Hello all,
This is my first post. I have a 2013 Model S, salvage, recertified car. Owned it for a little over a year and wanted to get this information out there as I had a lot of difficulty finding anything. This means the car has no warranties. I finally got a straight answer from Tesla on this, battery and DU warranty are not valid. I was told a handful of times that I did still have battery and drive unit warranty, but after a little persistence finally got an "official" email and document from Tesla confirming it is not active.
Going back to the beginning of March, I got an error message. "Car needs service. May not restart". After my drive home (lucky I was on the way home when I got the error) and I parked the car, I tried searching online for potential troubleshooting. I went back out to the car, got in and saw "Systems shutting down". Everything went black. My local service center was in the middle of a move to a new location and I wasn't able to get in touch with them. I spoke to the phone technical help multiple times and tried to get information related to what my error codes were actually related to on the car. My first conversation lead me to believe I had a HV issue based on the technical support interpretation of the code. Also, the car going black was because the HV issue wasn't charging the 12V battery. Photo tech support told me about the charging posts behind the nose cone, so I hooked up a battery charger and let the car sit. Later that day I went out to the car and it was again powering up, and had no immediate error codes.
The next few days I spent discussion the warranty question, finally got a hold of the service center, discussed whether Tesla would tow the car for service (told they would not send a truck as it was out of warranty and I would need to call a towing service to get the car there, later was asked if they wanted me to have them send a tow truck and charge it to the repair service) and ultimately decided I would take the car in for service. At this point I was still under the assumption, based on my calls with phone tech support, that I did still have a batter/DU warranty. The last call I had, I was told, get the car there as soon as possible.
So, one day after work, I decided if the car would "start", I would try and drive it to the service center (the location they were moving from per the address phone tech support told me to go to). I arrived and was lucky to find a sales person still there, as all the service department had already moved to the new location. Finally someone showed up that was able to help with service and apologized about the confusion, explained the move, and said leave the car, then gave me a loaner. I was a little surprised by the loaner.
The next week, I got a call. There was a HV isolation issue. Water/moisture was in my drive unit and I was sent a picture of the orange cover on the inverter side of the DU with condensation on it. I was told I needed a new DU, $7,000 with taxes for parts and labor. I started to research the drive unit, learned there was coolant running though the unit and then asked the SC, water or coolant??? I was told water. I began going through the process of asking to buy the DU outright (obviously no), then can I buy a used DU and have Tesla push firmware (again no) and ultimately left with either Tesla does the work or the car will never drive again.
I kept driving the loaner, trying to exhaust all my options, ultimately getting a hold of someone on here. The people I needed to learn from for how to do the swap myself and get firmware pushed. At this point, Tesla was getting fairly angry that I was just drying their loaner without having given them the approval to fix the car, so I had to return the car. I probably had it 2, maybe 3 weeks. Throughout that time, I continued to try and connect to the car through the app and had limited success. So before I dropped the loaner off, I asked them to charge the 12v on the car, which the actually did. And even though they had told me the contactors wouldn't close in order to be able to charge the HV battery, the day I was set to pick it up, they started charging the car (thanks to the app notification I found out). Side note - I was also told the car wouldn't drive and charging the 12v would only allow the car to power up and that if I did drive it would be on 12v power alone HAHA.
Anyway, drove the car home, error message sporadically coming on the whole way but nothing noticeable on the drive. Car sat for a few days. Randomly checked app connection and even tried to drive a few times. No issues really except for the error code, and it was very random. Would come on then go off, come back on....
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I finally decided, due to the help from the members here and the posts, I'm going to take out this DU. Basically this is were it gets good, but I thought the long back story would be good for all those people that might run into similar issues and question. Got the drive unit out, pulled the inverter cover off and immediately saw a droplet of moisture. Got the cover fully off and sure enough, there was liquid. But it wasn't water, it's coolant. This leads to the question. Can you please off coolant from an inverter and what areas would/could be affected by the coolant. Thanks to some more off from a member on here, I learned that DU's can be saved and how to start cleaning the inverter. Also a potential way of testing the inverter to see if it's "fixed" before it goes back in, using a megohmmeter. That's where we stand right now, testing of the inverter and how to test the inverter.
There's plenty more to this story and pictures coming soon. This was all done on the garage floor without any fancy tools (except the megohmmeter which I just bought). Hoping this all works out, not just because I'll be able to drive the car again, but so other's know it's possible. Oh....and figuring out how to fix that coolant leak!!
