• ExtraPartsLeft@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    This article is misleading. If a car crash is bad enough that it damages the frame of a car, it’s going to get totalled anyway. So either way it’s going to go to a junk yard and get slowly parted out.

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      No. These cast parts take up a lot more area. They will get damaged much more frequently than a frame being damaged.

      • bemenaker@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Not on unibody cars. There isn’t a big increase in frame area in this car versus any other unibody out there. The difference here is the unibody isn’t actually a unibody, it’s a multipart unibody that is bolted together. A standard unibody, which is just about everything on the road today that isn’t a pickup truck, is all three of those frame pieces you see in that picuture, but as one giant piece. That big piece of metal you are normally used to seeing in car assembly photos. There are no frame rails under it. The unibody being split into segments is the first real change to the unibody design since GM started using it in the 80’s.

    • FireTower@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Lots of ‘totaled’ cars that still function fine get shipped to other countries with less picky used car markets too.

      • mayonaise_met@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        I once took a taxi in Addis Ababa that had slicks and a view of the road under the car. Very fancy.

    • Critical_Insight@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      Not necessarily. On some vehicles the exterior panels are part of the frame and you may only have cosmetic damage but fixing it would costs tens of thousands.

    • Chunk@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not true. Some idiot t boned me and they had to replace the frame of my car. It cost her $7k and my car is worth about twice that today.

      • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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        1 year ago

        You can contest that you were not fully reimbursed for the expense/what you have received in not equivalent in value to what you had.

  • Hyperreality@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Manufacturers are joining the era of disposable cars.

    Consumers are joining the era of disposing of cars.

      • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ll be honest, they are?

        There is no affordable car today that you can make any money today that you need to use. They require money in order to maintain it well enough to use.

        Tires are expensive. Gas is expensive. You’ve got filters and oils and fluids to replace, and headlamps. Without the required disposables, a car is basically useless.

        A house without running water, or power, or natural gas, or a furnace filter, or water softener, or lightbulbs, or toilet paper, etc. still provides shelter without all of those things.

        A car gets you from point a to point b until it doesn’t. At that point it’s disposed of.

        • time_lord@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Get an EV. The only expense is tires. I’m hoping my ev can last the life of the battery, which is supposed to be around 22 years.

          • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            My next vehicle will be. no reason to have a gas anything. Unfortunately I’m in the middle of a divorce, so I have no idea how long it will be before I can make any positive changes. Fuck I don’t even know where I’ll be living in 8 months.

    • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Ironically cars are far more reliable now than they were at any point in the past.

      • 1847953620@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I agree, I think the real problem is the cost to maintain one and the economics around it. For too long the expectation was to put as little money as possible into maintaining it and getting a new one some years later. We need to stop making them the massive status symbols they’ve become.

    • MisterD@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Won’t be a problem because more and more people don’t want a car.

      Car manufacturers know this and that’s why they are focusing on self-driving cars. Taxis will be replaced by robo-taxis owned by manufacturers and private firms.

      Within 20 years, will be like a luxury like owning a horse

      • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        robo taxis can’t respond to accidents and emergencies so its likely they won’t be affordable to operate for some time.

  • PizzasDontWearCapes@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    As mentioned in another thread, there is a paintless dent repair video on YT of a fix done to the corner of a Rivian rear bumper

    The owner claimed that he was quoted $41K. To do the work, they would need to cut the body all the way up to the front of the roof

    The PDR fix was close to perfect in this case

  • Coreidan@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Enshitification has infected Toyota. What a shame.

    Just another brand I can start avoiding.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Corporate execs: How can we force people into even more debt so we can have even more money than we’ll ever need or spend?

  • JoBo@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    This bit does not ring true:

    Such a scenario would be to Toyota’s benefit however, as an unrepairable car will still need replacement—potentially with a new car. Repairability is something the automotive industry has directly combated in recent years, with a Toyota-backed industry group sponsoring a scare campaign to (unsuccessfully) undermine a right-to-repair bill. Car companies make their money from selling new cars, not keeping old ones on the road. If cast bodies serve that end better than those stitched together, it’d be no surprise to see them become the industry standard.

    Car companies need their cars to hold their value secondhand so that the people who buy their new cars can afford to replace them more often. The right to repair stuff is about forcing people to use their dealerships for repairs.

    No idea what Toyota’s plan is for body repairs but destroying their second-hand market is probably not a part of it.

  • Usernameblankface@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Has anyone come up with a guess on the cost of swapping out an entire cast body section vs replacing or refurbishing the parts that would be there without the cast?

    • w2qw@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      I think point is without the cast body section you could just replace broken parts which may be significantly less. In practice though I don’t think it matters that much. Small accidents hopefully don’t damage the frame and if they do it’s often a bit dubious repairing it.

