Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
What does a grease monkey know about "impressive" engineering? Sure, it's possible the autobody guy knows something, but it isn't likely. At any rate, the consensus does seem to suggest the body is the least well engineered system, which is fortunate because it's the most superficial.
Speaking of superficial, I wouldn't back into my garage in the first place, but if I did, I'd probably live with whatever superficial damage occurred since it's likely to happen again, and doesn't affect my enjoyment of the vehicle.
Should I decide to fix superficial damage, I'd do it myself. Worst case I'd hire someone handy with bondo and a paint sprayer. There's no scenario where I drop $6k on aesthetics, or allow my insurance premiums to skyrocket.
Someone backed into the front end of our Prius and caused a grand in damage to the bumper cover and some other little bits. There's a fist size hole now, but an extra grand in my bank account. Wish I could get that lucky more often.
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Oh I agree, I'd pocket ANY damage claim and fix whatever myself to however I want it for a fraction of what shops charge. The problem is, this on most any other car would have been a $2-3000 hit being generous. What that means is insurance is going to cost more as these averages "pile up". Pun intended.
I do think mechanics know way more than you might give them credit for and he's outside the control of Tesla or any car maker for that matter so I trust his partiality. I think part of any automotive mechanical engineering degree should be at least one summer at a mechanical repair shop, one summer at a body shop, and one summer on the assembly line. Then we might get some well engineering cars.