[bcrl]

Dealers are known for being expensive. Furthermore, $60k is mostly a "go away" price from the dealer signalling that they don't have the skills and don't want to take on the risk on learning the skills needed to make the repair. The end result is that the article says more about the dealer than the manufacturer. There are plenty of decent third party mechanics in the world that are willing to try.

There's a similar video on youtube about repairing a dent in a Rivian truck. The official repair by a dealer was quoted at more than $40k as it involved replacing the entire single piece panel that was "damaged". Instead, a small auto body shop spent the 2 days needed to gently pull out the dent, fill in the scratches and touch up the paint for something like $3k.

Not all mechanics are created equal. Find one that's willing to work with you, which will become easier as electric vehicles become more common.

[wakawaka28]

If you have a warranty, you may be obligated to go to the dealer or forfeit the warranty if I'm not mistaken. I never had this issue though. If the dealer wants you to gtfo with that garbage, a nearly new vehicle with their name on it, why do you think anyone else would be better able to do the job? I think a particular dealer not able to do the work would refer you to another dealer who could, if it was just a skill issue.

The problem with the Rivian was the body is all in one piece and made of aluminum, which is not easily reworked. Making the bed of a truck out of a soft metal that is hard to rework is a bad idea. But perhaps there is someone out there who could do it cheap.

[bcrl]

Dealerships are like any other business: some of them are incompetent at certain tasks. My entire point is that if one dealer is not doing a good job, then go to someone else that is willing to try to do a better job.

[wakawaka28]

Generally I agree, but only the dealers and manufacturer have all the technical data, software, and access to parts for these cars. They would not take telling a customer the job is infeasible lightly, especially if they have a warranty. They would probably send the customer to a different repair shop in their network if that was possible and necessary.

[bcrl]

Your faith in dealerships is unreasonably high. Based on my experiences maintaining a fleet of trucks for my company in addition to my personal vehicles, there are most certainly dealerships / mechanics that are incompetent and unable to fix certain problems within a reasonable amount of time. Their mechanics are not magicians, and they vary in skill level significantly. Sometimes a quick 5 minutes spent on the internet will find a solution for a problem that the dealer's mechanics are clueless about, as was the case with the anti-theft lockout on the Alero I had. The stand-pipe issue on one of the older diesel trucks took the mechanic $3k worth of time to diagnose and fix, but once we knew about it, we found out that the issue was quite common for engines of that vintage (and we later found out that the other stand pipe in the engine had already been replaced by another mechanic prior to our purchase of that truck).

Other times a mechanic shows a degree of cleverness that makes them well worth compensating them for the time, like using an infrared camera app on their phone to find a wiring harness short in a minute rather than spending hours crawling around the chassis.