Have a feeling this will be an expensive ordeal for the insurance company and werksta who both have collective agreements.
teslaclubsweden.se
Marcus: "My Tesla is being held hostage by IF Metall"
By
Tibor Blomhäll |
December 12, 2023 |
One of our members contacted us to share his story. Marcus bought a Tesla Model Y at the end of June this year. After owning the car for three weeks, he drove with his wife and son to Öland on holiday. "Go to Öland, it will be fun, they said," he tells us. "But it wasn't very fun."
On Öland, they were hit from behind. He slowed down and stopped, but the Volvo behind did not, but drove straight into their car at roughly 60 km/h. There was a terrible bang. "The car saved us," says Marcus, "if we had gone with the wife's Hyundai i10, I wouldn't be standing here today. I will never buy another car.”
As he lives on the west coast, he wanted the tow truck to transport the car to a sheet metal workshop in Gothenburg, but the insurance company Trygg-Hansa believed that the Werksta plant in Norrköping was closer. Werksta is an independent workshop chain with a collective agreement that is accredited for sheet metal work on Tesla cars. After several weeks of waiting, the car was then sent on to Werksta Linköping as they were considered to have better competence to repair its damage.
By the beginning of October, Werksta had received all the necessary spare parts from Tesla and started the repair work. Which was supposed to take three weeks according to their initial estimate but then dragged on.
When IF Metall issued its
notice against Werksta at the end of October , Marcus became worried about his car. However, he received reassuring news: the notification would only apply to new cases, started jobs had to be completed so his car would not be affected.
The day before Werksta is taken out of the blockade, however, he receives new information: Werksta then claims that IF Metall has changed its mind, they will not be allowed to work on any Tesla at all, regardless of who is the customer or how far they have come on the work. The car must be moved out of the workshop premises. Werksta sets up a makeshift, unheated storage tent in the yard where his and other Tesla cars are placed. According to what he heard, IF Metall was not really satisfied with that arrangement either, in that the tent was still standing on Werksta's land, they really wanted the cars to go out on the street. Marcus's car was then completely disassembled from the back doors to the back. Werksta had started the assembly but had not had time to complete it.
When he asked if the car could be damaged by this, they did not want to answer at first. IF Metall concluded that the cars had to be boosted so that their batteries would not suffer permanent damage - but Marcus's car cannot be charged because the belt tensioner had tripped and thus automatically deactivated the main battery! Marcus' mobile has had no contact with the car for five months now. “Who knows how much charge it has left? The only thing that keeps me hopeful is that I had just charged the car, the batteries were 90% charged when the accident happened," says Marcus. The car's batteries are slowly discharging and if the charge reaches 0% or if the batteries freeze, they can be permanently damaged.
So now Marcus' car sits and slowly discharges and freezes to ice in an unheated tent in Linköping. A car he enjoyed for a total of three weeks before the crash. A car that had already received all the parts needed for the repair, a repair that his insurance company would pay for and that would be done at a sheet metal repair shop connected to public transport.
Marcus has tried in various ways to get rid of his car. From Werksta he received the message that IF Metall has forbidden them to even touch the car. IF Metall's contract secretary Veli-Pekka Säikkälä responded to his email with "I understand you and everyone else who is affected by this conflict". However, his solution to the problem was that as soon as Tesla signs off, the car can be fixed.
Marcus has also tried to get Trygg-Hansa to move his car to another sheet metal workshop. At first they said no problem, suggested that the car be moved to Ellte car in Tumba, a tow truck had even been booked. But then they suddenly changed their mind. Marcus believes out of fear for IF Metall. Suddenly he was called by a manager at Trygg-Hansa who said that they did not want to get involved in the conflict. If he wants to move the car and repair it elsewhere, he must do so at his own expense, the insurance company has only approved the cost of the repair at Werksta.
Marcus' car cost SEK 560,000. The damage after the collision was estimated at 200 thousand kroner. The replacement rental car Trygg-Hansa pays has already cost them over one hundred thousand kroner. And Marcus sees no improvement in his case. He does not believe in any quick solution but feels a kind of sick resignation, comparing the situation he has found himself in to Catch 22 or Kafka novels.
"That a strike affects third parties is completely reasonable and part of the game,"
says Marcus, "but in our case we have nothing to do with the company Tesla, apart from the fact that the car is of the Tesla brand. We have not ordered any work from Tesla, it is ordered by a completely independent workshop, which has also signed a collective agreement. What you do in this strike is that you use some form of juvenile schoolyard bullying where, in addition to making it difficult for the company, you also attack all customers, not indirectly but directly. As the car is not drivable and it is inside the workshop area where I have no access whatsoever, the car has in reality been seized by IF Metall."
www.teslarati.com
(I wonder if they initially thought forcing Tesla to "sign zee papers" was going to be easy?)