Shane
This is my first post. I have a 2013 Model S, salvage, recertified car. Owned it for a little over a year and wanted to get this information out there as I had a lot of difficulty finding anything. This means the car has no warranties. I finally got a straight answer from Tesla on this, battery and DU warranty are not valid. I was told a handful of times that I did still have battery and drive unit warranty, but after a little persistence finally got an "official" email and document from Tesla confirming it is not active.
Going back to the beginning of March, I got an error message. "Car needs service. May not restart". After my drive home (lucky I was on the way home when I got the error) and I parked the car, I tried searching online for potential troubleshooting. I went back out to the car, got in and saw "Systems shutting down". Everything went black. My local service center was in the middle of a move to a new location and I wasn't able to get in touch with them. I spoke to the phone technical help multiple times and tried to get information related to what my error codes were actually related to on the car. My first conversation lead me to believe I had a HV issue based on the technical support interpretation of the code. Also, the car going black was because the HV issue wasn't charging the 12V battery. Photo tech support told me about the charging posts behind the nose cone, so I hooked up a battery charger and let the car sit. Later that day I went out to the car and it was again powering up, and had no immediate error codes.
The next few days I spent discussion the warranty question, finally got a hold of the service center, discussed whether Tesla would tow the car for service (told they would not send a truck as it was out of warranty and I would need to call a towing service to get the car there, later was asked if they wanted me to have them send a tow truck and charge it to the repair service) and ultimately decided I would take the car in for service. At this point I was still under the assumption, based on my calls with phone tech support, that I did still have a batter/DU warranty. The last call I had, I was told, get the car there as soon as possible.
So, one day after work, I decided if the car would "start", I would try and drive it to the service center (the location they were moving from per the address phone tech support told me to go to). I arrived and was lucky to find a sales person still there, as all the service department had already moved to the new location. Finally someone showed up that was able to help with service and apologized about the confusion, explained the move, and said leave the car, then gave me a loaner. I was a little surprised by the loaner.
The next week, I got a call. There was a HV isolation issue. Water/moisture was in my drive unit and I was sent a picture of the orange cover on the inverter side of the DU with condensation on it. I was told I needed a new DU, $7,000 with taxes for parts and labor. I started to research the drive unit, learned there was coolant running though the unit and then asked the SC, water or coolant??? I was told water. I began going through the process of asking to buy the DU outright (obviously no), then can I buy a used DU and have Tesla push firmware (again no) and ultimately left with either Tesla does the work or the car will never drive again.
I kept driving the loaner, trying to exhaust all my options, ultimately getting a hold of someone on here. The people I needed to learn from for how to do the swap myself and get firmware pushed. At this point, Tesla was getting fairly angry that I was just drying their loaner without having given them the approval to fix the car, so I had to return the car. I probably had it 2, maybe 3 weeks. Throughout that time, I continued to try and connect to the car through the app and had limited success. So before I dropped the loaner off, I asked them to charge the 12v on the car, which the actually did. And even though they had told me the contactors wouldn't close in order to be able to charge the HV battery, the day I was set to pick it up, they started charging the car (thanks to the app notification I found out). Side note - I was also told the car wouldn't drive and charging the 12v would only allow the car to power up and that if I did drive it would be on 12v power alone HAHA.
Anyway, drove the car home, error message sporadically coming on the whole way but nothing noticeable on the drive. Car sat for a few days. Randomly checked app connection and even tried to drive a few times. No issues really except for the error code, and it was very random. Would come on then go off, come back on....
--------------
I finally decided, due to the help from the members here and the posts, I'm going to take out this DU. Basically this is were it gets good, but I thought the long back story would be good for all those people that might run into similar issues and question. Got the drive unit out, pulled the inverter cover off and immediately saw a droplet of moisture. Got the cover fully off and sure enough, there was liquid. But it wasn't water, it's coolant. This leads to the question. Can you please off coolant from an inverter and what areas would/could be affected by the coolant. Thanks to some more off from a member on here, I learned that DU's can be saved and how to start cleaning the inverter. Also a potential way of testing the inverter to see if it's "fixed" before it goes back in, using a megohmmeter. That's where we stand right now, testing of the inverter and how to test the inverter.
There's plenty more to this story and pictures coming soon. This was all done on the garage floor without any fancy tools (except the megohmmeter which I just bought). Hoping this all works out, not just because I'll be able to drive the car again, but so other's know it's possible. Oh....and figuring out how to fix that coolant leak!!
Shane
