I wouldn't presume that.
I do daily. We work with customers dealing with out of warranty battery service quite literally every day now.
I
always try to put myself in the customer's shoes and just tell them what I think the right path for them is, even if that's not the same path that makes my company any money. And I feel like most people greatly appreciate and respect that.
We try to get people the best possible options. I've even sent customers to
@Recell when I feel like it makes the most sense for them... much to the surprise of the customer who is usually confused why I'd send them to a competitor. Usually when it's a customer super close to their shop and it doesn't make sense to spend on shipping even if our price might end up a little lower before shipping.
Not sure if Recell has done the same for us, but honestly doesn't matter to me. As long as they're not screwing over customers like some other places, all good by me. I've no affiliation with Recell, but they seem to be the only other company in this space legitimately doing something similar to what we do, and haven't heard anything crazy about them so far. haha. So kudos to them on that.
Recell's offerings are perfectly fine for folks who absolutely must have a fixed price for service. There's value in that, certainly. From the business side, Recell is taking on the risk associated with that offering and that's reflected in their pricing, which factors in a core return just like we do. So if their set price is $x, which assumes at least $y recoverable value from a core pack to cover costs, overhead, etc... and the core pack ends up not worth $y, then they have to eat that. If its > $y, then more profit/buffer for them in exchange for the gamble.
We definitely do things differently at 057. I'm not much of a gambler, so we have no fixed pricing on replacements w/core returns because I'm not going to assume your core pack has any value until we inspect it. (We have our extended service plans, but that's pretty much a separate thing.) So instead of a fixed price, you pay whatever the
actual cost is. That may be lower or may be higher than a similar deal from Recell. We've gotten pack replacements for some folks completed for under $2k. Others have been > $10k. All depends on the condition of the core pack. We usually just do it as a "Let's get the car here and do diagnostics and go from there," type plan. We help arrange transport, etc. If you decide not to work with us on the repair/replacement, we just charge a small diagnostic fee and that's that. We'll even bring the car to the local Tesla service if desired after that, or help ship wherever.
I usually tell people to just get the car to us for a diagnostic before making a decision, especially if they're anywhere nearby (within 1000 miles or so).
I think
on average we end up cheaper than Recell on pack replacements, but that's the trade-off benefit of shifting that variance to the customer instead of having to price that variability into a fixed cost like they do. I don't mean this to be an us vs Recell thing either, just pointing things out. Market does all the deciding here.
And that's all just customer preference really, since the end results are effectively the same. Good old free market competition! We're swamped, with I think almost 30 S's in the shop right now, transporters here every single day, etc... so clearly not a demand issue... and I don't even think we even have battery replacement services even
listed on our website
at all.
I'd have to bet Recell is probably in a similar boat on the demand side given all of the issues with earlier S's.
Resetting errors without fixing the issue is stupid. Don't do it. Don't try to blow up your car.
And seriously, don't reset errors and pass the car to an unsuspecting buyer. In fact, I'm currently helping three different people with logs and technical info for court cases where a seller scammed them like this using some third party tool to temporarily clear a battery error right before selling the car without fixing anything. "I just bought this car, and a couple days later I got this error. Such bad luck!" "No, looks like it had the error for a while and someone tried to clear it right before you bought it." "Whaaaaaaat?! I got scammed???" "Yep."
So don't do that. I
will help people go after you if you do, and I'll help for free, if possible, because I absolutely hate scammers like this. IANAL, so I don't know if any of these are even winnable, but I'll be damned if I don't at least try to help these folks.
Like I said, if you must have fixed upfront pricing for as much as possible, I don't think you're going to get much better than Recell's offerings. Even Tesla themselves won't give you a price until they diagnose the car, so there's that. There's always other costs with these kinds of repairs. Downtime (rental car?), transport, sales tax, etc etc all things that will vary case by case. Up to you to figure that out and pick the option that works best for you.
definitely puts you in the ‘power user’ class. #achievementunlocked 
