It's hard to imagine that, after all the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into this company, they would choose to charge the customer > $30K for a new battery in the few cases where this occurred. Is it really worth a few hundred thousand dollars to get the PR this article implies?

And, why isn't there a failsafe mechanism that simply stops draining the battery completely before this happens? Then at least you can tow it home and recharge it -- inconvenient, but not $30K inconvenient.