Gold Peak on purchasing replacement NiMH cells

Before the acquisition announcement, I had been trying to broker a deal with Gold Peak Industries North America for puchase of replacement NiMH cells through a local EV component distributor owned by James Morrison, who also has a dead Vectrix adorning his garage.

Well, on Thursday I received a call back from Patrick Huberty, the Business Development Manager for Gold Peak Industries North America. Unfortunately, he says that OEM business for their EV products is already overwhelming existing staff and they’ve decided not to deal with smaller distributors or end users. I think it’s only partly due to the lack of bandwidth, however, since he also expressed a liability concern about uncontrolled handling and the safety implications. With OEMs they can ensure happy customers by overseeing shipping, handling, and assembly...but that’s not true for do-it-yourself conversions or end user repairs. As we all know, NiMH cells can't sit on shelves for months, which makes them very different from after market parts for your Mustang performance mod.

Of course, with Vectrix as a wholly-owned subsidiary, there’s now the fact that more revenues for the corporation can be generated (and likely more satisfactory results, to be fair) if the repair or refurbishing is handled by authorized Vectrix service centers. He’s promised to get back to me with a contact at Vectrix who will be authorizing service centers and my hope is that they’ll be able to refurbish damaged battery packs at a significantly lower cost than replacement. We’ll see.

During the conversation, I let slip my concern that end user warrantee claims might not be honored after the $2M set aside was used to pay other debts. While clearly cautious about building up my expectations or making any promises, he seemed rather optimistic that those of us with damaged battery packs would be able to get them replaced if we filed our claim by January 5th.