The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[biocqr]

EV owners gettring hit up with $40,000 estimates for minor rear end collisions...

Owners of a popular electric pickup reported horrifying repair estimates for a common fender bender

https://www.thestreet.com/electric-vehicles/owners-of-a-popular-electric-pickup-reported-horrifying-repair-estimates

“You have to understand how these vehicles are made; this isn’t a bed like a normal pickup truck, this is more like an SUV. The quarter panel […] is tied to the cab of the truck, it goes all the way across the roof across the vehicle, all the way to the rear view side mirror,” explained Boyette in his video. “In order to replace this panel, all that has to be cut off; the back glass has to be taken out, the panoramic roof has to be taken out, the windshield, the battery pack has to be removed. There’s a lot of disassembly that has to occur in order to for this to get fixed the conventional way at a body shop.”

Though Rivian made use of large body panels to create a sleeker car, huge repair bills like the ones that the R1T owners faced could become a reality for other prospective EV owners, as both Tesla (TSLA) - Get Free Report and Toyota (TM) - Get Free Report set out to use gigacasting methods to produce cheaper electric cars in the future.

Gigacasting speeds up the process of creating a vehicle through the elimination of welding joints — traditionally done by people or robots — by making large components of the car out of a huge single casting. The downside of such methods is that damage to said components can result in owners facing the same reality of the mentioned R1T owners, where the littlest of damage can impact a major part of the car.

Mix the possibilities with Tesla’s reputation for poor build quality and you have a recipe for disaster put in the hands of owners. This is already a reality for Tesla owner Nizar Kamel, who took to social media in August 2023 after discovering large cracks in gigacasted components in his five-month-old Model Y that were large enough to jeopardize the car’s structural integrity.