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Comment by Awelton | Hacker News Reader

Looks like in the case of minor body damage you will have to cut and flush weld patches in the body instead of bolting on a new panel like they currently do. Aftermarket modular body panels are extremely cheap, and repairs consist of spraying a new panel and removing and installing a couple bolts and clips. This new method will make car manufacturers more money but will inevitably drive insurance and repair costs higher. This is a negative for car buyers, and the cheaper manufacturer costs won't necessarily be reflected in sales prices. There have been tons of manufacturing breakthroughs in the last few decades that have made vehicles cheaper and easier to produce and prices just keep getting higher and higher.

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"Minor body damage" usually means paneling and brackets. Chassis damage to aluminum frames almost always means replacement AFAICT, which for all but the newest cars is more than the cost of replacement anyway. Remember also that modern crumple zone design deliberately sacrifices the frame as part of the collision for safety reasons.

Basically, this doesn't seem right to me. If you're hit hard enough to bend the frame, your car is totalled anyway. And that's the way we want it.

> Basically, this doesn't seem right to me. If you're hit hard enough to bend the frame, your car is totalled anyway. And that's the way we want it.

It's horribly wasteful from a resource usage perspective, because now you have to throw away the rest of the car - you can't even, say, splice together a new car out of one that has a bent front and one that has a bent back.

Everything in society moves towards easier and cheaper manufacture, but at the same time to dramatically lower repairability, and that's just Not Good At All.

> wasteful from a resource usage perspective

The materials in a car are pretty recyclable. Aluminium and steel especially so.

The biggest environmental cost of a car is arguably the people who put it together. Ie. the emissions of the person who put it together, and his house and family.

If you use fewer people to assemble a thing, the environmental emissions go down (if you count human labor as having associated emissions).

> The materials in a car are pretty recyclable. Aluminium and steel especially so.

Yes, but melting down metals costs a lot of energy and emits a ton of nasty stuff into the air. That's the reason why so many smelters moved to Asia, cheap energy from burning coal and next to zero emissions regulations there.

To keep you from dying, though. This isn't a phone. If you want to make an efficiency-based argument against personal automobiles from first principles, I'm right behind you. But given that we're going to drive them around, I'd rather drive ones that kill fewer people; even if it means having to recycle a bunch of frames.

> now you have to throw away the rest of the car

You ever been to an auto wrecker?

Not much gets thrown away.

Eventually whatever's left will go to a metal recycler. Steel, aluminium, copper, it's all extremely recyclable.

There'll be some plastic waste, sure, but we can just bury that if there's no good recycling option.

> you can't even, say, splice together a new car out of one that has a bent front and one that has a bent back

Nobody was doing this anyway.

There used to be shops that would "weld on a new front clip". I know someone who had insurance pay for this type of repair on a unibody car in the late 80s. Not as common in the US anymore, but if you peruse youtube autobody videos you can find shops in asia and the middle east doing these repairs on late model vehicles.

I mean I once saw an episode of Pimp My Ride where a guy was driving together a car made from 2 cars welded together, but it's definitely not standard practice

Ok not nobody. But effectively nobody.

It’s more wasteful if someone dies driving a ‘repaired’ vehicle that shouldn’t have been repaired in the first place.

Bent structural components are almost invariably a write-off no matter what kind of car you have.

It depends.

I did Au$10,000 to a car valued at $12,000, almost all of the damage was non-visible suspension and structural.

The quoting repairer had high confidence in the repairs before starting, so the insurer went ahead.

The car drove like new after the repairs, dead straight, smooth af.

If even a small fraction of that damage had been on, say, the pillars it'd had been a write off.

These giga-pressed components are distinct from the body panels.

They aren’t casting the body panels, rather the subframe that the body panels are attached to.

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