I asked Dave Olsen directly today about these. There's 2 things.
1. the gearboxes are dry. Twist off the trucks and grease.
2. The headlight wires are rubbing the flywheel. This takes out a lot of stuff if it shorts.
He told me it was ok to open them up and make sure the headlight wires are out of the way or otherwise protected (tape, heat shrink, etc...), and if they still went bad then I could still send them in.
I haven't even taken mine out of the box yet, but I'm going to pop them all open and make sure the wires are well tied up before firing them up.