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Model 3 - All wet and muddy [Salvage - Flood damaged vehicle]

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Hi team,

After going through a heap of threads I have decided to post my journey. Hopefully with the help of multiple minds and experience/expertise I will succeed in the end!

I acquired this 2021 Tesla Model 3 Standard range plus (single motor) here in New Zealand after a cyclone. The car was basically under water(fresh) for some time, potentially a few hours to a day. With the huge amounts of rain also came huge amounts of silt.
The vehicle sat for approx 3months as insurance did their thing.

Now feel free to follow along and dont be shy to chip in.
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My first instinct when electric things get wet is to put them in a bag of rice, but I don't think they make one big enough in this case. Looks like a good project to do though. (I do wonder if it's possible to get a right-hand drive Tesla shipped to the states. I love right-hand drives. I would need the interior to be cleaner though.)

 
You’re on the right track, before doing any more powering up/attending to move, I would be depowering- and making HV safe, then removing modules and plugs and inspecting for water ingress. Anything with water in it is likely not going to be able to be saved at this point- the mineral deposits in the water will have destroyed the sensitive electronics. Also, don’t forget the gear oil in the motors/gearboxes. Drain and check for water ingress. I’m interested to see what it looks like under the penthouse (silver cover which is under the rear seat) that’s where most of the battery/drivetrain electronics are located, such as the DC/DC converter, etc. Be safe- electricity can kill you, and it’ll hurt the entire time you’re dying, but also- have fun! Cool project for sure.
 
If its fresh water, some of the electronics can be saved if not burned up.
Depends how the power went down. You can soak printed circuit in solvent
and use compressed air to dry them. In the old days we saved many a TV, even with
coke poured into them, and thats just nasty.
 
Definitely brave for taking on a project like this! i'd never get such a dirty car myself n i love restoring salvage cars :)
I would open every electronic unit n check for water/corrosion before powering on for sure.
I opened n dried my HV on my X but it wasn't flooded, just got wet from driving...
First open the penthouse (under rear seat) like other poster said n see how bad/wet it is then u can drop the pack n open/dry it...
Could also get lucky n maybe it stayed dry...
 
You’re on the right track, before doing any more powering up/attending to move, I would be depowering- and making HV safe, then removing modules and plugs and inspecting for water ingress. Anything with water in it is likely not going to be able to be saved at this point- the mineral deposits in the water will have destroyed the sensitive electronics. Also, don’t forget the gear oil in the motors/gearboxes. Drain and check for water ingress. I’m interested to see what it looks like under the penthouse (silver cover which is under the rear seat) that’s where most of the battery/drivetrain electronics are located, such as the DC/DC converter, etc. Be safe- electricity can kill you, and it’ll hurt the entire time you’re dying, but also- have fun! Cool project for sure.
Thanks for some direction. It is always welcomed!
Do you have a link to the process of depowering the HV and checking? I would rather have a step by step path to follow, then making my own assumptions based on snippets of other information I have found.
 
If its fresh water, some of the electronics can be saved if not burned up.
Depends how the power went down. You can soak printed circuit in solvent
and use compressed air to dry them. In the old days we saved many a TV, even with
coke poured into them, and thats just nasty.
The water was definitely fresh. The car was off at the time it was flooded. The first attempt to power on was me after 3 months of sitting. That's when I cooked the vcfront.
Any particular solvent you found that worked better then others?
 
Speaking as a person who would, as part of $DAY_JOB, get back broken/burned/destroyed electronic equipment from the field, and then determine if it was to be junked or not, you've got some problems here.

First off: Fresh water or not, that's a lot of silt. And it likely got into everything electronic. And then things are going to go downhill from there. First, the bad news:

Silt contains things like salts (Yes, NaCl, but also every-other-positive-ion plus a-negative-ion known to man.) Most of these are hydroscopic; that is, given water vapor, they attract water molecules and form, well, a conductive slurry.

That conductive slurry means that dissimilar metals (copper, tin, zinc, iron, you name it) are going to trade ions back and forth and, well, corrode. We're not just talking the circuit boards, now: Individual components, be they resistors, capacitors, inductors, and all that jazz are going to be susceptible to this. So, if you were thinking that this beast of yours, after repair, might last, say, five years, you might want to think again.

