6 ms·

Here’s Why That Rivian R1T Repair Cost $42,000 After Just a Minor Fender-Bender

41 points by computerliker 3y ago

metadat 3y ago
Hope I never get into any bumps or collisions in this R1-T, these things are clearly an absolute nightmare to repair. That unibody design is epically bad, along the lines of Karmann-Ghia but even worse! https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/unipanel-1024x683.jpg https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/unip... Cool car though, one for the history books on the evolution of motorcars. A pleasure to drive, and superbonus of no Elon Asshat in the supply or shareholders chain.
- txcwpalpha 3y ago
  The unibody design, while still bad, actually seems to be a bit of a red herring in this case. The article describes that the actual cause for disassembling the entire vehicle was that they had to replace the tailgate, and had to repaint the body to match the new tailgate. Painting the body basically required disassembling the entire truck (which is also ridiculous). For the painting though, even in "simpler" cars, vehicle painting is ridiculously overpriced and complex, IMO. I've been quoted nearly $2000 to fix a dent the size of a nickel on my basic 10 year old car because the body shop said they'd have to repaint the entire door, then repaint all of the panels adjacent to the door to blend it in. In other words, fixing a dent the size of a nickel somehow requires repainting an area thousands of times larger. It's ridiculous. There must be a better way.
  - metadat 3y ago
    What did you end up doing to solve the nickel spot?
  - kylehotchkiss 3y ago
    There is: you can buy a bandaid car magnet from Amazon for $8 Magnet Me Up Band Aid Magnet Decal, 3x8 Inches Heavy Duty Automotive Magnet for Car Truck SUV https://a.co/d/dwWXKjr https://a.co/d/dwWXKjr
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    If you don’t care if the paint matches, you can repair only the small area. You can even use a rattle can if you want and don’t care about the appearance. If you want the paint to match closely and blend so the eye can’t readily see that a repair has been done, you need to do a lot more work to accomplish that. I had a driver back into my parked classic Mustang. They were not at all happy with the eventual cost of the repair, thinking that they could just pay out of pocket a few hundred bucks (really) because the dent wasn’t that bad in their opinion. Well, tough. The eventual repair was the entire fender and blend time for the hood and door, with associated labor for disassembly and reassembly because the car started with no detectable damage and that’s the state to which it needs to be returned.
  - anonuser123456 3y ago
    >There must be a better way. Don’t fix the dent?
  - thraway54321 3y ago
    If the paint is still intact in the damaged area you could look up a shop specializing in paintless dent repair or PDR as it is sometimes abbreviated.
antiterra 3y ago
A company’s employee backed my vehicle into another in a parking lot and it ended up being around $30,000 to fix. The high price was largely due to costs and required labor expertise to weld an aluminum body part that also functioned structurally. It sounds wild but the body shop made the case to the business’s insurer and convinced them it was absolutely necessary.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I’m surprised they don’t just sell the bumped car and give out a brand new one. The damage in the original is very small and I’d not mind having it as a beater.
  - ridgered4 3y ago
    My experience with old cars and full insurance coverage is if the car repairs cost more than the value of the car they just total it and pay out the estimated sale value of the car. Which isn't great if you were happy with the car. I remember my boss 15 years ago having an accident that totaled his old but reliable car because the trunk and read bumper were damaged. He bought the totaled car from the insurance company for $500 and just kept driving it. But it was a lot easier to get junker cars inspected back then.
anonuser123456 3y ago
We need limits on liability for cases like this. If you want to drive around a piece of engineering artwork... the risk should be on you. Every driver will (statistically) get into an accident at some point regardless of how cautious they are. It's not really fair to the average roadway user.
- mwint 3y ago
  Isn’t this practically true already? If this guy had been rear ended by an uninsured motorist in a ‘92 Beetle with $500 to their name, it’d be the Rivian owner and their insurance on the hook (if they have UM coverage!) Sure, you can sue the person who hit you civilly, but it’s not going to be worth it, because you aren’t going to get blood from a stone.
  - clnq 3y ago
    The problem is more so if I have $42k (in cash or other assets) but would rather not spend it on someone else’s truck bumper. Which I think is a common sense stance. Minor accidents happen to everyone. They should not be life-ending/cause total devastation in life.
    - fooker 3y ago
      That's why insurance exists. But there has to be a better way to handle this.
    - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
      In Europe it is covered by mandatory insurance. When you hit somebody (and it is your fault), your mandatory insurance covers the cost for repair for his car, but not for yours. If somebody hits you, his mandatory insurance covers your damages. Mandatory insurance is legally mandated to be used by every motorists and it is illegal to drive without it, which makes it pretty cheap.
      - eliaspro 3y ago
donmcronald 3y ago
I think the Lexus owner’s insurance should pay a standardized repair cost and the Rivian owner’s insurance should have to cover the difference. Why should I have to cover the cost of someone else’s poor decision to buy an ultra expensive to repair vehicle?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Why should I have to cover the cost of someone else’s poor decision to buy an ultra expensive to repair vehicle? You don't. You have to cover the cost of the damage you caused unlawfully, not the cost of their decision to buy an expensive to repair vehicle. Routine repairs that aren’t due to torts for which other people are liable are the reaponsibility of the owner, and those are the only ones that are natural consequences of the purchase decision. Consequences of tort are...consequences of tort. Victims don’t owe tortfeasors a duty of care to minimize likely damages in the event of tort. As to why you are liable for harms you caused even though they might have been cheaper were the victim differently situated, well, that’s basically the well-established “eggshell skull” rule of tort liability.
