2014 Ford EV ruined because owner can’t get $14,000 battery pack.

A Florida family bought a 2014 Ford Focus EV with 60,000 miles for $11,000, only to have all the dashboard lights come on, and then tow the car to the dealer, to find out it is ruined because they can’t get $14,000 battery pack.

The dealer says even if it could get the $14,000 battery pack, that still doesn’t cover labor hours to install. I don’t know how many labor hours to change out a battery, but I do know that labor hours at dealerships tend to run between $170 an hour and $400 an hour, depending on the dealership and brand, and I can’t imagine it would take less than 4 or 5 labor hours to get this job done.

That’s a lot of gas. I probably won’t use $15,000 of gas in the next decade in the Buick. Not even close. But with an unreliable EV, this is something you have to plan for every 5-8 years, if you can even get the part.

Fox Business wrote another article on the difficulty of getting them serviced anywhere. Your local independent won’t be able to, most likely, which means dealer labor, and dealer parts (if the dealer can get the parts). And that’s going to bleed you as well.

Then, even if they fixed the battery somehow, it’s an EV, so it has all these other parts that will break, like sensors, regenerative brake parts, etc. Does Ford even make that anymore?

This family learned an expensive lesson.

On the battery alone, I could buy enough gas to get the Buick well over 100,000 miles. And there’s an aftermarket for the parts.

When Eric Sandeen at Red Hat bought himself a Nissan Leaf in 2012, by 2017 the battery was already acting up. Like every EV owner, he had to assure himself that cars that don’t even last 5 years “are the future of transportation” (everyone who buys them says that even if they don’t work and they just lost all their money), and said that he hoped his car battery would crap out by 2018 because then Nissan would be on the hook to replace it.

Of course, car companies are shady. Sandeen only missed having to pay several thousand dollars for a new battery pack because the thing finally qualified to be warranty replaced a couple months before the warranty ended.

It’s pretty clear that Electric Vehicles aren’t practical enough for the majority of people to take the risk on one. For starters, working class stiffs can’t afford to buy anything new, and likely rent an apartment, so they can’t plug them in at night. Then there’s no public chargers, and gas stations don’t have chargers.

So how do you charge the stupid things? IMAGINAAAAAAATION! Which is the Biden Administration’s plan for fast charging infrastructure. They’ve been in office two years and the only one I know of in my COUNTY is over by a Target store three cities away. And I’m a county over from Chicago!

Then if you work through THOSE problems somehow, the batteries only last you about 5-6 years and crap out. And they’re not giving ’em away!

During the 1970s oil crisis, AMC started making electric cars. They weren’t very good, but they worked. The technology just wasn’t there and they flopped.

But I think what we’re seeing now among EV owners today, is that they know that if they can’t get the battery to just go ahead and fail while the manufacturer is on the hook, to hurry up get rid of the car on someone while it still drives.

Someone who doesn’t realize that these things develop serious problems very rapidly, and then you’ve just paid them $11,000 for the stupid thing and they have a down payment on their next new car while you have a $500 piece of scrap metal that looks terrific.

Fox Business had a picture of the blue Ford EV that the parents got for their teenager. Looked like you drove it off the dealership lot yesterday, except for the small detail that it doesn’t actually….go…anywhere now.

As for being great for the environment, replacing an entire car every 5 years because the OEM stopped making battery packs is very green.

I drive a 2008 Buick. It doesn’t get the best gas mileage. It’s 6 years older than that Ford. I’m in about what they paid for the Ford, except my Buick runs and my mechanic can get aftermarket parts for it. The battery only exists to turn over the engine, and any battery of that Group size will fit it.

The only reason Ford made the Focus was because of CAFE. They’re “compliance cars”. They didn’t want to make the car in the first place, they just had to tell the government they got an average fuel economy and knew some buyers would buy a cheap Focus or Fiesta that fell apart because someone always does. What happens to it 8 years later to the second owner is Someone Else’s Problem.

And as bad as the situation with the Ford Focus EV sounds, many Teslas don’t even hold up that well.

Eventually people will catch on, by so many people making a mistake and buying a used EV, that used EVs are too much risk, and then they’ll stop buying it, or demand enough of a discount to immediately go out and buy a new battery pack, assuming you can still get them.

