Same. Initially I was optimistic about the Cybertruck because I though “flat metal panels and no paint is going to make both manufacturing and repairs so much easier and cheaper”.
Flat metal is more expensive than curved metal. Curved metal, you design the curves to help support the stress points: you can get by with thinner sheets. Flat metal requires thicker heavier more expensive sheets of sheet metal in order to be strong enough.
Curved metal also lets you design the whole thing to be more aerodynamic. which is an important consideration even with something as un-aerodynamic as a truck.
Painting cars really is a hugely optimised process that materially affects performance characteristics such as weight.
Its very difficult to appreciate just how many cars are made worldwide wide, but just think if a completely optimised fully robot optimised line cost a billion dollars, in only needs to process a few million cars to fully pay itself off. Just look at how much a “paint option” costs. Enough people paying for a premium colour would completely pay for the entire production painting line.
At the scale of Tesla the millions of dollars on a fully automated setup is cheap because amortize the cost of so many cars
Very common to use a mix of both strategies in practice.
Either you have a modern expensive car and insurance which knows how to handle it properly, or it doesn't matter anymore and you got to a cheap car doctor.
I had a jeep wrangler once. The window was "flat" but not if you looked at its reflection. There was an almost imperceptible but complex curve, no doubt for strength.
As the DeLorean community will tell you, repairing unfinished stainless steel to aesthetically pleasing levels is almost impossible.
Take a piece of tinfoil, crumple it, then try to uncrumple it to its factory finish.
Repairing painted bodywork is easy and cheap: hammer it to get a rough shape, apply fillers, then paint & polish to factory finish. Simple as.
...you don't. You replace it in whole. You can't use filler to mask small dents and paint over it, if you want it to look as before, you have to pretty much replace it.