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"Minor body damage" usually means paneling and brackets. Chassis damage to aluminum frames almost always means replacement AFAICT, which for all but the newest
by ajross 4y ago
"Minor body damage" usually means paneling and brackets. Chassis damage to aluminum frames almost always means replacement AFAICT, which for all but the newest cars is more than the cost of replacement anyway. Remember also that modern crumple zone design deliberately sacrifices the frame as part of the collision for safety reasons.
Basically, this doesn't seem right to me. If you're hit hard enough to bend the frame, your car is totalled anyway. And that's the way we want it.
- mschuster91 4y ago> Basically, this doesn't seem right to me. If you're hit hard enough to bend the frame, your car is totalled anyway. And that's the way we want it. It's horribly wasteful from a resource usage perspective, because now you have to throw away the rest of the car - you can't even, say, splice together a new car out of one that has a bent front and one that has a bent back. Everything in society moves towards easier and cheaper manufacture, but at the same time to dramatically lower repairability, and that's just Not Good At All.
- ajross 4y agoTo keep you from dying, though. This isn't a phone. If you want to make an efficiency-based argument against personal automobiles from first principles, I'm right behind you. But given that we're going to drive them around, I'd rather drive ones that kill fewer people; even if it means having to recycle a bunch of frames.
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago> you can't even, say, splice together a new car out of one that has a bent front and one that has a bent back Nobody was doing this anyway.
- HideousKojima 4y agoI mean I once saw an episode of Pimp My Ride where a guy was driving together a car made from 2 cars welded together, but it's definitely not standard practice
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoOk not nobody. But effectively nobody.
- kube-system 4y agoThere used to be shops that would "weld on a new front clip". I know someone who had insurance pay for this type of repair on a unibody car in the late 80s. Not as common in the US anymore, but if you peruse youtube autobody videos you can find shops in asia and the middle east doing these repairs on late model vehicles.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago> now you have to throw away the rest of the car You ever been to an auto wrecker? Not much gets thrown away. Eventually whatever's left will go to a metal recycler. Steel, aluminium, copper, it's all extremely recyclable. There'll be some plastic waste, sure, but we can just bury that if there's no good recycling option.
- londons_explore 4y ago> wasteful from a resource usage perspective The materials in a car are pretty recyclable. Aluminium and steel especially so. The biggest environmental cost of a car is arguably the people who put it together. Ie. the emissions of the person who put it together, and his house and family. If you use fewer people to assemble a thing, the environmental emissions go down (if you count human labor as having associated emissions).
- mschuster91 4y ago> The materials in a car are pretty recyclable. Aluminium and steel especially so. Yes, but melting down metals costs a lot of energy and emits a ton of nasty stuff into the air. That's the reason why so many smelters moved to Asia, cheap energy from burning coal and next to zero emissions regulations there.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoIt’s more wasteful if someone dies driving a ‘repaired’ vehicle that shouldn’t have been repaired in the first place.