But I think the problem we’re seeing here is that people my generation and older are used to gasoline-powered cars that you take to a muffler shop now and then and other than that, you put gas in them and they run for 20 or 30 years.

Thanks to the Democrats, those days are long gone. They push the EV scam hard on people.

My ex was an idiot. He went down to a Toyota dealer and tried to finance a 2010 Toyota Prius for $11,000 in 2019. He got a letter from all the banks the dealers ran it through, including Toyota’s own in-house finance company, who rejected it and said it was because there was insufficient value remaining in the vehicle, compared to the proposed finance price.

That’s right! Toyota said what their own dealer wanted, which the dealer wouldn’t come down from, was “far in excess of what the vehicle [was] worth”.

I went car shopping for him and got him a 2019 (gasoline) Ford Focus Fiesta Hatchback, and we got out of there paying about $13,500 after tax, title, and license fees. I found a bunch of rebates and stuff and declined all the finance room bullshit, and found him a nice bank loan at 3.5%. Which is not terrible for a sign and drive deal. The car got almost 40 miles per gallon on the highway.

There just doesn’t exist a world where all this battery crap makes sense.

Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary, had a “Let them eat brioche!” moment a couple of months ago. Some guy asked what people should do when they can’t afford a gallon of gas for their clunker, and so Buttigieg tells the guy “Just buy an EV and you’ll never worry about gas again.”.

Even if you can come up with a down payment and get financing, and find somewhere to plug the stupid thing in at (none of which are Mayor Pete’s problems) you also get to bite your knuckles and HOPE the battery pack kills out soon so you get another one and keep the car half as long as your old Buick.

The fact is there’s not ever going to be enough stupid people in the world to buy these lemon EVs, so the government has to step in and bribe people to do it with my tax money, and threaten to make cars that work and get you to your job, doctor appointments, vacations, and stuff illegal.

Sounds wonderful to me!

EVs are clearly the latest pipe dream, and the only reason the companies making them are still going is that, up ’til late, investors have tolerated huge losses and interest rates have been cheap, but times are changing.

Although there are definitely some suckers out there who would buy another one after having nothing but problems already, some will be “Once bitten, twice shy.” about the whole idea.

If Biden stays in office, we’re looking at a future that is so jacked up, that the majority of people won’t even be able to afford to live at all anymore, much less worry about how they’re going to fare when their dependable old car finally does go and EVs aren’t just a bad idea, they’re the law.

Update: As you can see, Eric Sandeen has responded to my post:

So I read some more on his blog, and it turned out a man named Ken Clifton wrote:

Regarding our two LEAF(s) we traded both of them for Chevy Volts. I had one of the very first “Gid” meters built by Garry Giddings to check the battery capacity. After a year of ownership my 2012 was down to 85 percent. Based on that trend and at the time Nissan was still in a state of denial, I was desperate to get out of the car. My wife kept hers another year, but when winter was setting in 2014 the cold weather range was too tight for her to make it to work and picking up children. We have been very happy with the Volts. My 2013 Volt still has as much battery range as the day I picked it up. The cars have been outstanding for us.

–Ken Clifton

On his other post, Sandeen had a reader respond:

What can I do? I did not qualify for the new battery repalcement because I had neither 8 bars left or over 60,000 miles in 2017. I havE a 2012 LEAF, AND 60 MONTHS OR 60,000 MILES IS WHAT i NEEDED AT THAT TIME. help WHERE DOES THAT PUT ME??

-“Jose”

Sandeen suggested paying full price for the battery.

It also seems that to actually have any chance of getting Nissan to honor the battery warranty, you have to take it to the dealer every year for “battery software updates”.

This doesn’t sound promising. Many OEMs hide serious defects in their cars by updating the software so it doesn’t warn you there’s a problem, or changes how the car operates so it’s not as likely to explode, where the real fix would be tearing down the engine (Kia).

Maybe Nissan has some form of “battery throttling” like Apple does on the iPhone to keep people away from the service department demanding new batteries until it’s out of warranty. Who knows? It’s proprietary, right? 🙂