21 ms·

One things this means is that cars are going to become as disposable as cell phones and laptops. As cars get assembled from larger components, damage to one are

One things this means is that cars are going to become as disposable as cell phones and laptops. As cars get assembled from larger components, damage to one area of the car will have larger effects. This will increase repair costs, more often pushing them over the limit to declare the car a total loss. I can’t quickly find the numbers, but I know that car repair costs are going up and repair rates are going down, and have been for decades. The reason is obvious: the benefits of a modern car come at a cost. E.g., cars are much safer now, partly thanks to airbags; those are expensive to replace. My car has 11 airbags, and if they all popped off at once that alone would probably total it. Years ago I was in a collision which bent that frame of my car. That’s usually game-ending, but this car has a modular frame, so they just bolted on a new frame component. Now, Mercedes have always (until lately, perhaps) been known as highly-repairable; it’s one reason they last so long. So it’s good that the right-to-repair movement is getting traction. We’re going to need to point it at cars soon, and for mechanical reasons.

sacrosancty 4y ago
[dead]
bryanlarsen 4y ago
The reason that your Mercedes was worth repairing was because it was so expensive. Most cars get written off with $15,000 worth of damage simply because most cars aren't worth $15,000.
- sonofhans 4y ago
  Actually, I got it used for about that amount, and many years before the collision. You may not know -- forgive me if I'm wrong -- but damage to a car frame totals the car. Frames have crumple zones, the activation of which destroys that part of the frame. No insurance company will sanction repair of it. This only worked because the frame was modular to begin with, a rarity, so they could replace only the damaged part. IOW the car was built to be repairable. This increased its final cost, but means that it's still on the road today, rather than in a scrapyard.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    >You may not know -- forgive me if I'm wrong -- but damage to a car frame totals the car. This is a pretty safe general rule, but it is not absolute. I had a brand new truck < 6 months old where I was hit from behind in stop-n-go traffic. The insurance company did not want to total it because the repair could be made for less than the value of the total. I asked how a frame could be repaired, and they just said it can be done. My counter was that the vehicle would now show frame repair and would have no value for trade-in nor would someone other than less than reputable dealers offer a car with repaired frame damage. So, depending on the insurance company (Progressive was pushing for the repair. I hate Flo), some will argue against frame damage being an automatic total.
    - YeahNO 4y ago
      I've had a car in a crash that should've been totaled. I was rear-ended by a truck while stopped about two months after my previous car was totaled (t-boned by an drunk driver). The insurance company balked at a 2nd total in that time period and demanded it be repaired. The total repair cost came to almost $5,000 over the KBB value. The rear end had been accordioned and the repair company straightened it out (you can indeed straighten frames with the proper alignment tooling) having to replace all the panels past the doors. They claimed it was back to spec, but it never tracked correctly in turns after the repair job. I sold it shortly after for about what I paid.
      - joering2 4y ago
        > I sold it shortly after for about what I paid. How did you manage to do that? Was that in USA? I presume damage was on record with CarFax, etc. Did you tell new owner what happened to the car? Finally - if you were able to show the car does not track correctly, wouldn't that be enough to re-open the claim and go back to your insurance company to properly fix it (most likely replace it at this point?)
        bombcar 4y ago
        Once cars hit a certain price people know they’re all sorts of messed up but don’t care. You can find things on salvage titles that are literally two or three cars welded together.
kjksf 4y ago
Munroe addressed this complaint and his point was: if the collision is bad enough that it damages that cast, it would total a non-cast car as well. Plus you have to reason on the level of systems, not components. Single-piece rear casting replaces 70+ parts. Those parts have to be welded together by robots. Each weld is a potential failure point. Casting produces more reliable car with less variances which ends up lowering repair costs on global (system) level. https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1513886756923445254 https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1513886756923445254
- hef19898 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - Loughla 4y ago
    Expand on that comment, please.
  - djbusby 4y ago
    Which one? I can't tell cause i don't have experience.
    - numtel 4y ago
      Probably because welds are usually stronger than the materials they are binding. As far as casting, I would imagine that would result in more brittle components that would snap instead of bend in a crash.
      - galangalalgol 4y ago
        That depends on the metal and if it is post treated. Welded aluminum isn't as strong as the cast/extruded and heat treated pieces. Welding on 4130 steel can easily produce weaker joints if those joints are then treated. If they have an economical way to heat treat an entire cast piece, that might make it stronger than welded bits.
jollyllama 4y ago
All of the comparisons involved will probably be for unibody / monocoque vehicles, but comparisons to body on frame (Crown Vic) would be interesting.
post_break 4y ago
My Honda accord was $35,000. If the front is damaged just the headlights are $900 a piece. Ignoring structural issues with the unibody, the damage multiplier for new cars isn't the frame, but everything else. Headlights, fog, lights, sensors for adaptive cruise, calibrating the new sensor, bumper, paint, etc.
- function_seven 4y ago