  - sieongioetnio 3y ago
    However you want to justify it, the result is the same: luxury toys are subsidized by people who don't buy them. Every expensive car sold makes everyone's insurance premiums go up. This is a transfer of wealth from the poor and the prudent to the rich and the vain. Any legal principle that supports that is wrong.
  - firstlink 3y ago
    It sounds like you are advocating for the deeply fascistic concept of "personal responsibility". Not a good look.
- fwlr 3y ago
  Under that system, a Honda Civic driver who’s angry about the ultra-rich could allow himself to ‘accidentally’ rear-end a Lamborghini, knowing that even though he will be found at fault, his insurance has a standardized repair cost cap, while the Lambo driver’s going to be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars (either directly, or his insurance costs are going to skyrocket). It might be possible to design a system that doesn’t have this perversity, but it’s hard to see how that could be possible without imparting at least a little bit of “that car looks expensive, I should take more care around it” expectation onto drivers of regular cars. I do agree that ultra-expensive-to-repair vehicles do impose extra costs, but I also think to some extent that cost is already priced-in by both insurance companies and the current system probably handles it better than it would with your proposed change.
dendrite9 3y ago
This line from one of the comments resonates with me. And I wish it didn't. One of my first product designs was too tightly integrated from the beginning between enclosure, PCBs, sensors, and even the firmware. There was never enough time to fully disentangle things, even some small changes took far more effort than they should have. Eventually we had to do an almost complete redesign while keeping all the important bits. I can't imagine doing that with the complexity and integration of a car would be easy for a young business to do. "I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but the biggest concern I have with Rivian after watching the Munro teardowns is that those trucks are full of too-complex designs that are so tightly integrated with the rest of the truck that you can’t trivially fix them up in a mid-cycle refresh."
- pja 3y ago
  Yes: the same design decisions that make these vehicles very expensive to repair also makes them hard to fix at the manufacturing stage since any change inevitably affects every other part of the design. Something to think about when designing systems!
Mizoguchi 3y ago
The statement below comes from Rivian's website. Doesn't designing a car in such way that it requires 20k-50k of parts and labor to fix the mildest and most common type of car accidents defeats the entire purpose of their mission? "Today we’re operating off hundreds of millions of years of accumulated plant- and animal-based carbon. On our current path, we will fully exhaust this stored energy in only a few generations and, in the process, carbonize our atmosphere to such a degree that life as we know it will not be possible. If the planet is to continue to sustain life and enchant future generations, we have to change. To build the kind of future our kids and our kids’ kids deserve, extraordinary steps must be taken to stop the carbonization of our atmosphere. This requires individuals and entire industries to come together in ways we never have before to transition the world toward sustainable energy. This is where Rivian’s potential lies — in creating solutions that shift consumer mindsets and inspire other companies to fundamentally change the way they operate. As staggering as this may sound, and as complex as our objective is, we already have everything we need to create change. It starts with harnessing the very thing every human being is born with: an adventurous spirit. There’s a reason we’re hardwired with curiosity and a capacity to invent better ways of doing things. The part of us that seeks to explore the world is the secret to making sure it remains a world worth exploring. Forever. "
- prepend 3y ago
  > the entire purpose of their mission? The entire purpose of their mission is selling $75k trucks to yuppies. They would sell kitten combustion engines if those were popular and rich people were willing to pay. This is neat tech. But the reason why repairs cost $20k is because people are willing to pay. Not designing for sustainability isn’t surprising to me. This is a trend with many car manufacturers now and I don’t think they care about low maintenance and repair costs. I had to pay $2k for a slight fender bender that just bent my bumper and I have a pretty regular car.
segmondy 3y ago
Welp, never buying a Rivian!
synaesthesisx 3y ago
If this ends up being the case, expect the costs to insure these things to skyrocket soon.
perryizgr8 3y ago
I view this as an engineering failure. The entire purpose of the bumper in a car is to absorb impacts and limit damage to the rest of the car. Here it is the opposite. The proper way to handle this is to price Rivian insurance accordingly. That will motivate owners and manufacturer to fix this quickly.
rasz 3y ago
No, it doesnt cost half of vehicle sticker to replace few panels. Someone is taking a piss and exploiting insurance system with insurance companies in on it like in health care. After all bigger payouts lead to fatter premiums.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fuzzfactor 3y ago
"Designed to be expensive" is a feature most people will never be able to afford. This is by design. Imagine how much climate damage is required just to earn the money to pay the tax on such a repair to a supposedly environmentally sound vehicle like this.
fwungy 3y ago
Sounds like a great off road vehicle.

