Yes, you can cut and weld it, in theory. But aluminum is difficult to weld and cast metals are extremely difficult to weld. Repairing cast aluminum is a highly specialized skill that is unusual even among professional metalworkers.
Yes, you can cut and weld it, in theory. But aluminum is difficult to weld and cast metals are extremely difficult to weld. Repairing cast aluminum is a highly specialized skill that is unusual even among professional metalworkers.
Granted, these were fender benders. Not serious collisions.
The crumple zones in modern cars hide a lot of serious damage in a minor appearing accident. My sister in law was hit a few months ago and I was able to drive the car home with what just appeared to be a missing tail light and had to tie down the trunk.
When the auto shop looked at it they could see serious warping and bends at welds all over places in the unibody that would cost more to repair than the car is worth.
You might've missed this earlier comment by @unregistereddev: "Compared to stamped metal, a cast metal part is brittle under impact and is far more likely to crack rather than deforming."
In Tesla's case specifically, this isn't just hypothetical: https://www.thedrive.com/news/tesla-model-y-owner-finds-scar...
In older cars it was easy to chop them in two and weld them together however you wanted. But these days with the concepts where the engine compartment and trunk are crush zones and the passenger compartment is rigid so they occupants don't get crushed, there is a ton of non visible damage in even minor impacts.
Insurance doesn’t care if there is frame damage. It only cares how much the car is worth, how much it’s going to cost to fix and how much it’s worth at an auction in its current state. They run the numbers and decide if they are fixing or totaling the car.
There is a reason tesla is expensive to insure.
Tesla's gigacasting cars are roughly as repairable as any other modern car. Lower speed collisions can sometimes be repaired. The repair may not leave it as structurally sound or with the same collision resistance. The older the car gets the more likely it is to be totaled even in such a lower speed collision because these kinds of repairs are labor intensive.
Medium and high speed collisions are always a full loss event. That's a deliberate design decision to sacrifice the car (eg crumple zones) to protect the passengers.
Insurance totaling out Teslas is to some degree an early adopter problem. Parts are less available, service centers with experience may not exist in your area, third party service manuals haven't been published, etc. These things make the cars more expensive to repair. All of these issues are rapidly improving but it should be obvious that they aren't a 100 year old car maker so their network of spare parts and repair shops will smart out smaller.