  It’s insane. One of the stories about Chevrolet—when they were first designing the C5 Corvette—was that they took input from the insurance industry regarding repair costs. One example of this is the hood. The previous generation had a beautiful clamshell hood that wrapped down around the sides. Opening the hood made the front end almost look like an open-wheel car. But it was expensive to make in one piece, and the entire piece had to be replaced if any part of it was damaged. The C5 has a more conventional hood, with seams running along between the fenders and the hood panel. Not as pretty, but substantially cheaper to repair. So, $900 for a headlight? We need to strengthen (or better align) the incentives for carmakers to reduce component costs.
  - jcampbell1 4y ago
    There is a huge incentive misalignment. The customer pays monthly for “insurance” and the moral hazard, the insurance company then pays a repair company, who then pays the OEM for the headlight. The games all go away when the manufacturer sells the insurance, estimates how safe the driver is with data, and then handles the repairs. Tesla understands this and sees it as a way to beat the competition on total operating cost for the customer.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      I don't understand why more people don't check insurance rates before buying a car.
      - coredog64 4y ago
        Insurance rates will eventually be reflected in the way the market prices the car. It would be more efficient if people checked, but the current process is close enough.
elif 4y ago
If you bend a frame rail in a composite structure, you have x new welds you have to perform, y rivets, z bolts, w plastic pins and spacers. Some of those attachments were not designed to be removed and performed again, so you're looking at removing and replacing otherwise okay parts and then probably realizing that some other piece is slightly out of alignment and can't safely be reused... If you bend a a unibody casting, firstly there is a larger chance that it is non-critical since there is so much added mass and structure. It is not a series of dominos like in a composite. Secondly, all the attachment points are cast into the part. Replacement of one large piece is a significant reduction in effort, and results in more confidence in the ultimate repair.
- winrid 4y ago
  That "one large peice" is literally the entire unibody. You going to re-shell a street car like a racecar?
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >Some of those attachments were not designed to be removed and performed again Just because the OEM didn't bother to figure it out doesn't mean nobody can. There's all sorts of trick specialty repair parts and procedures in the aftermarket autobody industry to fill the gaps the OEM couldn't be bothered to.
SECProto 4y ago
> I know that car repair costs are going up and repair rates are going down, and have been for decades. The reason is obvious: Have you taken a car in for repair recently? I agree that the reason is obvious - parts labour costs make it no longer make sense. Just a brake job nowadays costs a thousand dollars or more (depending on car model etc), i.e. 3% of a brand new vehicle purchase price. There's no anti-features causing this, it's just labour charges increasing.
- sonofhans 4y ago
  Yeah, but why is that? Consider: I can repair a 1980 Mercedes with one box of tools I can carry. Spend a couple years with your dad working on old cars and you could, too. For a 2024 Mercedes I don’t think I’m even allowed to know what’s wrong with it. Hardly anything in modern cars is user-serviceable. Can I replace the airbags? Change their timing or velocity? Alter parameters of the antilock brakes, or emissions control? No way, never. Many of those systems have to be replaced wholesale by people specially trained. The same argument holds, and for similar reasons, with phones. Anyone with a screwdriver could service an old Bell phone. Today it’s almost impossible to take most of them apart at all without destroying them, and the majority of their function is completely invisible and untouchable anyway (software). We’ve added a huge amount of technology not just to vehicles, but to the tools we use to maintain them. Of course labor will be more expensive as it gets more specialized. Of course parts will be more expensive as they get more capable and more complex.
  - SECProto 4y ago
    None of that gets to the question of why a brake job specifically costs so much, which is why I used it as an example. Brakes are no harder to do than 3 decades ago (at least for my car). They cost a lot because of the cost of labour, primarily. Other work has different costs. The primary basis of your argument falls flat for me though. You don't need to repair new cars as much as you did 40 years ago. You never need to mess with your carburetor, spark plugs last a decade+, other stuff tends not to fail at nearly the rate it used to. My current car has 11 years and 250000 km on it, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to do any service aside from oil changes. (aside: why would I ever want to adjust airbag timing? And yes, if I somehow need to replace an airbag, I'll happily pay someone certified to do it. And if I buy a secondhand car, I'd really like to know that the person before me couldn't change airbag timing or velocity) I do feel a sense of foreboding when it comes to choosing my next vehicle though. I want a BEV, but they all have so much electronic junk in that I fiind to be actively detrimental. I recently drove a friend's (2017) Toyota for a weekend, some ice built up on the sensor (in the badge on the front bumper). The following day, when roads were clear, it wouldn't let me use regular cruise control because the sensor was still iced over. A different toyota wouldn't let me cross the lane lines to avoid a pothole. They'll both slow me well below the speed limit on the highway based on the car ahead of me, with no notification. I would pay more for a car with these "features" removed.
patwolf 4y ago
I read an article, probably a decade or more ago, about how bad it would be for NYC cab companies that Ford was discontinuing the Crown Vic. The reasoning was that repair costs would increase because it was the last vehicle where individual body panels were easily replaceable. It was also the last body-on-frame sedan, so you could feasibly swap out an entire chassis. I'd be curious what the long-term impact was, or whether Uber made all that irrelevant.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Probably still cheaper to operate a Corolla, especially when everyone on the planet knows how to fix them.
