Battery replacement cost, £15,000!!!

[Bo_apex]

kambites said:

How many cars on the old style number plates do you still see on the road?

Edited by kambites on Friday 28th January 11:25

ICE cars ? Loads around London including some 1930's Bentleys

[mclwanB]

Max_Torque said:

I've just designed and built a 420 kWh battery that weighs the best part of 2 tonnes!

No fires yet......... ;-(

But the Tesla Roaster (2020ish...) lives!

[kambites]

CoolHands said:

You make it sound simple, but it’s probably going to take them a week. So will never be cheap. And you (they) can’t refurbish the cells, in reality they need to be changed / renewed.

Depends on the car. You can replace a module in a Leaf battery in 20 minutes once it's out of the car.

No, they're not going to be refurbishing cells - even if it was possible it'd be a complete waste of time! I doubt they'll even take the cells out of the modules, just replace the broken module with another of similar age.

Edited by kambites on Friday 28th January 21:40

[Scrimpton]

https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/17458772/furious-m...

ENGINE REPLACEMENT COST £27,000!!!

Edited by Scrimpton on Friday 28th January 23:59

[dvs_dave]

Main dealers aren’t interested in doing any repairs beyond the warranty period unless they can mug you off. It’s as simple as that.

[anonymous-user]

Scrimpton said:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/17458772/furious-m...

ENGINE REPLACEMENT COST £27,000!!!

Edited by Scrimpton on Friday 28th January 23:59

£1450-£2000/month!!!

[Buzz84]

gottans said:

Buzz84 said:

Would like to know the whole story. Not just the selective details the media are reporting

Article said:

when he bought a second-hand Mercedes Benz hybrid car four years ago

Article said:

At the time of purchase, the car had done 49,000 miles

How many miles had it done at the time of failure? Read it through a couple of times now and can't see the important detail anywhere.

It is a click bait article shouting doom and gloom while not providing anything useful.

Exactly, the way that it's written almost indicates that they are hiding some truths.

Nothing to say it's not been used as a taxi doing the airport runs for 4 years and has clocked 200k miles now.

[annodomini2]

kambites said:

I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing refurbished battery packs sold on an exchange bases rather than companies repairing an individual customer's pack - you take your car to the repair place, they remove your battery and swap in a refurbished one, then they refurbish your old pack their leisure to fit to the next customer; or if it's beyond economical repair they remove the remaining good cells to use to fix other packs.

The issue is the business needs to maintain stock of batteries.

Given new ones are £20k, a 2nd hand one will be £5-10k as they are still usable for grid storage.

Keeping a stock for all the different cars with all the different variants is not going to be cheap.

Swap is more convenient for the customer, but expensive for the business, so unlikely.

[delta0]

This is the reason used EVs make me very nervous. Extremely ruinous bill possibility is very high. Even just the perception of this will be very damaging to the used car market as these vehicles age and become more common on the market.

[georgeyboy12345]

I’m glad that newspapers are publishing BS articles like this, should hopefully drive used prices of PHEVs and EVs down so I can pick up a bargain

[kambites]

annodomini2 said:

The issue is the business needs to maintain stock of batteries.

Given new ones are £20k, a 2nd hand one will be £5-10k as they are still usable for grid storage.

Keeping a stock for all the different cars with all the different variants is not going to be cheap.

Swap is more convenient for the customer, but expensive for the business, so unlikely.

I was referring to fixing broken, rather than degraded, packs. A broken pack has no immediate value until it's fixed so whoever reuses it for whatever they reuse it for needs to at least hold it in stock for long enough to fix it!

I guess whether it's better to swap the packs over or repair the customer's own will depend on the time it takes to replace a module in the pack once it's out of the car. Companies wont want to hold too much expensive stock, but there will be a significant competitive advantage to being able to fix a customer's car in one day rather than having to hold it for several. Even if the mechanical side of fixing a pack isn't too long-winded, re-balancing a pack from scratch is a pretty slow process.

It used to be very common to buy refurbished components on an exchange basis, at least in classic car circles. No idea if it still is.

