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Flat Battery? Certainly we can fix it, sir. That will be $45,000.
Oh my God! How would you feel if you buy a new supercar, let the battery go flat and then get charged $45,000 to replace it?
Hmm. Not happy, Jan.
But that’s what’s happened to some owners of the new Tesla Roadster Electric Supercar.
The car costs around $200,000 in Australia, is fully electric, with a range in a single charge of 400kms. and will accelerate to 100kph in under 4 secs. which sure is supercar territory.
In fairness the maker does make it clear that the battery must not reach full discharge and that there are numerous warning signals. Despite that some owners have had to face the unbelievable – ” I’ve got a brick!”, a totally immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed to the side of the road.
The owner is forced to pay around $45,000 to replace the entire battery – and possibly a lot more if the car fails far from its home base in the USA, like the unfortunate owner who suffered severe shipping delays when he imported his car to Japan and it arrived with a flat battery! It seems that neither Tesla’s new car warranty nor normal car insurance policies provide any protection for the unfortunate owner.
The full story, including Tesla’s response can be seen here
BUT HERE’S THE GOOD NEWS! That’s not symptomatic of electric cars, though keeping a charge in the battery is much like keeping oil in the engine or petrol in the tank for a normal car. The first experience that local buyers will have for an appoachably-priced electric car will probably be the Nissan Leaf, scheduled for sale this month. It has already been launched overseas and has had a launch event here, supported by a really interesting and award-winning ad campaign- World Without Petrol (and it’s worth a click through), which will probably be used for the public launch in Australia.
THE GOOD NEWS is that if the battery does go flat it can be easily re-charged. There’s also plenty of warning that it’s running out of petrol-sorry, electricity. Finally, in some markets Nissan also offer a free ‘pick up and tow’ service, although that hasn’t yet been confirmed here (and Nissan HO were unavailable for comment). We’ll be telling you more about the new Nissan Leaf shortly, but it offers around 100-120 km range on a single charge, and it is expected that it will not need specialist charging points (it should be able to be done at home). It will be sold at a premium price to its petrol competitors at around $51,000.
How Reliable Will My New Car Be?
We have written about car reliability surveys on our web site here.
We, and many others, are really annoyed that no such survey happens in Australia. So we are all still in the dark as far as Australian-made cars are concerned! No local insurance company or auto magazine seems to want to produce their own survey, and the local car companies refuse to make industry quality surveys public. Yet these very same companies benefit from millions of dollars showered upon them by the Australian Government – that’s our tax dollars – so don’t you think they have an obligation to divulge how well they make their cars with our money, and that we have a right to know before we buy? We’d like to know how you feel, so click below to write your views
Most Travelled Car
On the site here we wrote an article about the cars that have done the most kilometers in the world. We werent sure of the Australian record, so please let us know in the comments below if you know of a record breaker or near record breaker odometers.
Million Kilometer Car
Your Best Car Ever
In last month’s newsletter we asked our readers for their horror car experiences , and we were surprised at the response. We have shown that modern cars are much more reliable than their classic counterparts (here), but, it seems, even the most dependable makes have their ‘off’ days. The best story last month won a TomTom Live Sat/Nav, so we are offering the same prize this month for the best “Great Car’ experience.
You may recall last month that I had my own worst car experience with a Holden. Surprisingly that same make gave me my best car experience, too.
Ten years ago I bought a Holden Statesman. It was just over two years old, and had a mere 18,000kms on the clock, so I thought I was pretty safe. But it didn’t turn out that way – at least initially.
The engine had a strange knock on start up, so I took it to the dealer to investigate. The result was that they kept the car for two weeks whilst they replaced the engine. So I reluctantly thought I’d bought another lemon and was getting prepared to sell it.
And sell it I did, but 240,000kms and six years later! It’s hard to recall if I ever kept a car that long, as I simply didn’t know what to replace it with. Its only demand on my wallet was for petrol, regular servicing and tyres. That’s it- not an extra cent to spend and not a drop of oil between services.
So Holden gets both the winners and losers guernseys in my book.
What about you?
Do you have a stunning reliability story to tell? If so we’d like to hear from you, and there’s a Tom Tom sat/nav for the best answer.
Click on comments below.
Level 2, 9 Help Street