pengaru 4y ago
One could make the same argument about batteries in EVs making cars more disposable. The insurers are going to total any vehicle having the slightest damage to its battery module between the high risk of incorrectly assessing its safety, and its high cost of replacement...
nradov 4y ago
Repairability for collision damage is a lost cause. Let's focus on collision prevention instead. The latest generation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems are already bringing collision rates down for newer cars and there is much room for improvement.
eternityforest 4y ago
Most cars don't seem to fail because of structural damage. How relevant is repairability? Is the expected material use and expected cost to the consumer more or less for repairable vs gigapress?
mauvehaus 4y ago
I was talking to a body shop about unibody construction in the context of some rust repair several years ago. Basically, for a lot of cars, if it isn't a bolt on part, it's already supplied as one big piece from the manufacturer. Like, the whole side of the car sized piece. Whether that's one stamping or several welded together (or bonded), it's a cut and weld job for a collision repair. A small enough rust repair can be made up from sheet metal, but not a serious collision. Also: paint. It's never one panel. They usually have to feather in the color on the adjacent panels because getting a perfect match is tough despite computers, etc. You need one panel painted, and you're pretty quickly looking at getting 3 or 4 painted (or at least attended to). Even discounting airbags, it doesn't take much to total out even a five to seven year old car these days.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Also totalling is “back to how it was” - a single hail storm totaled my wife’s car because that many dents can’t be undented. So we took that and bought the totaled car back and still use it.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Username checks out
fiftyfifty 4y ago
If you look at the breakdown of the Model Y with the casted front end and back end by Munroe on Youtube it's fairly modular, with a front end cast and back end cast both bolted to the battery pack in the middle, and the top of the car lowered onto the base. If one of these casts were damaged in an accident but the rest of the car was OK, it might make more sense to just replace the entire front end or back end cast with a new one.
barney54 4y ago
The average price of a new car in the US is now $50k. That’s not a disposable purchase.
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  I originally thought that too, but neither are laptops or mobile phones. However, it seems the OP is talking about disposable in the sense that they cannot be repaired, so must be disposed/replaced if they incur any damage.
prawn 4y ago
Is it the William Gibson book where future cars are described as having a cardboard exterior?
emmelaich 4y ago
The same issue happened when they moved from chassis + wagon to monocoque. It's still an improvement.
jacquesm 4y ago
The main reason why MB lasts so long is due to a single component in the engine, they still use a chain rather than a timing belt. This one little change has so much impact on the rest of the engine design that they tend to last very long compared to cars that have timing belts. Suddenly a whole pile of stuff is happening inside the engine enclosure instead of outside of it reducing the number of seals and in general reducing complexity outside of the engine core. It also reduces the need for complex service. It's a bit old fashioned, timing belts result in an engine that runs a little bit more quiet and they make for a lighter package. So it's easy to see why many manufacturers would choose that option. But MB got that bit right (they also got plenty wrong, their software for instance absolutely sucks).
- ptmcc 4y ago
  You are right that chains are superior to belts, but MB is hardly the only manufacturer using timing chains. Chains are actually becoming more popular, not less popular, especially as interference engines have also become more common. My 2021 Mazda uses a timing chain. My 2004 BMW uses a timing chain. My old 1990 BMW had a chain. My folks' 2019 Lexus and 2016 Toyota both use chains. Honda was a notorious holdout that still mostly used belts for a long time, but even they are coming around and some new models use chains now.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Interesting! So there is a kind of resurgence in this. Nice to see that other manufacturers take the longevity and service of their engines serious for personal transportation. There was a point in time where MB seemed to be the lone holdout and the only other manufacturers that used chains were mostly making trucks (and Porsche). To me it's a no brainer, especially with an engine where the pistons don't clear the valves when they are active. The kind of engine damage that a broken timing belt results in is usually enough to completely scrap the engine. I wonder if those other manufacturers chains are also rated for the life of the engine or rather not.
    - ptmcc 4y ago
tomcam 4y ago
Hasn't this been true since unibody construction prevailed?
andreareina 4y ago
Right to repair has nothing to do with how easy it is, only that access to parts, manuals etc isn't restricted and that the repair doesn't require authorisation.
squishy47 4y ago
lots of people talking about repair costs. Mat Armstrong's channel (https://www.youtube.com/@MatArmstrongbmx https://www.youtube.com/@MatArmstrongbmx) is good for this. Pretty interesting to see him repair crashed cars on his drive and the prices of the parts. especially the newer lambo series. (edit - Englishing better)
kjellsbells 4y ago
Also interesting to consider the third or fourth act of cars. There are a lot of beaten up mercedes 190s and toyotas in poorer countries that people run for decades. Many of them were once used in richer countries before being shipped overseas. I wonder what happens when such vehicles cannot be economically repaired, since that is a key part of the value prop?

