, tint that you cannot see inside.

I'm going to have to remove that or face wrap from the police, but inside you can see very, very cool tidy interior in nice shape. The red piping is really sharp and well other than one uh error message, which is actually a very, very bad error message. Everything in here is working great, so this car has the big sunroof, which is very, very cool, and it even has a pretty rare option back here for the model s. It has a third row seat that folds away.

It's this. This thing right here: oh okay, that's really hard to do one-handed and i just jammed it come on yeah there. It is the rear facing third row seat, which is a full three point, harness like a car seat or a racing seat, and they even put reinforcements in the bumper for extra safety when you option the third row really cool, also a sport mesh, which is nice Since uh kids will inevitably get it dirty, but everything in this car works and it was actually working. Everything for a couple of weeks showed up.

I charged it at the supercharger, then charged it up to full range and it was beautiful for the first two weeks or a few hundred miles. Everything in here works even little gimmicky stuff see. I can even play centipede on this thing, and actually this car's system is way less glitchy than the old model. S that i had.

It hasn't had any hiccups, any odd reboots or anything like that. It's all working fantastically and the power was fantastic too not uh. Two seconds: zero to sixty, like the plaid, but still four seconds. Oh you just heard the pop.

That's the air suspension, which this thing also has so the active suspension that you can raise and lower i'm getting a little busy with the centipede here. But anyway. This thing had every single option, probably closer to a hundred thousand dollars new the big wheels, and i got it for well a small small fraction of that. Unfortunately, uh things went terribly terribly wrong well about a week ago.

Yes, let's hop back in and go for a drive and well here's the big problem. You see this message, it says maximum battery charge level reduced and when i plug in this car it only lets me charge up 50 miles before it cuts itself off. So it's thinking there is something wrong with the battery and well. There, probably is it's probably right about a year ago, tesla did an over-the-air update on the model s's and they called it batterygate, because so many batteries failed as a result of this update, i'm not sure what it was close.

The sunroof, i'm not sure what the details were, but some update made the batteries throw a lot more error messages and there were a lot more warranty replacements. But people really didn't complain very much because it happened when teslas were all still under that eight-year battery warranty. So right at the end of their warranty, they were getting brand new batteries, so they were very, very happy, but it still took out a lot of packs. Unfortunately, this car was sold in march of 2013, which makes it eight years and uh four months or something like that.

So we are four months out of the battery warranty and i am on my own, but despite the battery having a diminished charge capacity, it does not have diminished performance, it still has all the performance and man. Is it a big difference from my old 2012 tesla? A lot more um from the air suspension is absolutely wonderful. You definitely want to get one of these with the air suspension. It is way better.

The acceleration is still instant, shaming. It's just just insane performance out of these things, just a little over four seconds to 60 and that instant electric torque is just so much fun. It's what i missed most when i got rid of the tesla. Was this instant electric torque? This puts you back in the seat and since this is a real drive car, as you heard uh the tires got loose super already 60..

I need to slow down, but now we have full out. Oh full big range anxiety because, instead of having 230 miles of max range, we only have 50, which doesn't get you very far now. This is what leads to the big flaw that tesla and other car manufacturers have. Unfortunately, it's it's with these battery packs and how unwilling they are to service them and how screwed i thought i was so.

Why is this tesla not allowing a full charge? Well, really, i don't know exactly, but the google searches were not very encouraging. Basically, when this message popped up for everybody, it meant battery replacement, there's something wrong with the battery. It's limiting charge to either keep the car from exploding or causing damage to the battery, even though it needs to be replaced, i'm not sure, but every single time it seems to have resulted in either a software update that later led to a battery change or just A battery change, and unfortunately, since i'm out of warranty according to the searches battery replacement on these cars, 17, 000., 20, 000. So it completely and mechanically, totals out the car.

Now i could check with a tesla service center and make sure that is what it is. But it seems fairly certain, but that's a big issue with tesla in wichita kansas. There is no tesla service facility. The closest ones are three hours away the mobile service.

When i put it in the app they wouldn't even come out with a mobile tech to check the battery. They want me to take it to a facility, but with 50 miles of range, that's a quite difficult. So i was in a bad bad way, because, basically, the cost to repair this car is almost what i i paid for it. So i thought i was totally screwed until i realized well, i have a friend, rich rebuilds and i got on my knees.

Electrified garage went rich, please please, please, please help me and well, despite uh, our last meeting, not being on the best of circumstances. He agreed to help me out and put me in touch with one of his techs chris in ocala florida. He has three locations now for electrified garage he's much smarter than me, obviously, rather than taking a car to a mechanic to do everything he's opened up mechanic shops that he owns across the country and makes money on much more than videos. He's he's an absolutely brilliant man, unlike me, and i am sucking up to him because i do want this just to be fixed but uh his tech.

Chris said it is a very common problem and some little wire can come loose on a module on one of the bricks. I think the battery has three separate bricks, throws everything out of balance and it can be fixed and he said the cost on it could be as low as a thousand dollars. My big expense will be shipping it down to florida and back just to fix it. So tesla seventeen thousand twenty thousand dollars just replace a battery or fix the battery, and that's the big issue that i have with tesla, not just tesla, though any electric or hybrid manufacturer is the same with toyota priuses.

If there's an error with the toyota prius hybrid battery, even the old ones, back in the day, they just replaced it and it was five thousand dollars, even though they can be fixed. As i showed in a video from many moons ago, they can be fixed for a small fraction of the price. Pretty much every automaker does not want to get inside of the batteries to repair them. This thing has like 7 000 battery cells in it lithium-ion little cells that look like kind of like regular batteries, and if one of them fails, you replace the entire battery pack, when you can replace that little cell and rebalance the batteries put everything back in and It all will work fine, thankfully, there's garages like rich electrified, garage and others that are doing this, so you can actually fix your tesla.

It's not dead the moment the battery fails, but as we march towards the future, and if it is an all-electric future within the next 10 or 20 years, we really really really need to change our thought patterns when it comes to how we repair electric vehicles - and It's not just the enormous cost of the battery pack, the cost to replace it. That is a big issue. I know elon is trying to get those costs down, but right now it is financially crippling for most people to have to spend 17 20 dollars for a replacement battery. It just causes ones like these to just be mechanically totaled they're parts, cars, and it's like the toyota prius, which has about 10 years before the hybrid battery pack, fails usually on average, from what i'm seeing at auction.

That's the case with all electric vehicles. That just means depreciation is going to be worthless in 10 years, so you really really want to address that, but it's not just the financial aspect of owners losing a bunch of money and appreciation. It's also such a waste, if you think about all the resources that goes in to make these batteries the cost of them. I know they all get recycled and reused and i'm sure nothing really gets thrown away when they replace a battery pack, but still how wasteful to replace something that rich and his crews say could be caused by simply a wire coming loose a module that could be Replaced and then you balance the batteries and they will all work.

Fine again, it just seems like an enormous waste to me, but i am very thankful that uh this tesla will be back on the road soon, so i'll be shipping it to florida as soon as possible and uncle rich. Please help me uncle rich you're. My only hope, please and also click below auto tempest search for cars pays for repairs pays for card trick. Thank you for watching it's carmageddon july it broke in july.

I told you.