What the documentation will provide is all the procedures for doing normal maintenance.
Exactly.
Sure, the battery will go back to Tesla for service no matter who pulls it from the car. The same can be said for the motor or speed controller. Those are big tasks and should seldom be required.
What is required are annual services and the like. Bleeding the air from the battery cooling system probably involves multiple bleed points with the coolant circulation pump running. Anyone know how to turn it on or where the bleed points are? Brake fluid should be swapped periodically to prevent moisure build up in the system. Some car's ABS components allow for suction or pressure bleeding while others require the use of a test tool to actuate some of the ABS solenoids. Those are but two of what I would guess would be a long list of very pedestrian maintenance functions that do not get anywhere near high voltage or opening battery packs or motors.
There is, mind you, no legal requirement for Tesla to release this basic maintenance information at all... but see below.
This really is just normal stuff. I'm surprised there is such a reverence within the Tesla community and that their have not been more calls for proper documentation. This is not rocket science; that's the other company. Hopefully this is one thing that will change (for the better) with the Model S being a production volume car.
If Tesla simply doesn't release the information for doing basic maintenance, then Tesla cannot claim that requiring the maintenance is "reasonable". Under the federal Warranty Act, Tesla cannot require that you use their branded service before they honor their warranty. So, if Tesla never tells you what maintenance needs to be done annually, and you don't buy Tesla's maintenance service, then Tesla has to provide warranty coverage anyway, even if you don't do the maintenance and the damage is caused by lack of maintenance, because they never told you what maintenance needed to be done.
George B., however, has claimed that Tesla will deny warranty coverage to people who don't buy Tesla's branded service. The fact that this is in contradiction to the law has been hashed out before.
Tesla should just release the manuals for people to perform their own annual maintenance if they want to (and stop claiming that people need to buy the service plan). They have a little under a year to release the manuals before the first "annual service" is due.
(Edit: it is in fact legal for Tesla's stated maintenance procedures to require tools which are not easily available. But they should at least tell people; some people will go out of their way and obtain the tools.)
