Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

[ Problem 1 ] Quality control and faulty unit: The kit I received appears to have a bad battery. In just a few seconds, it goes from supposedly fully charged to auto-shutdown due to supposed low battery. After resting for a few seconds it once again believes it is fully charged, but trying to use it again only works for a few seconds before auto-shutdown and red "low battery" indicators. This is not a great start. My central motivation in buying into a battery-based system was the dream of higher reliability with lower maintenance cost/effort compared to my gas tools. OK so this is incredibly frustrating, but surely EGO is a modern company with modern e-commerce-speed customer expectations in mind... I'm sure if I give them a call or visit their website they'll have a replacement battery out to me in no time. Right? Wrong. So very wrong. [ Problem 2 ] EGO customer support experience: 1. Went on their website. There is no chat support. That is annoying as now I'll have to stop multi-tasking and either sit on hold or wait who knows how long for an email response. 2. Website gives the option to fill out an email-like for or to call, but strongly recommends that for warranty issues it is best to call, but it is outside their call support hours. Will have to try again the next day. 3. Sent an "email" through their online form, other than an automated acknowledgment email never heard back from them on this. 4. Made my second call the following day, got a message that their system was overwhelmed and they couldn't even put me on hold or offer a callback. The message said to try again the next day "at my earliest convenience". Funny they should use that word convenience. 5. Made my third call the following day. Got a message that they were sorry to be very busy, but they could offer me a callback. Left my number. Got a callback several hours later but unfortunately missed it. In the voicemail they left they said they would try again soon. Never heard anything more from this. 6. Made my fourth call a couple of days later. Again registered for a callback. Got the callback later in the day. While the agent was friendly she was unable to help. Instead of sending me a new battery, she indicated that I should take my charger and battery to a local home depot tool rental department as they would be able to do diagnostic testing there. After that, I was to call EGO again (!) and let them know the results of the diagnostic. 7. Went to home depot. The guy at the tool rental counter rolled his eyes as soon as I said "EGO", and let me know that I had been misinformed. They don't do any diagnostics there. They can accept the parts there and ship them off for testing to be done. I would get the parts back and the diagnostic results in four to eight weeks (!!!). I decline. 8. Here I stand today, still unable to trim the trees at the center of this whole ordeal. Clearly I should have washed my hands of this and just returned the whole thing to Amazon after step 1 or 2. In retrospect, I think I had placed too much faith in EGO based on all the hype. Maybe the battery electric power tool market isn't quite there yet, or maybe I should have gone with a different battery-electric vendor.