sacrosancty 4y ago

[dead]

bryanlarsen 4y ago

The reason that your Mercedes was worth repairing was because it was so expensive. Most cars get written off with $15,000 worth of damage simply because most cars aren't worth $15,000.

sonofhans 4y ago
Actually, I got it used for about that amount, and many years before the collision. You may not know -- forgive me if I'm wrong -- but damage to a car frame totals the car. Frames have crumple zones, the activation of which destroys that part of the frame. No insurance company will sanction repair of it. This only worked because the frame was modular to begin with, a rarity, so they could replace only the damaged part. IOW the car was built to be repairable. This increased its final cost, but means that it's still on the road today, rather than in a scrapyard.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >You may not know -- forgive me if I'm wrong -- but damage to a car frame totals the car. This is a pretty safe general rule, but it is not absolute. I had a brand new truck < 6 months old where I was hit from behind in stop-n-go traffic. The insurance company did not want to total it because the repair could be made for less than the value of the total. I asked how a frame could be repaired, and they just said it can be done. My counter was that the vehicle would now show frame repair and would have no value for trade-in nor would someone other than less than reputable dealers offer a car with repaired frame damage. So, depending on the insurance company (Progressive was pushing for the repair. I hate Flo), some will argue against frame damage being an automatic total.
  - YeahNO 4y ago
    I've had a car in a crash that should've been totaled. I was rear-ended by a truck while stopped about two months after my previous car was totaled (t-boned by an drunk driver). The insurance company balked at a 2nd total in that time period and demanded it be repaired. The total repair cost came to almost $5,000 over the KBB value. The rear end had been accordioned and the repair company straightened it out (you can indeed straighten frames with the proper alignment tooling) having to replace all the panels past the doors. They claimed it was back to spec, but it never tracked correctly in turns after the repair job. I sold it shortly after for about what I paid.
    - joering2 4y ago
      > I sold it shortly after for about what I paid. How did you manage to do that? Was that in USA? I presume damage was on record with CarFax, etc. Did you tell new owner what happened to the car? Finally - if you were able to show the car does not track correctly, wouldn't that be enough to re-open the claim and go back to your insurance company to properly fix it (most likely replace it at this point?)
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Once cars hit a certain price people know they’re all sorts of messed up but don’t care. You can find things on salvage titles that are literally two or three cars welded together.

