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Comment by loloquwowndueo | Hacker News Reader

“cast bodies might be more difficult to fix in the event of major damage, such as a crash.”

Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a car NOT be written off after “major damage”. The industry already doesn’t bother to fix cars, they just get scrapped, so I don’t see what the actual difference is.

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My car got written off. 11 years old but in good condition, got hit on the rear left corner, sheet metal work was damaged. The tier 1 body shop that the insurance company sent me to quoted about 3/4 of the car's (undamaged) value in repair costs, including replacing most of the left side, the back window among other things, and even $600 worth of paint.

Shopping for a replacement vehicle in the damaged one, various tier 2-3 dealer types said, oh, we could fix that up real nice for $3K, and one of them would have been happy to have the car at the insurance company's quoted value in damaged condition. So you can bet that that thing has by now been auctioned off, fixed up like that and sold, possibly with a "rebuilt" title, at a modest profit, and continues to be used. It was too good to scrap and the damage, while a PITA to fix, was not even remotely structural.

So it's not that insurance companies consign all these written-off cars to the scrap heap. It's just that they don't want to deal with the repairs, and possible post-repair complaints. So just like bad debts, it's sent down the pipe to the people best matched to the job. A broken cast frame would short-circuit this process, causing the car to be scrapped for real and thus raising costs for everyone.

There are body shops all over town here repairing collision damage every day. Yes a major crash is a write off especially on an older car, but the problem is that with cast frames, if they are more likely to be irreparably damaged in a collision, that's more write-offs. That means insurance premiums for these cars will be more costly as well.

My understanding is frame damage generally results in a write off. It’s too expand too risky.

It often does if it's severe, but if the frame is just "tweaked" it can often be pulled back into spec with specialzed jigs and equipment. Any comprehensive collision repair shop will have that equipment.

My understanding is it’s just not common to do that anymore. Most vehicles are already unibody, so fixing frames is much harder.

If the damage is bad enough o require a frame fix, it’s very likely there’s significant damage to other parts of the car.

Hand raised.

Of course, your question is basically a tautology if you define "major damage" as "that which causes a car to get totaled". The whole concern is that, with these cast bodies, damage that would have been considered fixable or minor in the past now becomes an instant write off.

Not really. Major damage would be damage to the subframes or wheel wells. It's a step right above getting entire axles ripped off. In most situations, for most cars, that will total the car.

Well the article says major damage, not me.

I know, but you are the one proposing that "major damage" is always written off.

It does lower the bar for what is considered "major damage".

Having a car written off when you need to essentially take the entire thing apart is fairly reasonable, as is not wanting to repair the actual body part itself.

When the car is made out of multiple different parts, a low-speed bump into a bollard or another car might result in the bumper needing to be replaced. Not the cheapest repair, but definitely quite doable and probably not worthy of a complete writeoff. When the entire car is made out of a single cast that very same bump results in the entire body needing to be replaced - and that's just not going to happen.

Those castings have a slot for crush cans that are not welded. If you have a low-speed bump it would crush your bumper and the crush cans behind it, it would not effect the casting.

Literally nobody plans to remove crush cans from the vehicle, even if the whole body is cast.

See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...

Yeah I feel like this is the next stepping stone on a path we have been on for years. I remember Rich Rebuilds got rear ended in his Rivian and the total repair bill was somewhere around $30K if I remember right. I really do wish repairability was considered more not less, but with safety standards, manufacturing costs, etc it seems like cars are racing towards the cliff of just “discarding” if they have a problem just like the rest of consumer goods

With EVs this problem is getting a lot worse. In latest-gen EVs the battery pack is a stressed member of the frame. Any type of collision that distorts the frame will also imply a deformation of the battery module, which means instant write-off.

So if you think about it - if you first decide you need to go down the "structural battery" route to save cost and weight, you've already lost repairability if the frame is bent. Then moving to a cast frame doesn't really change anything.

Don't you lose repairability anyway if the frame is significantly bent?

AFAICT the actual batteries inside the "structural battery" are separate much smaller cells [1] that can at least be recovered from the bent frame and reused if undamaged.

Consider four factors: normal car performance, car's safety in a crash, car's repairability after a crash, and car's price. They all work against each other; no wonder that repairability is sacrificed to optimize the other three. (In a military vehicle the price is usually sacrificed instead.)

[1]: https://insideevs.com/news/323682/rare-look-inside-a-tesla-m...

A salvage operation where you harvest raw cells is no where near repairability. That is one step removed from taking a crushed car selling it for scrap metal.

Indeed, not reparability but reusability. The cells are standard and can be readily reused in a variety of ways, unlike a badly bent frame / chassis that can only go to scrap metal.

Maybe batteries will get good enough (hence small enough) to not become a stressed part of the frame in the near future.

This would also lighten EVs, which has a tremendous number of benefits.

The castings and frame are incredibly strong. Or in other words; when those are damaged, the rest of the car is likely beyond economical repair. Even without insurance. Tear it appart for parts.

The battery pack would be bent after the crash if the pack is structural or not.