41 points by computerliker 3y ago

Hope I never get into any bumps or collisions in this R1-T, these things are clearly an absolute nightmare to repair. That unibody design is epically bad, along the lines of Karmann-Ghia but even worse! https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/unipanel-1024x683.jpg https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/unip... Cool car though, one for the history books on the evolution of motorcars. A pleasure to drive, and superbonus of no Elon Asshat in the supply or shareholders chain.

txcwpalpha 3y ago
The unibody design, while still bad, actually seems to be a bit of a red herring in this case. The article describes that the actual cause for disassembling the entire vehicle was that they had to replace the tailgate, and had to repaint the body to match the new tailgate. Painting the body basically required disassembling the entire truck (which is also ridiculous). For the painting though, even in "simpler" cars, vehicle painting is ridiculously overpriced and complex, IMO. I've been quoted nearly $2000 to fix a dent the size of a nickel on my basic 10 year old car because the body shop said they'd have to repaint the entire door, then repaint all of the panels adjacent to the door to blend it in. In other words, fixing a dent the size of a nickel somehow requires repainting an area thousands of times larger. It's ridiculous. There must be a better way.
- metadat 3y ago
  What did you end up doing to solve the nickel spot?
- kylehotchkiss 3y ago
  There is: you can buy a bandaid car magnet from Amazon for $8 Magnet Me Up Band Aid Magnet Decal, 3x8 Inches Heavy Duty Automotive Magnet for Car Truck SUV https://a.co/d/dwWXKjr https://a.co/d/dwWXKjr
- sokoloff 3y ago
  If you don’t care if the paint matches, you can repair only the small area. You can even use a rattle can if you want and don’t care about the appearance. If you want the paint to match closely and blend so the eye can’t readily see that a repair has been done, you need to do a lot more work to accomplish that. I had a driver back into my parked classic Mustang. They were not at all happy with the eventual cost of the repair, thinking that they could just pay out of pocket a few hundred bucks (really) because the dent wasn’t that bad in their opinion. Well, tough. The eventual repair was the entire fender and blend time for the hood and door, with associated labor for disassembly and reassembly because the car started with no detectable damage and that’s the state to which it needs to be returned.
- anonuser123456 3y ago
  >There must be a better way. Don’t fix the dent?
- thraway54321 3y ago
  If the paint is still intact in the damaged area you could look up a shop specializing in paintless dent repair or PDR as it is sometimes abbreviated.

