No, they demand your VIN number before they'll sell you parts, and god help you if they've decided your chassis is no longer fit for the road.
They will also refuse to service the car or do bodywork on it (and they are the only place you can get bodywork for a Tesla done, I believe, as Tesla refuses to make bodyparts available), stop providing over the air updates (a violation of federal law, I believe), disable supercharger network access (and in the US, that means no fast charging whatsoever, as Tesla only sells a CCS 1 adapter in South Korea, and US cars lack the software to talk to a CCS charger), and turn off features that the owner had "purchased."
Richrepairs has found that they are quite arbitrary about when they declare a vehicle "totaled", and there's no recourse (except via civil court, I guess?)
To head the inevitable responses off at the pass, such as "well it's got that incredibly dangerous high voltage stuff, they have a duty to make sure it doesn't start a fire or kill someone":
* no other automaker requires VIN numbers for authorization purposes. You can walk into any car dealership and ask for a part number, and get it.
* no other automaker makes it their business to declare their vehicles road-worthy or not. No car manufacturer bothers to maintain such records except maybe for recall notification purposes, or tracking historical vehicles (such as non-road-legal, factory-built race cars for which there will eventually be heritage)
* no other automaker makes parts sales contingent on whether the vehicle is road-worthy or not. Or even if such a vehicle exists. GM, Ford, Dodge, and numerous other automakers will in fact sell you "crate" engines for whatever purpose you want. Again, no questions asked.
...all that, for vehicles that use a carcinogenic, poisonous, highly flammable fuel called "gasoline" which readily generates highly flammable, heavier-than-air vapors.
Or, for that matter, for their electric vehicles. A number of which use twice the voltage Teslas do.
_ea1k|3 years ago
KennyBlanken|3 years ago
They will also refuse to service the car or do bodywork on it (and they are the only place you can get bodywork for a Tesla done, I believe, as Tesla refuses to make bodyparts available), stop providing over the air updates (a violation of federal law, I believe), disable supercharger network access (and in the US, that means no fast charging whatsoever, as Tesla only sells a CCS 1 adapter in South Korea, and US cars lack the software to talk to a CCS charger), and turn off features that the owner had "purchased."
Richrepairs has found that they are quite arbitrary about when they declare a vehicle "totaled", and there's no recourse (except via civil court, I guess?)
To head the inevitable responses off at the pass, such as "well it's got that incredibly dangerous high voltage stuff, they have a duty to make sure it doesn't start a fire or kill someone":
* no other automaker requires VIN numbers for authorization purposes. You can walk into any car dealership and ask for a part number, and get it.
* no other automaker makes it their business to declare their vehicles road-worthy or not. No car manufacturer bothers to maintain such records except maybe for recall notification purposes, or tracking historical vehicles (such as non-road-legal, factory-built race cars for which there will eventually be heritage)
* no other automaker makes parts sales contingent on whether the vehicle is road-worthy or not. Or even if such a vehicle exists. GM, Ford, Dodge, and numerous other automakers will in fact sell you "crate" engines for whatever purpose you want. Again, no questions asked.
...all that, for vehicles that use a carcinogenic, poisonous, highly flammable fuel called "gasoline" which readily generates highly flammable, heavier-than-air vapors.
Or, for that matter, for their electric vehicles. A number of which use twice the voltage Teslas do.
yakz|3 years ago