Do you think just because the pack itself is not structural it just not gone get unharmed?

And by the way, structural pack doesn't mean its not replaceable.

Can you point to any references/examples of this? Not a challenge, but as an EV owner I didn't know this and I'm interested to learn more.

Here is one story from Reuters that is citing GM, Volvo, CATL and BYD doing this, in addition to Tesla.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/next-s...

He's probably referencing Tesla's structural battery packs. Essentially the pack makes up the bottom part of the frame of the car.

https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/tesla-structural-battery-pack...

The Ford Mach-E does the same thing. There's thin box frame rails as part of the traditional ladder frame, and the battery pack actually forms the floorpan and stressed crossmembers. Without the battery pack the frame will deform because there's no lateral reinforcement, making it this weird hybrid of a ladder frame and unibody that it shares with the Model X and Ioniq 5. Most EVs like the Bolt and the Ioniq 6 are unibodies however since they're just designed like regular cars with battery packs shoved where the fuel tank would normally go under the rear seat or rear hatch floor, and the battery pack simply reinforces the floor.

Its not actually the same. People constantly mix things up because the words people use are so wrong.

Structural packs are nothing new, lots of EV always had structural packs.

What Tesla is doing in the newer Model Y (called 'Structural Pack') is actually structural cells. That's the innovation. Where the cells themselves are glued together and sandwiched in a pack. So the cells themselves act as vertical enforcers. The whole back is basically filled with structural foam.

The only other company that is doing something like that is BYD but that is quite different as those are really big Prismatic cells stacked up.

Wonder if that's the same Rivian that was in a YouTube video that popped up a couple of days ago where some specialty repair shop was able to use nontraditional repair methods to fix the damage at a fraction of the quoted $41,000 repair cost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKPfy5djvLc

Yeah iirc it happened twice to him, the first was a rivian authorized repair at the high price tag and the second was an alternate repair method they tried out at a much smaller price tag

With Cars I do believe there's a tradeoff between repair ability and crash safety to some degree. The Chassis has to deform to take the crash energy away from the passenger and the more it deforms the more energy gets absorbed.

That the car is written off doesnt mean it gets scrapped though. It usually gets auctioned, and if its fixable, some mechanic can buy it for peanuts and put it back on the market.

So why the write off nonsense. Just send it to a repair shop directly and if it cannot be repaired, then initiate a write off.

Sounds like extra steps for the profit of middle men

> So why the write off nonsense

Write-off is about insurance policies, and whether it is cheaper to repair damage to the standard committed to by the insurer within the parameters (e. g., new original manufacturer parts) in the insurance contact or to pay the amount the insurer is committed to pay in the alternative.

It is only tangentially related to whether it is econonically viable to restore the vehicle to usable condition.

When hail totaled my car, I kept it for another 4 years. Just "cosmetic" damage. It's still kicking around in New Mexico; I guess it's 17 years old, now.

My current car was an insurance write off and looks good if you look at it casually though looking closely the line is not quite straight down the side where it was hit and you can see a boundary in the paint where the respray finished. Works fine though.

Writing it off is just the insurance company buying it from you for your insured amount because they owe you the value of the car and it'll be cheaper to just buy it from you than repair it. Normally you can then buy it back for what they expect to get at auction and do the repairs yourself with a salvage title.

At least in my country, insurance can only replace with original parts...

A newish car, a minor crash, bumper, hood, a front light or two, couple of airbags... at ~1500eur per light, 2-3k for original hood, 2-3k for airbags, body work, and low eurotax estimate of the price of the car, your repair cost is easily above 70% of the "car value".

A few trips to the dump, some aftermarket parts and someone to do the work for cheap, and you've got a drivable car.

Because it wouldn’t be economic to repair it to “good as new” status.

The people who buy salvage titled cars are usually happy to drive a car that doesn’t work quite right if they get a killer deal for it.

Cars bought at auction have a salvage title, and they are not repaired to a level that would be considered acceptable by most people. Those cars are usually mechanics projects using junkyard parts and zip ties.

The other thing is that generally, a person is free to buy their car back from the insurance company instead of taking the cash from the totaling. That is when they will discover they can't just send it to a shop and get it repaired for any reasonable amount, plus the salvage title means no one else wants it.

Risk mostly. Many of the vehicles won't be repairable and will just go to the scrap yard. Some will appear to repairable but after some effort end up scrapped too. And some will be repairable but only by guys who specialize in such things and have customers willing to buy a retitled salvage vehicle. For the insurance company, it's not worth the effort and added risk. That someone else can make some money off the missed margin isn't a big deal to the insurance company.

Isn’t that exactly what happens?

You send it for an estimate. If that estimate is too high, insurance gives you a check then sells the car as a salvage.

The insurance company is always looking at:

- what it would cost them to repair it (including the risk of having to get additional work done, etc)

- what the car was worth minus what they can sell it for at auction.

If the values get close, they total the car. Then someone else buys it: maybe for parts, or maybe to repair it to a standard that the original owner wouldn't have been happy with.

