As far as I can tell from our own experience, it does not really matter to Tesla when it comes to excessive/ severe degradation.
All we have got back from them is...It’s normal and your battery is just fine...
We are in the process of filing a lawsuit against them concerning this degradation.
Other than that, the car is a good one.
All that follows is idle speculation. I am not an attorney. If I’ve got something wrong here, by all means point it out. Especially if you are an attorney.
How are you calculating the degredation?
Are you using pure numbers or miles calculated based on the driver’s past power consumption?
And if you are relying on the car computer readout, how accurate is it in reflecting the true value of the remaining battery capacity?
I’m not questioning what you say, just wondering whether the data is valid. I’m sure if you do go to court these things will come up.
Every time I’ve been to court it’s cost about $30,000 in attorney’s fees.
I think it might go like this:
Suppose your 90D is a $100,000 car. And suppose you have a bona fide 10% degredation and the upper limit of “normal” degredation is 5%. It seems your excess degredation, assuming you can prove it, would be worth about 5%. Now suppose the entire value of the car is in the battery pack. It isn’t but let’s assume it is. So we start with 5% of the car value. They’ll argue that you’ve had use of the car so the depreciated value should be used. A 90D goes for an average of $56,405 according to AV-CPO just now.
So 5% of $56,405 is $2820.
I don’t think the potential recovery is going to cover your attorney’s fees.
If Tesla has limited your ability to charge the car at superchargers, you might make a case for this inconvenience. If it takes 2 hours to charge instead of one and if you visit superchargers 50 times a year, then they might figure you’ve lost 50 hours. There are 2000 work hours in a work year (40h X 50 weeks). Suppose a person makes $100,000 per year. That’s about $66,000 after taxes. That person’s time would be worth about $33 per hour so the lost hours might have an after tax value of $1650. They’ll argue these weren’t work hours lost so they should be valued lower. Nonetheless we’ll use $1650.
So $2820 + $1650 is $4470.
And that’s if you win. You won’t, though. Tesla’s lawyers are better than the one you’ll hire. They’ve got more than one. They know the science, have intimate knowledge of the batteries, and point out flaws in your calculations and assumptions. They’ll find reasons for the degredation, maybe you kept the car charged to 100%. They’ll have access to all your charging data. You’ll have access to none of their data.
I do understand the frustration. I’m not sure the range you see on the computer reflects a genuine decrease in the battery pack capacity. Anyway, I just don’t see court as a reasonable approach. No lawyer is going to take the case based on a fraction of the award, so he’ll happily charge you his going rate. His retainer will be higher than the potential recovery.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t sue. People have lots of reasons for suing. I doubt you are going to compel Tesla to replace your battery, your car, and I don’t think you are going to recover your costs. It takes a long time. And it will consume you, you’ll spend your time and energy on this, preparing things, meeting with lawyers, worrying, concerned with dates and deadlines, instead of spending your time on other pursuits
.
