Anyone have a favorite, reliable, knowledgeable EV shop in the Northern Ca?
~350 mi. north of NorCal in NE Portland:
Alex Bessinger
WattWorks
8750 NE Emerson St.
Portland, OR, 97220
+1 (971)-444-5064
[email protected]
He is an extremely experienced RAV4 EV tech, and has kindly put many vids on YT about various issues with them.
Question: 1. Does anyone else have a “Check EV system” warning and there car works perfectly?
Well. This is tricky. Yes, this can happen. My understanding, which may be only partially reflected in reality: if there's a Tesla 'w' (warning) DTC, it can trigger the Toyota side to maintain the "Check EV system" message on the IC for a number of ON/OFF cycles. If the DTC remains a 'w', the "Check EV" may roll off and stop being displayed after that. A transient DTC, if you will.
If there's a Tesla 'f' (fault) code, Tesla will re-trigger the Toyota side and Toyota will not clear the "Check EV" on the IC no matter how many ON/OFF cycles.
Some 'w' DTCs can allow the car do drive normally, or somewhat normally. You can't know much more than that without knowing what the Tesla DTCs are or were. This is even more complicated on this car because the Tesla side frequently will
not store DTCs after an ON/OFF! So for intermittent Tesla-side problems, you have to read the DTC(s) before cycling the Power button.
If you are interested in some low-cost triage, before transporting your vehicle to a shop -- knowing something about the upcoming repair puts you in a better position to evaluate options, rather than just taking Toyota's word for it -- then you might want to
obtain the Tesla diagnostic software (free, for a somewhat-reduced-capability version) and an
adapter cable (at my cost) and let it tell you what it can.
They said there was an error indicated inside the battery with the contactors . . . 2. Does anyone have contactor problems with their battery and harm is it to the car? 3. Are the contactors difficult to change?
The most common contactors issue is overheating/welding and failure, often resulting in a Tesla DTC of BMS_f038, but there are others; I have not heard of any repeat failures of contactors, once they've been replaced (with different, better contactors, of course). It was a teething issue with the early Model S and RAV4 EV. I have just replaced mine, and am awaiting a non-rainy day next week to reinstall my HV battery pack. Read
here for the gory details, with lots and lots of pictures.
As Matt indicated, the 900 lb. HV battery must be dropped out from under the car (easy), to top removed and cleaned up (hard), contactors replaced (fairly easy), the lid refurbished (if paint is peeling, like mine) and reinstalled (not too difficult), then reinstall the pack to the vehicle (fairly easy). This is all straightforward if space, time, and tools are on hand, but it's not everyone's DIY job.
Lastly, the Drive Unit (we call it the LDU, for Large Drive Unit, because that's common community-speak for the Tesla version of it) has a liquid-cooled rotor with a sealing issue that even Tesla has given up trying to fix permanently; Tesla Reman LDUs for Model S/X are now supplied with a coolant manifold that bypasses cooling the rotor, which eliminates the issue, but so far nobody has reported seeing a Reman
RAV4 EV LDU with this newer revision coolant manifold.
Unless you can verify that your replaced LDU has this newer coolant manifold, everyone will agree that you should strongly consider an aftermarket coolant manifold solution to effect the same outcome, as Tesla will not sell you that manifold. Much more information is in
this thread. Alex sells and installs one version.
