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Environmentally friendly my ass. Any minor damage and the car will be toast because the insurance company will total it. Even if it gets back on the road it'll
by Tanoc 3y ago
Environmentally friendly my ass. Any minor damage and the car will be toast because the insurance company will total it. Even if it gets back on the road it'll have a salvage title, something that's poison to a car and ensures that it ends up either crushed or parted out. These are already problems with unibody cars thanks to how quickly insurance adjusters will take any deformation of the core unibody, even just cosmetic damage like the C-pillar having a dent, and call the car a total loss.
There are more than a few A-body Oldsmobile Cutlass Cieras and Buick Centuries from the late 1980s that I still see driven around where I live. The environmental impact they've had has been far less than any of these cast-body cars will be because an A-body is a cockroach that will never die no matter how many times you hit something with it. They were produced decades ago and have long since offset their initial production impact. Add in all the Chevrolet C-10s, Chevrolet S-10s, Ford Rangers, Suzuki Sidekicks/Geo Trackers, and XJ Jeep Cherokees I see daily and they still have less of an impact environmentally than these disposable cars will have because they can be repaired instead of requiring total replacement.
- petee 3y agoEh, even now Toyotas have a low threshold for being totaled, the parts are just so expensive. My 2014 Tacoma was essentially sideswiped hard; repair was estimated at $12,000 but was deemed totalled, insu paid me $17,000. It is now rotting in a junk yard for the past 4 years (I check the old VIN time to time)
- skullone 3y agoDon't feel too bad about your truck in a junkyard. It has probably donated enough parts to keep a dozen other ones on the road with economical scrapped parts.
- w0z_ 3y agoMy Model S was hit in the unibody and not totaled, not sure how you're making this up.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> Any minor damage and the car will be toast because the insurance company will total it. Another best part is our currently skyrocketing car insurance - even for people who don't carry collision. Even if you don't contribute to the problem, insurance companies force you to financially support everyone who does.
- tomatotomato37 3y agoDon't forget part of the reason a lot of older cars can survive an accident is because they don't have crumble zones. That's great for the structural integrity of the car, not so much for the humans that interact with it. It's better for society to just write the car off and keep people alive than try to keep some smelters a little less busy by killing people off
- alphabettsy 3y agoThat’s true of even older cars, but the cars listed above all have crumple zones as did almost all cars from the 70s on. And older cars definitely fold in crashes just not in predetermined ways that minimize intrusion and injury like modern cars. Generally older cars have far less rigid chassis than modern vehicles.
- Tade0 3y ago> The environmental impact they've had has been far less than any of these cast-body cars Most(85%+) of a car's environmental footprint comes from usage - namely fuel. And no wonder - a car works itself through approximately 10x its weight in fuel during its lifetime. A car from the 80s or even 90s will naturally have visibly higher fuel consumption that a modern car and thus keeping it running is actually the more environmentally impactful choice. On top of that nowadays factories run on a much cleaner grid than in the 90s, so despite there being more tech and sophisticated materials inside, it's actually less environmentally damaging to produce a car than it used to be.
- panick21_ 3y ago> Any minor damage and the car will be toast because the insurance company will total it. No because cars with castings still have crush cans. Only a crash hard enough to go threw the crush cans and bend the frame will require totaling. And that is not a small crash. The castings are very strong and hard to bend, being aluminum that is specifically cast in a shape to be strong. You can see the crush cans here: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla-mOdel-Y-underbody-2.jpg?quality=82&strip=all https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...