      • Usernameblankface@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I think once you get to the point where the car needs the frame worked on, it’s probably going to get scrapped whether it has a cast frame or not.

        • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          … on a 1st world country.

          we definetly do those kinds of repairs over here

          • bemenaker@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            This is for cars and small SUVs. The trucks still have frames. The cars and small SUVs are already unibodies. Just not multi-segmented unibodies. The two differences are that its multi-segmented, and the metal is cast, instead of forged in a stamping press.

            • pirat@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Probably because trucks are industrial vehicles built to be driven millions of km*, and therefore are a much bigger investment, so the repair is more often “worth it” than for personal vehicles.

              Also, one truck can have the cargo capacity of many cargo vans, and one bus in pendular movement has the capacity of many personal cars, so each truck/bus repair will have a greater impact.

              *At least, that’s the case for buses, according to a schoolbus driver when I was a kid.

        • epyon22@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          What this seems like is it would replace things that are normally spot welded or glued together, things I can think off the top of my head that are like this are the front radiator support and strut towers in various cars. When these items are bent or rusted you can usually buy these peices. See skyline r34 strut tower rust issues. On this new proposed design your options would be to replace the whole front or rear third of your car, or precision cutting and welding a piece in, which may be inaccessable because of the casting design.

          • Usernameblankface@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Now there I can see how this design might make more problems than it solves. Bending the mounts of different parts might total the car.

          • Thetimefarm@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Welding a casting is a lot more dubious even if you can access it easily. If the original material was welded together chances are it can be rewelded without much issue. Most successfull welds in cast material I’ve seen have been in compression, it tends to split around the weld when you put it under tension.

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      The problem is that you’d have to pretty much disassemble half the vehicle to replace a cast part, and that will be thousands extra in labor.

      • Usernameblankface@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Considering that the cast part is practically half the vehicle, I wonder if it is easier to change out the cast vs several frame parts.

        • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          The frame is a much smaller portion of the vehicle than these cast parts.

          Once a frame is damaged the vehicle often gets totalled out because it would be so much to replace, basically disassemble the vehicle or try to repair the frame and have poor safety risks from then on.

          These casts are a lot more than where a frame is. Damage to the casts will happen from accidents that never would have damaged a normal frame.

        • epyon22@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          My guess is increase part cost but reduce repair labor. Similar to replacing transmission or engine today. Not worth it for a shop to usually do the repairs them selves but replace the whole unit and send off to a remanufacturing plant

  • thejml@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    If you have a large cast part you could do the same thing as you do with a frame or body panel now. As long as there’s a replacement cast part ready, it is lots of work in some cases, so it’s less “impossible to repair” and more accurately “cost prohibitive to repair”

    • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      I wouldn’t even say cost prohibitive. Imagine if you could just swap on a whole new front end after a car crash. Currently, it takes bodywork at hundreds of dollars per hour to repair damaged body panels while this could severely reduce that time and cost.

  • MNByChoice@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    Article does not have the numbers, and I filled in DDGing the Numbers. How many cars have their frames repaired each year?

    My anecdotal experience indicates very few car frames are repaired each year, though not zero.

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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      1 year ago

      The expense of repairing frame damage is already really high and, in my personal experience with a couple cars that had frame damage from being hit, the insurance counts it as a total loss every time. I don’t suspect the average car owner is going to repair that kind of damage when it would be cheaper to just replace the entire vehicle. An enthusiast or someone with a sentimental bond with it, and has the money for it, might choose to repair it tho.

  • arc@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Gigacasting saves car companies money, it doesn’t save car owners money. For the manufacturer it reduces their bill of materials and time take to assemble a vehicle. They might save a couple of hundred bucks. Possibly.

    For the owner, it increases the risk that a small collision runs a fracture along the body of their car which is then basically impossible to repair and the entire vehicle is a writeoff. Castings could potentially have sacrificial points where some kinds of damage could be ground off and replaced with stamped metal but even if that were so, it’s still less repairable than if the entire frame of the car were assembled of stamped metal.

    • jimbolauski@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s more than a couple hundred dollars. Production time will drop from 10 to 5 hours per car. The tooling and multiple parts eliminated from large casts will save thousands.

      • arc@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I doubt it is thousands since most plants are automated, but even assuming it were, it’s the consumer who suffers when their car is basically disposable after a crash.

        • jimbolauski@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          If they were only saving 1% on costs I doubt they’d risk the bad reputation 10% makes it more appetizing.

          • arc@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            They’ll risk their reputation for much less than you might think. Tesla are getting rid of physical controls to save a few bucks even though it has a serious impact on usability and safety. E.g. The new model 3 will remove indicator stalks and put buttons on the wheel making it all but impossible to safely and legally traverse roundabouts. I reckon there will be huge backlash on this especially in the UK and Europe.