Now, say one had something that got good and proper dunked in fresh water, sans mud. Well... that's not so bad. Water, as a rule, does have $RANDOM_JUNK dissolved in it, but, heck, circuit boards get washed with water.. albeit it, deionized water.

There's a heck of a lot of electronics in a Tesla. Computers, touch screens, you name it. I'm thinking about all that silt. IF you took every single blamed electronic control box out of there, washed the heck out of them with deionized water and really removed all residues, there might be a chance. But.. a coil, or transistor, with small spaces under the components and/or in the component, and you blasting away with a high-pressure spray, trying to get all that stuff out of the teensy tiny spaces and such.. Admittedly, any teeny tiny cracks that let teeny tiny silt particles in might let those teeny tiny particles back out again.. I'm sorry, I can't see where This Is Going To Work.

It gets stupider. My old Chief Petty Office in Electronics A school informed the class one say, "90% of your problems are going to be in the wires." He was dead right. So, think about all those connectors in the wiring harness. Not just in the mated ones, where there's rubber gaskets to keep moisture out, but on the other side of the connector. There's likely been silt & water intrusion in there, too. Urgle. I guess taking out all the wiring harnesses, left, right, and center, and blasting away to get all the salts in the silt out of the wires and connectors would be in order. OK: I know that Tesla's big on minimizing the amount of junk that goes into a car, but I'm a-thinking that we're talking at least a mile, and possibly as much as five miles, of wiring harness in that car. It'll all have to be cleaned.

I'm somewhat less worried, I guess, about stuff like the actual drive train, hoses, pipes, cooling systems, and that kind of thing. Probably because I'm a EE and ignorant of all that mechanical engineering stuff. But, as a EE, we work with things that are reactive: That is, metals. With the possible exception of gold nuggets, there's No Such Thing as Naked Metal in nature: Any such has been corroded to dirt over the eons and Nature, given a chance, will do that to stuff like copper and all those other metals I mentioned above.

I mean.. there are those scroll wheels in the steering wheel. Those are electric switches of some kind. The switches are in little plastic boxes that likely don't come apart. They're inside the passenger compartment where, well, large amounts of liquid weren't exactly expected, although I'll give you a splashed can of soda as a possibility. (The electrics in the wheels for ABS brake components and such probably are sealed aggressively against water intrusion.)

I really, really wish you hadn't tried turning the car on. With all that conductive slurry everywhere high voltage electronics literally got shorted out, hence the burning electronics smell. I suspect that the inverter electronics that chargers the battery are likely toast at this stage.

I guess.. Suppose you got one, maybe two Teslas of the correct vintage and type sitting in a junkyard after being totalled in some non-water related accident. You might then be able to mine that one or those two cars for dry components for your resurrection bid. But cars end up in junkyards like that so the junkyard owner can sell the parts as spares, so this might cost more than it's worth. Dunno.

I hate to throw a damper on your project, but do you really want to do this? If had been only fresh water, no silt, then I think you'd have a fighting chance. With all that silt, it may as well have been sitting in salt water.
 
Speaking as a person who would, as part of $DAY_JOB, get back broken/burned/destroyed electronic equipment from the field, and then determine if it was to be junked or not, you've got some problems here.

First off: Fresh water or not, that's a lot of silt. And it likely got into everything electronic. And then things are going to go downhill from there. First, the bad news:

Silt contains things like salts (Yes, NaCl, but also every-other-positive-ion plus a-negative-ion known to man.) Most of these are hydroscopic; that is, given water vapor, they attract water molecules and form, well, a conductive slurry.

That conductive slurry means that dissimilar metals (copper, tin, zinc, iron, you name it) are going to trade ions back and forth and, well, corrode. We're not just talking the circuit boards, now: Individual components, be they resistors, capacitors, inductors, and all that jazz are going to be susceptible to this. So, if you were thinking that this beast of yours, after repair, might last, say, five years, you might want to think again.

Now, say one had something that got good and proper dunked in fresh water, sans mud. Well... that's not so bad. Water, as a rule, does have $RANDOM_JUNK dissolved in it, but, heck, circuit boards get washed with water.. albeit it, deionized water.

