Well known car YouTuber Tyler Hoover of the Hoovies Garage channel has just bought a new Tesla, but as with most of the cars he buys for his channel, it’s broken and the cost of repair is so high it would total the vehicle. However, he doesn’t want to fix it in an official Tesla service center, so he instead sent it to Rich Rebuilds’ Electrified Garage, a third party shop that services Teslas.

The Tesla in question is a 2013 Model S P85 with 97,000 miles / 156,000 km on its odometer, that has an issue with its battery pack. It was never in a big accident and it doesn’t have any major mechanical flaws, yet it cannot charge to provide more than 49 miles / 79 km of range and it displays an error message that reads

Maximum battery charge level reduced

If he were to simply go to Tesla to have the battery pack replaced, since the car is out of warranty, that would cast around $17,000 to $20,000. In fact, this particular Model S had its eight-year battery warranty until recently and just as it ended some four months ago, the car developed this issue.

There is good news for Tyler, though, because while an official Tesla service center will immediately want to replace the battery, some third party shops will actually search for the exact cause of the issue. And that’s what Electrified Garage intends to do with this Model S and it may not need a new battery after all.

It may just be a bad connection to one of the battery modules, not any of the modules themselves going bad. We’ll probably see this car in a future video on the Rich Rebuilds channel, before it will be featured again on Hoovies Garage after it gets fixed.

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