Exactly how excited am I to be in a p90d? Well… [Music] Welcome back to part two of my video. You've always heard the saying "when
it rains it pours", right? [Music] So my Tesla Model 3 has been
dead for two weeks now, in fact, it's still in the shop right now. So when
the car first died, I didn't panic because I do have a second car that I can drive
in the meantime while it's in repair, but um had a problem there too. This is my project car
here, a Miata. I got the battery charged up and come out here to take a look. So I go to start
up my Miata here and let's see what happens.
Do you hear that clicking? The car is dead as a doornail. The battery is good,
the alternator is good. I've got a bad starter. So my electric car is dead and my gas-powered
car is dead! Luckily I have a Tesla and a Mazda, and my wife also has a Tesla and a Mazda. So my
amazing wife loaned me her Mazda for that first week that the car was dead. I had the car just
in the garage while I tried to troubleshoot it and also I had to schedule Tesla Service. It
wasn't like I could drive it in that day uh or have it towed that day. So uh I had to wait
a few days for Tesla Service to be available, then I towed the car while I was driving the Mazda
to work every day, and boy, let me tell you.
I do not miss having to pay for gas. The Mazda is very
fuel efficient, but you know I drive pretty long distances and I was putting about fifty dollars
in the tank every two and a half days, so it got pricey real quick. So that was the first week that
the car was dead, then I had it towed into the Tesla Service Center. They did give me a loaner
and I'm really thankful for that because the car has been there for over a week now, and it's still
in repair.
This is the awesome car that they gave me as a loaner. It is a Model S. It's a 2016 p90d.
It has ludicrous plus mode! It's very fast. It is not locked in chill mode. I can do ludicrous Plus
in this if I really want to. The only downside is they do have the speed governor enabled, so I
can't go over 85 miles an hour, which is kind of a bummer on the interstate. But uh still a great
car. I'm really impressed with it. Okay so let me, first of all, tell you about my car. It's a
2019 model. I've got almost 106,000 miles on it, so I'm out of main warranty, which is 50 000
miles, but there is still warranty for the main battery pack and the drive units. For a Long Range
Model 3, that is eight years or 120,000 miles. So I'm within that spec so I should have warranty if
it's a battery pack issue or a Drive Unit issue. So when I first brought it into Tesla, they did a
remote diagnostic on the car before they even took it apart to look at it, and what they found were
alarms telling them that it was a bad inverter. Well, that is actually covered under the Drive
Unit warranty.
The inverter is inside the Drive Unit, and anything connected there is going to
be covered under that warranty. If you're a Tesla owner pay attention to this next part because
it's really important to know. When Tesla first gets your car into the service center and they,
you know, are telling you what it's going to cost to repair it, they send you an estimate on your
phone in the app, and whatever that estimate is, you should just go ahead and approve it.
Because
what happens is they are not even considering warranty at that point. The car doesn't know
if your car is in warranty or not. It's just telling Tesla what it is and what it's going to
cost to fix it. So Tesla sends you a bill and in this case for my inverter, they were sending
me a bill for two thousand six hundred dollars. That was for everything. That's parts and labor.
So thousands of dollars to get the car fixed, and that's what you have to approve before they
start working on the car. Once you talk to your service rep, they'll let you know that if there
is any warranty, warranty will cover those things. They just have to show you the itemized bill
before they start working on it.
Whatever the cost is on that estimate that they send you is not
always what you have to pay, because they are not even considering warranty at that point. If there
is warranty on any part of the car that is getting repaired, then warranty will cover the cost but
they still give you that estimate of the full price of whatever that is. So you just approve it,
they do the work and then, worst case scenario, if it's not under warranty you have to pay that
price. But if it's under warranty you don't have to pay that. So after talking to my service guy,
you know, he told me it was an inverter that I'm going to have to get replaced and that it should
be under warranty, and I was like great! So uh warranty will cover the cost of the repair, the
parts, and labor.