There's a heck of a lot of electronics in a Tesla. Computers, touch screens, you name it. I'm thinking about all that silt. IF you took every single blamed electronic control box out of there, washed the heck out of them with deionized water and really removed all residues, there might be a chance. But.. a coil, or transistor, with small spaces under the components and/or in the component, and you blasting away with a high-pressure spray, trying to get all that stuff out of the teensy tiny spaces and such.. Admittedly, any teeny tiny cracks that let teeny tiny silt particles in might let those teeny tiny particles back out again.. I'm sorry, I can't see where This Is Going To Work.

It gets stupider. My old Chief Petty Office in Electronics A school informed the class one say, "90% of your problems are going to be in the wires." He was dead right. So, think about all those connectors in the wiring harness. Not just in the mated ones, where there's rubber gaskets to keep moisture out, but on the other side of the connector. There's likely been silt & water intrusion in there, too. Urgle. I guess taking out all the wiring harnesses, left, right, and center, and blasting away to get all the salts in the silt out of the wires and connectors would be in order. OK: I know that Tesla's big on minimizing the amount of junk that goes into a car, but I'm a-thinking that we're talking at least a mile, and possibly as much as five miles, of wiring harness in that car. It'll all have to be cleaned.

I'm somewhat less worried, I guess, about stuff like the actual drive train, hoses, pipes, cooling systems, and that kind of thing. Probably because I'm a EE and ignorant of all that mechanical engineering stuff. But, as a EE, we work with things that are reactive: That is, metals. With the possible exception of gold nuggets, there's No Such Thing as Naked Metal in nature: Any such has been corroded to dirt over the eons and Nature, given a chance, will do that to stuff like copper and all those other metals I mentioned above.

I mean.. there are those scroll wheels in the steering wheel. Those are electric switches of some kind. The switches are in little plastic boxes that likely don't come apart. They're inside the passenger compartment where, well, large amounts of liquid weren't exactly expected, although I'll give you a splashed can of soda as a possibility. (The electrics in the wheels for ABS brake components and such probably are sealed aggressively against water intrusion.)

I really, really wish you hadn't tried turning the car on. With all that conductive slurry everywhere high voltage electronics literally got shorted out, hence the burning electronics smell. I suspect that the inverter electronics that chargers the battery are likely toast at this stage.

I guess.. Suppose you got one, maybe two Teslas of the correct vintage and type sitting in a junkyard after being totalled in some non-water related accident. You might then be able to mine that one or those two cars for dry components for your resurrection bid. But cars end up in junkyards like that so the junkyard owner can sell the parts as spares, so this might cost more than it's worth. Dunno.

I hate to throw a damper on your project, but do you really want to do this? If had been only fresh water, no silt, then I think you'd have a fighting chance. With all that silt, it may as well have been sitting in salt water.
Thanks for the Insight and knowledge. I too have to remind myself to be realistic with what I'm dealing with.
The components I'm most worried about are the ancillary items such as electric windows electric seats etc. And anything else that can't really be opened and cleaned and assessed
 
Thanks for the Insight and knowledge. I too have to remind myself to be realistic with what I'm dealing with.
The components I'm most worried about are the ancillary items such as electric windows electric seats etc. And anything else that can't really be opened and cleaned and assessed
Yeah. And I don't know why I'm piling on. But think about that LCD display, front and center. Those things run with high voltage to twist the long polymer chains that make LCDs do what they do. But I've seen the more-or-less insides of a display or two: Long, thin sheets of plastic with lots of layers pinned to plastic and glass. Urgle. Silt and water. No way to clean, I think. So, a new one. Urgle.
 
I'm testing out the HV system tomorrow with someone who is far more qualified then me. Infact he was the first person in New Zealand to build a custom EV. I didnt want to be the first person to be fried from an EV.
The car was a BMW hatch body with an electric heart. Nor did he use a conversion such as a leaf / tesla etc driving system 🤔
 
At this point I would start a spread sheet, assume you need
all new electronic modules, seats, and so on.
Track both new and used. When you find out
how much other stuff you need you can track it.
Remember it is never as bad as it seems (others may question that)
and its never as good as you hope. Good luck.
 
This guy took everything out of his model 3 and it remained operating.

What comes to my mind is if the HV system and drivetrain are working you don't need necessarily to have everything else fixed to have a functional Tesla. Of course you might want, but it can be done one by one with time while you still have a functional vehicle.

But make sure the drive train and battery can be saved before going deeper on this rebuild.
 
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