Tesla owner blows up his Model S with dynamite over $22,000 battery replacement

A Tesla Model S owner in Finland decided to blow up his electric car with dynamite after it needed a battery replacement, which Tesla said was going to cost $22,000.

There’s not a lot of information about how much an electric car, or especially Tesla vehicle, battery replacement costs.

It’s a hard question to answer since the vast majority of Tesla battery replacements have been done under warranty.

Early on, Tesla offered eight-year unlimited mileage powertrain warranties for Model S and Model X.

With Model S production starting in 2012 and higher volumes not coming until 2014, only recently have those vehicles started to come off their powertrain warranty. We have seen quotes from Tesla for battery pack replacements between $20,000 and $30,000. That’s a lot of money, but the good news is that Tesla’s battery packs have been known to last a long time.

I have a Tesla Model X that had a battery pack last for more than 300,000 miles.

However, even if the problem is not necessarily battery degradation, the battery packs simply fail sometimes, and it’s expensive to replace those early packs.

We recently reported on a case where a Model S owner was told by Tesla that he needed a $22,500 battery replacement.

That wasn’t really an option since it’s basically equivalent to the value of the vehicle.

Fortunately, the owner managed to find a third-party repair shop the fix the battery pack for a fraction of the cost – though the fix is somewhat controversial in the Tesla repair community.

Now we learn of a similar case in Finland where Tuomas Katainen, a 2013 Tesla Model S owner, had a battery pack that was out of warranty fail, and Tesla asked for the equivalent of $22,000 USD for a battery pack replacement.

Katainen didn’t like the value proposition considering used 2013 Model S vehicles go for about 35,000 euros in Finland and he didn’t have access to a third-party shop to fix the pack.

What options does one have at that point? Quite a few actually: You can try to find a used battery pack, you can sell the car as non-functional and still get decent money for it, or you can sell it for parts.

But Katainen decided to go a different way.

He reached out to YouTuber Pommijätkät, a channel known for blowing things up, to strap 30 kg of dynamite to the electric vehicle and blow it up:

That sounds like a reasonable solution to an expensive battery replacement.

To be fair, they did remove the non-functioning battery pack and other expensive parts, like the electric motor, before blowing up the car.

Electrek’s Take

Obviously, I don’t support this as a solution, but I definitely feel for early Model S owners in his situation.

One thing to keep in mind for EV naysayers that like to use this as “proof” that EVs don’t work, the high battery replacement cost is mainly for early vehicles that were produced in lower volumes.

It’s more expensive to have battery replacements for those vehicles.

Battery pack replacements for higher-volume vehicles like Model 3 and Model Y are expected to be much less expensive when they will be needed off warranty, and also battery technology is improving, which makes them last longer.