It also will cover your tow truck if you had it towed to the shop. They will
reimburse you for that if it was a warranty issue. So I was like great! So the whole thing is going
to be covered under warranty including my tow. Great! Then the next day comes and what they do is
the service tech will send you updates every day they have the car to let you know what they find,
and let you know the progress so you can keep an idea on your app of what the current situation
with your car is while it's in service. So that's all great, but the very next day the service tech
hit me up on chat and told me that the problem was not with the inverter and it had nothing
to do with the battery pack or the inverter. So remember when I was troubleshooting it and
I went into service mode and looked at what was going on there? So if you remember, I put the
car in service mode and ran a few Diagnostics there. I saw that the PCS which is the "power
conversion system", that's your DC to DC charging there, was complaining about an open contactor.
So what could be that open contactor? Sometimes it could be, you know, part of the inverter.
It could be a wiring harness, could be a lot of things.
But what it actually said in my service
mode diagnostic there was the PTC heater. So in a properly working circuit, all the contactors are
closed and the power can go to all the parts of the system that it needs to, but if you have an
open contactor, now you've broken the circuit and things aren't going to be working right. So there
was a device that was breaking that circuit with the open contactor and it just happened to be the
PTC heater. Now keep in mind this is an older car, it doesn't have the heat pump, the octovalve, and
all that that the new Model 3 and Model Y have, so it does have a PTC heater.
It
heats the cabin, it heats the battery, it's the electric heater that heats up what needs
to be heated in the car. So the PTC heater failed, it broke that connection, which means the
high-voltage battery pack is no longer able to charge up the 12-volt. The 12-volt is running all
the systems, the screen, the lights, the doors, power everything! And so because the high
voltage battery could not power up the 12-volt, then the 12-volt was just draining.
Every time
anything was running, it just drained. So that was the main issue is my PTC heater failed. It
bricked the car. Just remember what the batteries actually support. So the high-voltage battery
powers the car the drivetrain and all that, but it also powers your HVAC system. The 12-volt
battery in the front powers everything else. Your Center screen, your lights, your tail lights,
all the interior lights, your power door handles, everything that's electronic within the car.
That's your 12-volt up front. So it makes sense that a component that the main battery pack
controls that failed is what bricked the car. So do I just have extremely bad luck and it was
just coincidental that it just happened to break at this time or did the issue of me running the
battery down to zero and really starving all the electronics of power trigger something that caused
that PTC heater to fail? So the latest update on my car is they did replace the PTC heater.
They've
got the car up and running. They did say that the 12-volt battery got depleted during the process
of all this, so they did replace my 12-volt battery as a courtesy. So I didn't have to pay for
that, so thank you very much to Tesla for that. However, while they were working on this they also
found something else. I was just notified that they found a coolant leak, so they troubleshot
that a little further. It turns out that the coolant leak is coming from a failed o-ring
on the front Drive Unit. So that is covered under warranty. So right now we're waiting
for parts. They have to order a new o-ring. It's going to be a few days, and just
waiting. So the good news is it's not going to cost me the thousands of dollars I
was first quoted. There is going to be some warranty for the Drive Unit o-ring, but that
PTC heater is out of warranty and I'm going to have to pay for that.
So yeah the root cause of
what killed the car was the failed PTC heater. Well, Look who decided to show up? So Tesla texted me that my car was fixed and ready to be picked up. So I went last night
to go get it and we are back home now. So it's a beautiful day! The sun is out, the
birds are chirping, and I have my Tesla Model 3 back at the garage. So let's talk about how
much this thing cost me for being out for two weeks and having a lot of things done to it.
There were several things that they did replace under warranty, so I'll go over that.
The first
thing they did was there was a rear harness recall that is basically just a wiring harness that
connects to the rear camera in the trunk. So that was replaced under warranty under a recall.