kjksf 4y ago

Munroe addressed this complaint and his point was: if the collision is bad enough that it damages that cast, it would total a non-cast car as well. Plus you have to reason on the level of systems, not components. Single-piece rear casting replaces 70+ parts. Those parts have to be welded together by robots. Each weld is a potential failure point. Casting produces more reliable car with less variances which ends up lowering repair costs on global (system) level. https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1513886756923445254 https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1513886756923445254

hef19898 4y ago
[flagged]
- Loughla 4y ago
  Expand on that comment, please.
- djbusby 4y ago
  Which one? I can't tell cause i don't have experience.
  - numtel 4y ago
    Probably because welds are usually stronger than the materials they are binding. As far as casting, I would imagine that would result in more brittle components that would snap instead of bend in a crash.
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      That depends on the metal and if it is post treated. Welded aluminum isn't as strong as the cast/extruded and heat treated pieces. Welding on 4130 steel can easily produce weaker joints if those joints are then treated. If they have an economical way to heat treat an entire cast piece, that might make it stronger than welded bits.

jollyllama 4y ago

All of the comparisons involved will probably be for unibody / monocoque vehicles, but comparisons to body on frame (Crown Vic) would be interesting.

post_break 4y ago

My Honda accord was $35,000. If the front is damaged just the headlights are $900 a piece. Ignoring structural issues with the unibody, the damage multiplier for new cars isn't the frame, but everything else. Headlights, fog, lights, sensors for adaptive cruise, calibrating the new sensor, bumper, paint, etc.

function_seven 4y ago
It’s insane. One of the stories about Chevrolet—when they were first designing the C5 Corvette—was that they took input from the insurance industry regarding repair costs. One example of this is the hood. The previous generation had a beautiful clamshell hood that wrapped down around the sides. Opening the hood made the front end almost look like an open-wheel car. But it was expensive to make in one piece, and the entire piece had to be replaced if any part of it was damaged. The C5 has a more conventional hood, with seams running along between the fenders and the hood panel. Not as pretty, but substantially cheaper to repair. So, $900 for a headlight? We need to strengthen (or better align) the incentives for carmakers to reduce component costs.
- jcampbell1 4y ago
  There is a huge incentive misalignment. The customer pays monthly for “insurance” and the moral hazard, the insurance company then pays a repair company, who then pays the OEM for the headlight. The games all go away when the manufacturer sells the insurance, estimates how safe the driver is with data, and then handles the repairs. Tesla understands this and sees it as a way to beat the competition on total operating cost for the customer.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    I don't understand why more people don't check insurance rates before buying a car.
    - coredog64 4y ago
      Insurance rates will eventually be reflected in the way the market prices the car. It would be more efficient if people checked, but the current process is close enough.

elif 4y ago

If you bend a frame rail in a composite structure, you have x new welds you have to perform, y rivets, z bolts, w plastic pins and spacers. Some of those attachments were not designed to be removed and performed again, so you're looking at removing and replacing otherwise okay parts and then probably realizing that some other piece is slightly out of alignment and can't safely be reused... If you bend a a unibody casting, firstly there is a larger chance that it is non-critical since there is so much added mass and structure. It is not a series of dominos like in a composite. Secondly, all the attachment points are cast into the part. Replacement of one large piece is a significant reduction in effort, and results in more confidence in the ultimate repair.

winrid 4y ago
That "one large peice" is literally the entire unibody. You going to re-shell a street car like a racecar?
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>Some of those attachments were not designed to be removed and performed again Just because the OEM didn't bother to figure it out doesn't mean nobody can. There's all sorts of trick specialty repair parts and procedures in the aftermarket autobody industry to fill the gaps the OEM couldn't be bothered to.