The original owner of the car has some ability to refuse the repair job. It may be impossible to (economically) bring the car back to its previous state. The insurance company prefers not to take the risk. They write a clean check and recover some cost by selling the salvage, which will likely be repaired and sold.

> So why the write off nonsense. Just send it to a repair shop directly and if it cannot be repaired, then initiate a write off.

Well to get the owner of the written-off car installed into a new vehicle of course! With a whole new loan and likely a higher insurance premium esp. if they "upgraded" in the process.

or gets parted out?

In my 3rd world home country most cars are bought on copart as "salvage", they get fixed up and usually get ran well above the 100k miles, this change will undoubtedly reduce the opportunity to give new life to salvage cars while making it more dangerous for the people who have no other choice. In the end this will create a lot more waste than we had before, its a shame because Toyota's are the most highly regarded cars where I am from

Had a car with major body damage. Repair estimate magically came in $100 less than salvage value. Insurance company went with repair of course.

They don’t always get scrapped - they often get sent out to another country, sold at a discount, fixed there.

so are we at..."this is bad because it will restrict the flow of unsafe junkers passed off to someone living in Panama"?

Not unsafe necessarily. The cost of labor is so high in the US that fixing even minor damage might not be cost efficient. Also consider the possible increase in the insurance fees if you continue driving a car after repairs. Other countries have lower cost of labor overall, so it's a profitable (and, hopefully, safe) business for them.

Lots of passed off vehicles to poorer countries tend to be body on frame style. Lots of ford/Toyota trucks, where frame damage can as "simple" as welding steel bar stock or straightening with a basic frame puller. If a unibody vehicle is totaled from major damage in the US, they get scrapped of nearly every usable part, then crushed and melted down. Not even worth the shipping/hassle to send a smashed up Kia to Central America, let alone Africa. People aren't stupid. They're just as savvy at this, if not more, than we would ever be. Hence the amount of body on frame SUVs and trucks that get salvaged there. Sure, you'll see "beat up" cheap cars there, but they'll pass on anything majorly damaged, cuz even there, it's simply not worth it.

Yup, agreed. In the US the incentives are against repairs, not for. I don't know enough about cars to have an opinion on whether Tesla-style cast bodies will result in more cars being written off with similar damages to other fairly expensive cars.

There’s also enough people willing/able to do the repair themselves to get the car back into drive able condition.

I see this frequently driving through poor, rural communities. Very nice vehicles, with some sort of damage and repairs. You can get a super nice interior and high quality ride if you’re willing to deal with vanity flaws.

Even in the US there are enthusiasts who buy and restore super cars for cheap (relatively speaking). There are several crafty YT channels showing the process from start to finish.

I don't know tbh. I just drive a 10-15 y.o. US vehicle in Poland because the previous owner imported it. Who knows, when I'm done with it, it might even be exported on out of the EU.

Hands down. I haven't personally experienced major damage, but I have bought and know folks to buy many of these written off cars only to have them repaired, certified by the state and put back on the roads.

My mum had a 2004 Sonata and it got T-boned with like 3,000km on the odometer. It was like a $17k car brand new, with and they put like $15k of body work (and then hiring a loaner car for a month while doing it) into it. Ran fine for another 150,000km before she traded it in, but I was baffled that the other driver's insurance didn't just say "we're writing it off, go get another one." OTOH, she was so pleased by their willingness to pay without hassle that she switched to that carrier.

They are scrapped but then usually resold/exported to a cheaper country where they get fixed up and sold there. Maybe the unicast cars will get a lot of duct tape and Bondo.

That doesn’t mean it’s not fixed by someone else after auction and salvage titling assuming it’s a car that’s somewhat desirable. So this is just a move that generates more waste?

I mean, there's certainly rebuilt/salvaged cars, but more often than not people are scammed into buying those from shady AF places. Lesson is, don't waste your time or money on a unibody car with major damage. Scrap em. It's pointless. And people arguing we need to repair everything even from major damage when it makes zero economic or ecological sense and from those with no experience in the industry is just tiring.

I had to fight with my insurance to not have my 2005 model car written off after a fender bender. Thankfully I did because this was just before used car prices skyrocketed.

Was in a front-end crash with minor frame damage in addition to airbags deploying.

Vehicle was repaired, frame was able to be straightened on a rack.

They sell the wreck and recover some money that way. If the new vehicles are essentially unsalable, this will cause premiums to rise.

They don't get scrapped most of the time they are send overseas and repaired.

I think having cast body be written off is preferable to having forever damaged car

exactly! pretty much anything beyond superficial damage to a body panel...new car please, that is why I pay insurance

Hand raised!

I was rear-ended in a new Jeep Wrangler. Damage included a bent frame, crushed rear bumper, bent rear hatch, bent roll cage, bent rear fender, shattered tail light, and a bent floor.

It was nearly $20k in damage. It was repaired. [and I very quickly sold it because I had zero faith in the longevity of the repairs]

i can't imagine what insurance company premiums are going to be when they figure out how much they're going to be paying out for each incident with one of these.

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