Well, I'm hearing in person and in various threads on this forum that people are starting to get a bit tired of being told they have to cough up $10k for any minor failure. If someone created a more modular, more serviceable PEM without waiting lists or delays for replacement, I am sure there would be some interest. And as had been said, everyone will face this failure in due course.
Ideally, a more modular car would be ideal, but given Tesla's founding need to create
something to prove the base technology and to wake up the industry to what an EV could be, modularity certainly had to take a back seat. Presumably the newer cars have much better serviceability than our beloved Roadster.
The reality is that we (both Tesla and the Roadster owners) need to deal with this. In my opinion, there are two components to the solution:
1. Tesla should create a transparent repair pipeline for each of the Tesla-unique subsystems. Battery, PEM, Motor/Inverter, under-dash and under-hood stuff (computers, air conditioning, etc). The key word here is
transparent. Price based on actual component-level repair, consistent with the not-a-profit-center charter for the Service Center part of the business. I suggest a pipeline, rather than a repair-in-place strategy, in order to shorten the cycle time for a repair, and to eliminate the unrealistic need for trained technicians at each Service Center. A faulty PEM, for example, would be diagnosed, swapped out with a refurbished unit, and billed based on an estimate of the what the actual component-level repair should be. The failed unit would be shipped back to the factory for the actual repair, and within limits, the bill might be revised up or down upon the final repair. Labor, unfortunately, is not something we can do much about, so we'd be on the hook for that. But I believe that's also to be expected.
The key point here is that we actually have this in place now, except for the net billing of the actual repair. Further, I have at least one real-life example of this working (my PEM repair from last year), where we (Factory, Service Center, and I) diagnosed and repaired my 1111, 1144, and 1146 errors (the burned fan motor connector contacts on the bottom of the 2.x PEM).
2. Publish an official list of the non-Tesla-sourced components, and how to swap them. These are the things that were stock on the heritage Lotus Elise, as well as stuff "borrowed" from other makes, or available from a non-Tesla catalog. We (the owners) have figured out a lot of this out on our own, but having an official cross-reference would help with locating parts, and prevent accidentally putting under-spec'd parts into service (this is both a safety and reliability requirement). This should enable a lot of the otherwise-mundane repairs to take place properly, independent of and augmenting the increasingly diffuse team of Roadster-trained service technicians. Note: much of this may already be in the restricted-availability service manuals; I haven't seen them! Obviously, they'd need to be made more broadly available.
The only area I think will be a problem would be for unique items that aren't repairable. Body panels, for example. Not sure what the right answer is... Perhaps open or license the CAD drawings?
Ok, so that's three things. Thoughts?
Greg.