Edited by kambites on Saturday 29th January 10:45

[DodgyGeezer]

DoctorX said:

otolith said:

Anyone remember when the price of a new ECU for the electronic ignition and fuelling was going to write cars off? Should have stuck to carbs and points, shouldn't we?

The way things are going, there's plenty that will make cars financially unviable to fix in the future (fancy headlights, screen-based dashboards etc).

When headlights are coming in at £2,500 a side that could certainly put a crimp in your day! That said even the cost of disposable items like brakes on top line Audis can be wince inducing/ruinous too

Scrimpton said:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/17458772/furious-m...

ENGINE REPLACEMENT COST £27,000!!!

that's just mental - it'd probably be cheaper to buy a new LS/Hemi crate engine and make it fit!!

[anonymous-user]

delta0 said:

This is the reason used EVs make me very nervous. Extremely ruinous bill possibility is very high. Even just the perception of this will be very damaging to the used car market as these vehicles age and become more common on the market.

As pointed out above in the thread, ICE cars also send horrendous bills. Get over it.

[W201_190e]

My father in law had one of these as a company car. It was a 2013 model, scrapped by 2019 with only around 100k. Thankfully he wasn't responsible for it's upkeep.


Any car can produce a horrific bill. This is why I don't want to spend more than about £3k on a car. I'm not wealthy enough or brave enough to risk it otherwise.

[Oilchange]

bulldong said:

Exactly the point. Our passat needed a new clutch at 60,000km €2500.

I’ll stop you right there.

How much?

[sparta6]

Scrimpton said:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/17458772/furious-m...

ENGINE REPLACEMENT COST £27,000!!!

Edited by Scrimpton on Friday 28th January 23:59

All that mud-plugging can kill a Range Rover

[Mikehig]

delta0 said:

I wonder if it’s possible to remove the battery and just use it as a non-hybrid.

These things often use a starter/generator integrated with the transmission which charges the battery. It also uses the hybrid battery power to start the engine.
So, if the battery was removed, some alternative means of starting the car would be needed.

[anonymous-user]

Oilchange said:

bulldong said:

Exactly the point. Our passat needed a new clutch at 60,000km €2500.

I’ll stop you right there.

How much?

Yes I nearly wept as well. It’s a specific type of dual mass flywheel. When the garage told me how much it was I googled the nuts off it, called all the parts shops and went through it with them with the vin number. That specific part and model is only available from vw. The clutch and flywheel was €1800! Killed me.

[annodomini2]

kambites said:

annodomini2 said:

The issue is the business needs to maintain stock of batteries.

Given new ones are £20k, a 2nd hand one will be £5-10k as they are still usable for grid storage.

Keeping a stock for all the different cars with all the different variants is not going to be cheap.

Swap is more convenient for the customer, but expensive for the business, so unlikely.

I was referring to fixing broken, rather than degraded, packs. A broken pack has no immediate value until it's fixed so whoever reuses it for whatever they reuse it for needs to at least hold it in stock for long enough to fix it!

I guess whether it's better to swap the packs over or repair the customer's own will depend on the time it takes to replace a module in the pack once it's out of the car. Companies wont want to hold too much expensive stock, but there will be a significant competitive advantage to being able to fix a customer's car in one day rather than having to hold it for several. Even if the mechanical side of fixing a pack isn't too long-winded, re-balancing a pack from scratch is a pretty slow process.

It used to be very common to buy refurbished components on an exchange basis, at least in classic car circles. No idea if it still is.

Edited by kambites on Saturday 29th January 10:45

To begin with, the repair companies will probably offer to dismantle and replace the defective cells. Assuming they can get parts and with the associated delay.

Most EV batteries are modular, as time progresses, EVs become more common and age, parts will become more readily available, at that point they'd probably keep a stock of modules, as it would be unlikely that all modules are dead.

So for a repair they'd replace the defective module(s) and repair those removed, to speed up the process.

[NMNeil]

CoolHands said:

You make it sound simple, but it’s probably going to take them a week. So will never be cheap. And you (they) can’t refurbish the cells, in reality they need to be changed / renewed.

But just like an ICE car, there's plenty of spare parts available in the junkyards.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/284621880090?hash=item424...