antiterra 3y ago

A company’s employee backed my vehicle into another in a parking lot and it ended up being around $30,000 to fix. The high price was largely due to costs and required labor expertise to weld an aluminum body part that also functioned structurally. It sounds wild but the body shop made the case to the business’s insurer and convinced them it was absolutely necessary.

bombcar 3y ago
I’m surprised they don’t just sell the bumped car and give out a brand new one. The damage in the original is very small and I’d not mind having it as a beater.
- ridgered4 3y ago
  My experience with old cars and full insurance coverage is if the car repairs cost more than the value of the car they just total it and pay out the estimated sale value of the car. Which isn't great if you were happy with the car. I remember my boss 15 years ago having an accident that totaled his old but reliable car because the trunk and read bumper were damaged. He bought the totaled car from the insurance company for $500 and just kept driving it. But it was a lot easier to get junker cars inspected back then.

anonuser123456 3y ago

We need limits on liability for cases like this. If you want to drive around a piece of engineering artwork... the risk should be on you. Every driver will (statistically) get into an accident at some point regardless of how cautious they are. It's not really fair to the average roadway user.

mwint 3y ago
Isn’t this practically true already? If this guy had been rear ended by an uninsured motorist in a ‘92 Beetle with $500 to their name, it’d be the Rivian owner and their insurance on the hook (if they have UM coverage!) Sure, you can sue the person who hit you civilly, but it’s not going to be worth it, because you aren’t going to get blood from a stone.
- clnq 3y ago
  The problem is more so if I have $42k (in cash or other assets) but would rather not spend it on someone else’s truck bumper. Which I think is a common sense stance. Minor accidents happen to everyone. They should not be life-ending/cause total devastation in life.
  - fooker 3y ago
    That's why insurance exists. But there has to be a better way to handle this.
  - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
    In Europe it is covered by mandatory insurance. When you hit somebody (and it is your fault), your mandatory insurance covers the cost for repair for his car, but not for yours. If somebody hits you, his mandatory insurance covers your damages. Mandatory insurance is legally mandated to be used by every motorists and it is illegal to drive without it, which makes it pretty cheap.
    - eliaspro 3y ago

donmcronald 3y ago

I think the Lexus owner’s insurance should pay a standardized repair cost and the Rivian owner’s insurance should have to cover the difference. Why should I have to cover the cost of someone else’s poor decision to buy an ultra expensive to repair vehicle?

dragonwriter 3y ago
> Why should I have to cover the cost of someone else’s poor decision to buy an ultra expensive to repair vehicle? You don't. You have to cover the cost of the damage you caused unlawfully, not the cost of their decision to buy an expensive to repair vehicle. Routine repairs that aren’t due to torts for which other people are liable are the reaponsibility of the owner, and those are the only ones that are natural consequences of the purchase decision. Consequences of tort are...consequences of tort. Victims don’t owe tortfeasors a duty of care to minimize likely damages in the event of tort. As to why you are liable for harms you caused even though they might have been cheaper were the victim differently situated, well, that’s basically the well-established “eggshell skull” rule of tort liability.
- sieongioetnio 3y ago
  However you want to justify it, the result is the same: luxury toys are subsidized by people who don't buy them. Every expensive car sold makes everyone's insurance premiums go up. This is a transfer of wealth from the poor and the prudent to the rich and the vain. Any legal principle that supports that is wrong.
- firstlink 3y ago
  It sounds like you are advocating for the deeply fascistic concept of "personal responsibility". Not a good look.
fwlr 3y ago
Under that system, a Honda Civic driver who’s angry about the ultra-rich could allow himself to ‘accidentally’ rear-end a Lamborghini, knowing that even though he will be found at fault, his insurance has a standardized repair cost cap, while the Lambo driver’s going to be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars (either directly, or his insurance costs are going to skyrocket). It might be possible to design a system that doesn’t have this perversity, but it’s hard to see how that could be possible without imparting at least a little bit of “that car looks expensive, I should take more care around it” expectation onto drivers of regular cars. I do agree that ultra-expensive-to-repair vehicles do impose extra costs, but I also think to some extent that cost is already priced-in by both insurance companies and the current system probably handles it better than it would with your proposed change.

