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Comment by feralchimp | Hacker News Reader

> Replacing the engine in the car was something like $7,000.

Which, for many drivers, may as well be $40k.

> the solution is a combination of educating/warning owners & notifying them by phone or email if the car starts to get too low

I never advocated ignoring anything. My point is not that "Tesla is great" or "boo ICE yay electric," it's that all the hysteria around "OMG car bricking" doesn't actually promote whatever communication/engineering solutions would actually make the product better or more consumable for people.

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>Which, for many drivers, may as well be $40k.

Did you really go ahead and conflate $7,000 and and $40,000? $7000 buys me a decent used car. $40,000 buys me a brand new Toyota Prius (MSRP $24,700) with almost enough change left over to buy a brand new Hyundai Elantra (MSRP $15,345).

$7,000 is not a small chunk of change, by any means. It's a lot less, however, than $40,000. Conflating the two does no one any good.

I'm saying I put the same level of effort, as a consumer, into avoiding a $7k repair as I would a $40k repair. That is: maximum effort.

Unexpected maintenance costs can be factored into the consumer cost using expected value, similar to how one accounts for recurring costs such as fuel efficiency in the decision to purchase a vehicle.

Your reasoning is similar to a company computing the cost of web hosting using only the initial cost of one server, without accounting for the cost of downtime or multiple backup servers. Maximum effort does not imply a process with 99% reliability is 100% reliable, and that the cost of failure can be written off.

This is not making a claim in regards to Tesla or the accuracy of the $40k figure, merely that cost matters.

I agree. So the solution is simple.

Telsa should institute a completely unconditional agreement to replace your batteries should they fail for any reason for $7K (or less).

They are the ones that actually are more aware of what can brick one of these things so let them demonstrate the unlikeliness with their pocket book.

And we both agree that $XK leads to no difference in attention from the owners.

Fair enough. I admit that $40k is mad spicy for a repair resulting from some basic user error, and even if the incidence for this problem is 10% (much higher than Tesla would claim, I'm sure), we're talking about raising the price of a Roadster from $100k to ~$104k to cover the amortization.

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