Just don't crash

On a recent episode of The Smoking Tire podcast, esteemed cay guy Doug Demuro chronicles the frustrating experience of getting a door replaced on his Land Rover Defender. Apparently - due to the great supply chain shortage - there aren’t any spare body parts available for people to fix their crashed Defenders. Any and all supply are being used for new Defender production. This, for a car that’s four model years old. This isn’t a case where a particular model is so new, the manufacturer have yet to produce any spare parts.

So what are Defender owners doing when they get into an accident, waiting months for body parts that may never arrive? Doug says the dealerships are actually buying back those cars. That’s right! Because Land Rover cannot (or will not) supply spare parts, they will instead buy your crashed Defender. Perhaps hoping you’d immediately get another fresh one off the showroom floor. That is freaking insane to me. Imagine being a Defender owner, with the specter of potentially losing your car should you get into a fender-bender hanging over you.

That must be the same kind of nervous energy that owner of classic cars have. At least the Defender guys can get another copy pretty easily. That one-of-kind classic car? All the money in the world may not be able to find another exact copy, should you be unlucky to crash yours.

It doesn’t even have to be super expensive, either. I read about some guy with a Toyota Celica with the factory TRD Action Package. He got into an accident that damaged the package. Guess what? You absolutely cannot buy another set from Toyota - the company doesn’t make spares of that anymore. The only resort is to scour the junkyards for another Celica with an undamaged body kit. Easier said that done, however, because so few Celica had the TRD kit to begin with.

Get into a minor accident - lose your car. That’s a heavy burden for any car enthusiast!

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Mango a go go.

Car repair is expensive!

Recently my father got into a minor fender bender in this leased Toyota Corolla. As he was driving along on the right-most lane of a multi-lane road, a car to the right merged onto the roadway without checking the blindspot. A severely mangled front-end was the result, though thankfully the car was still able to drive straight. No injuries to the persons, which is ultimately what you want any time you’re unlucky to be in a car crash.

As modern cars get more and more expensive (average transaction price is well over $40,000 in the United States), it seems so have the cost to repair them. My father’s Corolla sustained damage to the bumper, headlamps, bits of the front fenders, and radiator core support. Rather minor in the grand scheme of things (no frame or suspension damage), but those items alone amounted to some $14,000 in cost from the body shop. That’s more than half the price of the car brand new!

A portion of that cost is the relatively expensive radar cruise sensor up front. Not only a new part is needed, but the car also has to be sent to a Toyota dealer to recalibrate the entire system. Hooray complexity, all in the service of ease and comfort whilst driving.

And because we’re still in the midst of global supply chain shortage of many things, it took a solid month from start to finish to fix the Corolla - for a minor fender-bender! We’re lucky because my father was able to get a rental car, so the extended repair length was not that bothersome. I’d imagine others aren’t so fortunate. That’s the true hassle of getting into an accident: dealing with the lack of a car or finding a temporary replacement while your own car is getting fixed. And also taking time from work to deal with the body shop, most of which are typically not open on weekends.

We’re just glad it’s over with now.

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Pachinko.

How good are the typical autobody shops?

On my bus commute to work everyday I pass by an auto-body repair shop that's constantly teeming with cars. I guess it’s always good business in that line of work due to law of large numbers dictating an adequate amount of vehicle accidents (the sheer number of cars in our little 7 by 7 mile peninsula never ceases to amaze). Like a well-oil assembly factory the particular shop takes in mangled metal and repair it to original condition in at most a few week's time. 

This is interesting to me because it brings me back to the last time I had a car accident and had to bring it in to a bodyshop. Thankfully that was almost a decade ago and fortune have since been kind to me in that regard. It wasn’t a particularly bad experience per se but the shop, in an effort to process as many cars a possible, definitely cut some corners in the repair. Outwardly the finished car looked fine, which is the most important part I guess? But the innards behind the repair wasn’t as lovely. 

I don’t suppose people would care about such minutiae as long as the car looks good and it drives straight. Can we rightly expect perfection when pressure is on the shop to perform the repair quickly so that we can get back on the road? Most drivers rely on their vehicles to get to work so after an accident it’s difficult to be without a car for an extended period. I’m sure repair shops get phoned many times from customers inquiring about progress.

Proper auto-body repair takes significant amount of time. Just look at Youtube videos of restoration shops putting in many thousand hours on a single car to get it back to showroom condition. Videos of DIY repair guys buying a body-damaged car and taking months to fix it themselves. No matter the skill-level of the repairer the time required to perform a stellar job is massive. 

Therefor I have no confidence in the typical auto-body shop "factories" where lead-time is measured in weeks and the aim is to get through as many customer cars as possible. I’ve experience with those results and while it may pass for the common driver, it’s utterly substandard for me. 

Think of why a car’s value is decreased after an accident; perhaps it’s tacitly understood the typical repair job won’t be perfect and there will be residual issues during the rest of the vehicle’s useful life. Compared that to say a properly restored vintage Porsche: no one would argue its former decrepit state decreases its value absolutely and permanently. 

If I am unlucky to get into a car accident in the future, I’ll take the car a shop that isn’t about chasing quantity but instead will take the appropriate time to do the job fully and correctly. It’ll likely take a few months for the repair but I can stomach that because my next car will not be a daily-driver so I can afford to let it sit. 

You would not believe your eyes, If ten million fireflies...