SECProto 4y ago

> I know that car repair costs are going up and repair rates are going down, and have been for decades. The reason is obvious: Have you taken a car in for repair recently? I agree that the reason is obvious - parts labour costs make it no longer make sense. Just a brake job nowadays costs a thousand dollars or more (depending on car model etc), i.e. 3% of a brand new vehicle purchase price. There's no anti-features causing this, it's just labour charges increasing.

sonofhans 4y ago
Yeah, but why is that? Consider: I can repair a 1980 Mercedes with one box of tools I can carry. Spend a couple years with your dad working on old cars and you could, too. For a 2024 Mercedes I don’t think I’m even allowed to know what’s wrong with it. Hardly anything in modern cars is user-serviceable. Can I replace the airbags? Change their timing or velocity? Alter parameters of the antilock brakes, or emissions control? No way, never. Many of those systems have to be replaced wholesale by people specially trained. The same argument holds, and for similar reasons, with phones. Anyone with a screwdriver could service an old Bell phone. Today it’s almost impossible to take most of them apart at all without destroying them, and the majority of their function is completely invisible and untouchable anyway (software). We’ve added a huge amount of technology not just to vehicles, but to the tools we use to maintain them. Of course labor will be more expensive as it gets more specialized. Of course parts will be more expensive as they get more capable and more complex.
- SECProto 4y ago
  None of that gets to the question of why a brake job specifically costs so much, which is why I used it as an example. Brakes are no harder to do than 3 decades ago (at least for my car). They cost a lot because of the cost of labour, primarily. Other work has different costs. The primary basis of your argument falls flat for me though. You don't need to repair new cars as much as you did 40 years ago. You never need to mess with your carburetor, spark plugs last a decade+, other stuff tends not to fail at nearly the rate it used to. My current car has 11 years and 250000 km on it, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to do any service aside from oil changes. (aside: why would I ever want to adjust airbag timing? And yes, if I somehow need to replace an airbag, I'll happily pay someone certified to do it. And if I buy a secondhand car, I'd really like to know that the person before me couldn't change airbag timing or velocity) I do feel a sense of foreboding when it comes to choosing my next vehicle though. I want a BEV, but they all have so much electronic junk in that I fiind to be actively detrimental. I recently drove a friend's (2017) Toyota for a weekend, some ice built up on the sensor (in the badge on the front bumper). The following day, when roads were clear, it wouldn't let me use regular cruise control because the sensor was still iced over. A different toyota wouldn't let me cross the lane lines to avoid a pothole. They'll both slow me well below the speed limit on the highway based on the car ahead of me, with no notification. I would pay more for a car with these "features" removed.

patwolf 4y ago

I read an article, probably a decade or more ago, about how bad it would be for NYC cab companies that Ford was discontinuing the Crown Vic. The reasoning was that repair costs would increase because it was the last vehicle where individual body panels were easily replaceable. It was also the last body-on-frame sedan, so you could feasibly swap out an entire chassis. I'd be curious what the long-term impact was, or whether Uber made all that irrelevant.

Scoundreller 4y ago
Probably still cheaper to operate a Corolla, especially when everyone on the planet knows how to fix them.

pengaru 4y ago

One could make the same argument about batteries in EVs making cars more disposable. The insurers are going to total any vehicle having the slightest damage to its battery module between the high risk of incorrectly assessing its safety, and its high cost of replacement...

nradov 4y ago

Repairability for collision damage is a lost cause. Let's focus on collision prevention instead. The latest generation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems are already bringing collision rates down for newer cars and there is much room for improvement.

eternityforest 4y ago

Most cars don't seem to fail because of structural damage. How relevant is repairability? Is the expected material use and expected cost to the consumer more or less for repairable vs gigapress?