Another thing that they did was uh they replaced my 12-volt battery. That was not the cause of
what made my car have to go in the shop in the first place. It was one of those things that you
know after it being depleted several times over the last two weeks of us testing and all that
they're like yeah this thing is you know it's a few years old let's just go ahead and replace
it. So they actually did replace that for free uh just as a courtesy. It wasn't under warranty or
anything. They were just you know offered it to me for free so gladly I accepted. Thank you very much
to Tesla for that.
Another thing that was covered under warranty was that O-ring on the front Drive
Unit inverter. It was leaking coolant and so they had to replace the O-ring and that took a couple
days for them to order that, but once they had it, they swapped it out and now the car was
ready to be picked up. So next let's talk about what uh they were quoting me to fix this
and then what I actually had to pay. At first, they were quoting me $2600 because they were going
to have to replace the inverter. Then after they actually took it apart and looked at everything
and they tested all the different things you know separately, they found that the inverter was
fine and everything attached to the inverter with the Drive Unit everything looked fine. So there
were no issues with that. So the $2600 you know they took that off the bill completely. However, I
will say this the inverter and drive unit is still covered under warranty. I've got up to 120,000
miles to get that taken care of and that would have been free, which didn't turn out to be that
way.
The actual problem that caused this outage was my PTC heater failed. Keep in mind that
PTC heaters in the loop there of your power conversion system where your high voltage battery
converts to the low voltage of your 12-volt and that PTC heater sits right in between, and if that
fails, that disconnects the connection to the two, and then everything starts running off that
12-volt battery up front and draining from that 12-volt because the high voltage isn't supplying
more current to it because it has to go through that PTC heater. So that was what it was, and
that is not covered under warranty. So if we take a look at the invoice it will show you that
the parts to replace that PTC heater was $563, the labor was $322. So after doing a little
bit of haggling and negotiating on the bill, they said they would take off $108 from
the diagnostic uh portion of that bill, um just to help me out, so I appreciate that
a lot.
After that taxes and everything the total came out to $942.71, and uh that's with
everything. Before we had agreed upon this invoice they did send me an even higher bill for around
$1,700 because they found two of my tires had low tread, and they were throwing in the price of two
new tires for that, and those were the original factory tires that I don't even have anymore,
and so I didn't want to pay over $700 for two tires! I'll go ahead and replace all four tires
for a little bit more than that and get the ones I actually want. So when I do pick out new tires,
I'll make sure I film that and go through all that information with you so you can decide if you need
to upgrade your tires as well. So that's that. The car was down for two weeks and it only cost me
$942, which is still more than I would like to have paid, but hey for it being that dead and
only costing 900 to get back to life, I'll take it. So hopefully you like this video and you found
something informational about it.
I hope I'm not dissuading anyone from buying an electric vehicle.
As you can see, my gas car is also dead. And everyone's freaking out in the comments about "huh
I'm never going to buy an electric vehicle because of things like this". You guys are tripping! You
guys grew up with gas cars and you've said none of them have ever had a breakdown where you've not
been able to drive your car? Cars breaking down is a car's thing, it's not a gas versus electric.
I've got both, I like both. I prefer my electric car. It is more convenient for me personally. I've
got a nice garage I can charge it in and that's not an issue so it just worked works for me and my
lifestyle.
It's not going to work for everyone. If gas cars work better for you or you live out
in the country, you don't have high-powered charging stations everywhere, then maybe a gas
car is better for you right now, but I'm just letting you know, don't let a car breaking down
dissuade you from ever going electric. My gas car is broken too. I've got bad luck the last month.
Hopefully, things are turning up now, and uh we'll just have to wait and see. I just want to give a
shout-out to all the new subscribers! Thank you for joining the family! I appreciate and love
you guys! If you like the video, hit that like button. If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure
you hit the Subscribe button so you'll be notified when new videos come out.
I'm always doing crazy
things to my Teslas. Always something going on, so you want to make sure you stick around and
see what happens next. Take care guys, bye-bye. that this is the place [Music] foreign.
