TL:DR: Poor scale and awareness due to being a niche brand, overly large aluminum body panels requiring either massive replacements or complicated welding, small shops guessing that it must be even more exotic and expensive than the CEO claims, and insurers shrugging and moving on because the volumes aren't hitting their financials hard enough for them to care.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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welding aluminum requires TIG. It's harder and more specialized.
welding mild steel body panels are simple with equipment any body shop will have.
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The market is ripe for the equivalent of a wileys jeep ev. Cheap to buy, repair and capable with no frills.
Make the software foss too and i'm in
I would die for a FOSS car. The main barrier for that is airbags, people could just disable them, which wouldn't be good or fair to their passengers or future owners. I also worry about other dumb stuff people would do with a foss car. Of course, I still want one.
Theoretically there are ways to deal with modifications in that scenario.
Prusa for instance had a trace on the PCB of the mk3 that you had to cut to be able to flash a unsigned binary iirc. You voided the warranty or at least the parts that were affected by modifications.
Imagine something like this for a car. Not a binary blob but something signed or otherwise secured through a chain of trust for components the law decides to regulate. Driving data recorder in case of crash and airbags and such. All the other non safety components can be changed and nobody but you controls your data and your ability to repair. And if you decide to change said components you loose some rights regarding insurance, not warranty for the car itself.
Yes please.
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Slate.. though who knows if it will ever materialize in the real world.
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I got into a fender bender with my Buick and they totalled it because the fender was worth half as much as the car. They're doing something very wrong in car design.
I used to drive an Isuzu Trooper. I got rear-ended which totaled my car. Theoretically it was repairable, but when your car is old enough to vote it doesn't take much damage for it to get totaled.
There was other damage, but one thing that still pisses me off is that a few hundred bucks of that calculation was my spare tire cover, which had some cracks after the accident, and the insurance company would not let that drop.
It was a plastic shell that is mostly just decorative that covered the spare bolted to the back of my vehicle. I didn't care that it was cracked, it in no way affected the safety of my vehicle, I would have happily driven that car for another decade with it being cracked, if they slapped 5¢ worth of epoxy on it I would have been more than satisfied, or hurry they could have just thrown the damn thing away and I guess my spare would get a little dirtier that it would if it was covered.
But they had to include that in the repair cost estimate, and since it was kind of an uncommon older car, replacement spare tire covers were scarce and pricey and added a few hundred bucks onto the estimate.
I don't know if that was the thing that pushed me over the edge to a total loss but it certainly didn't help
I had a perfectly mechanically sound vehicle that was paid off, and could possibly still be on the road today, and instead I got stuck with a couple years of car payments on a car I liked less than that one.
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Wrong for who?
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A GMC Hummer EV taillight costs an eye-watering $6,100 to replace, plus labor. The idea of having to replace one of Audi’s new adaptive Matrix LED headlight setups is something most people probably don’t want to stomach.
Audi made these adaptive light strips to fix the artificial problem of newer headlights being too bright compared to older ones.
I thought we all agreed there is a problem with headlights these days? Is it just not because of LEDs specifically?
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Meanwhile, only 30 years ago when we had sealed-beams in standardized shapes, you could replace a headlight for like $10. And the lens was actually glass instead of plastic prone to yellowing and abrasion.
Yeah and if you hit someone that glass shatters and stabs them. The plastic is shatter resistant.
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