dendrite9 3y ago

This line from one of the comments resonates with me. And I wish it didn't. One of my first product designs was too tightly integrated from the beginning between enclosure, PCBs, sensors, and even the firmware. There was never enough time to fully disentangle things, even some small changes took far more effort than they should have. Eventually we had to do an almost complete redesign while keeping all the important bits. I can't imagine doing that with the complexity and integration of a car would be easy for a young business to do. "I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but the biggest concern I have with Rivian after watching the Munro teardowns is that those trucks are full of too-complex designs that are so tightly integrated with the rest of the truck that you can’t trivially fix them up in a mid-cycle refresh."

pja 3y ago
Yes: the same design decisions that make these vehicles very expensive to repair also makes them hard to fix at the manufacturing stage since any change inevitably affects every other part of the design. Something to think about when designing systems!

Mizoguchi 3y ago

The statement below comes from Rivian's website. Doesn't designing a car in such way that it requires 20k-50k of parts and labor to fix the mildest and most common type of car accidents defeats the entire purpose of their mission? "Today we’re operating off hundreds of millions of years of accumulated plant- and animal-based carbon. On our current path, we will fully exhaust this stored energy in only a few generations and, in the process, carbonize our atmosphere to such a degree that life as we know it will not be possible. If the planet is to continue to sustain life and enchant future generations, we have to change. To build the kind of future our kids and our kids’ kids deserve, extraordinary steps must be taken to stop the carbonization of our atmosphere. This requires individuals and entire industries to come together in ways we never have before to transition the world toward sustainable energy. This is where Rivian’s potential lies — in creating solutions that shift consumer mindsets and inspire other companies to fundamentally change the way they operate. As staggering as this may sound, and as complex as our objective is, we already have everything we need to create change. It starts with harnessing the very thing every human being is born with: an adventurous spirit. There’s a reason we’re hardwired with curiosity and a capacity to invent better ways of doing things. The part of us that seeks to explore the world is the secret to making sure it remains a world worth exploring. Forever. "

prepend 3y ago
> the entire purpose of their mission? The entire purpose of their mission is selling $75k trucks to yuppies. They would sell kitten combustion engines if those were popular and rich people were willing to pay. This is neat tech. But the reason why repairs cost $20k is because people are willing to pay. Not designing for sustainability isn’t surprising to me. This is a trend with many car manufacturers now and I don’t think they care about low maintenance and repair costs. I had to pay $2k for a slight fender bender that just bent my bumper and I have a pretty regular car.

segmondy 3y ago

Welp, never buying a Rivian!

synaesthesisx 3y ago

If this ends up being the case, expect the costs to insure these things to skyrocket soon.

perryizgr8 3y ago

I view this as an engineering failure. The entire purpose of the bumper in a car is to absorb impacts and limit damage to the rest of the car. Here it is the opposite. The proper way to handle this is to price Rivian insurance accordingly. That will motivate owners and manufacturer to fix this quickly.

rasz 3y ago

No, it doesnt cost half of vehicle sticker to replace few panels. Someone is taking a piss and exploiting insurance system with insurance companies in on it like in health care. After all bigger payouts lead to fatter premiums.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

fuzzfactor 3y ago

"Designed to be expensive" is a feature most people will never be able to afford. This is by design. Imagine how much climate damage is required just to earn the money to pay the tax on such a repair to a supposedly environmentally sound vehicle like this.

fwungy 3y ago

Sounds like a great off road vehicle.