mauvehaus 4y ago

I was talking to a body shop about unibody construction in the context of some rust repair several years ago. Basically, for a lot of cars, if it isn't a bolt on part, it's already supplied as one big piece from the manufacturer. Like, the whole side of the car sized piece. Whether that's one stamping or several welded together (or bonded), it's a cut and weld job for a collision repair. A small enough rust repair can be made up from sheet metal, but not a serious collision. Also: paint. It's never one panel. They usually have to feather in the color on the adjacent panels because getting a perfect match is tough despite computers, etc. You need one panel painted, and you're pretty quickly looking at getting 3 or 4 painted (or at least attended to). Even discounting airbags, it doesn't take much to total out even a five to seven year old car these days.

bombcar 4y ago
Also totalling is “back to how it was” - a single hail storm totaled my wife’s car because that many dents can’t be undented. So we took that and bought the totaled car back and still use it.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Username checks out

fiftyfifty 4y ago

If you look at the breakdown of the Model Y with the casted front end and back end by Munroe on Youtube it's fairly modular, with a front end cast and back end cast both bolted to the battery pack in the middle, and the top of the car lowered onto the base. If one of these casts were damaged in an accident but the rest of the car was OK, it might make more sense to just replace the entire front end or back end cast with a new one.

barney54 4y ago

The average price of a new car in the US is now $50k. That’s not a disposable purchase.

RugnirViking 4y ago
I originally thought that too, but neither are laptops or mobile phones. However, it seems the OP is talking about disposable in the sense that they cannot be repaired, so must be disposed/replaced if they incur any damage.

prawn 4y ago

Is it the William Gibson book where future cars are described as having a cardboard exterior?

emmelaich 4y ago

The same issue happened when they moved from chassis + wagon to monocoque. It's still an improvement.

jacquesm 4y ago

The main reason why MB lasts so long is due to a single component in the engine, they still use a chain rather than a timing belt. This one little change has so much impact on the rest of the engine design that they tend to last very long compared to cars that have timing belts. Suddenly a whole pile of stuff is happening inside the engine enclosure instead of outside of it reducing the number of seals and in general reducing complexity outside of the engine core. It also reduces the need for complex service. It's a bit old fashioned, timing belts result in an engine that runs a little bit more quiet and they make for a lighter package. So it's easy to see why many manufacturers would choose that option. But MB got that bit right (they also got plenty wrong, their software for instance absolutely sucks).

ptmcc 4y ago
You are right that chains are superior to belts, but MB is hardly the only manufacturer using timing chains. Chains are actually becoming more popular, not less popular, especially as interference engines have also become more common. My 2021 Mazda uses a timing chain. My 2004 BMW uses a timing chain. My old 1990 BMW had a chain. My folks' 2019 Lexus and 2016 Toyota both use chains. Honda was a notorious holdout that still mostly used belts for a long time, but even they are coming around and some new models use chains now.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Interesting! So there is a kind of resurgence in this. Nice to see that other manufacturers take the longevity and service of their engines serious for personal transportation. There was a point in time where MB seemed to be the lone holdout and the only other manufacturers that used chains were mostly making trucks (and Porsche). To me it's a no brainer, especially with an engine where the pistons don't clear the valves when they are active. The kind of engine damage that a broken timing belt results in is usually enough to completely scrap the engine. I wonder if those other manufacturers chains are also rated for the life of the engine or rather not.
  - ptmcc 4y ago

tomcam 4y ago

Hasn't this been true since unibody construction prevailed?

andreareina 4y ago

Right to repair has nothing to do with how easy it is, only that access to parts, manuals etc isn't restricted and that the repair doesn't require authorisation.

squishy47 4y ago

lots of people talking about repair costs. Mat Armstrong's channel (https://www.youtube.com/@MatArmstrongbmx https://www.youtube.com/@MatArmstrongbmx) is good for this. Pretty interesting to see him repair crashed cars on his drive and the prices of the parts. especially the newer lambo series. (edit - Englishing better)

kjellsbells 4y ago

Also interesting to consider the third or fourth act of cars. There are a lot of beaten up mercedes 190s and toyotas in poorer countries that people run for decades. Many of them were once used in richer countries before being shipped overseas. I wonder what happens when such vehicles cannot be economically repaired, since that is a key part of the value prop?