I’m An Insurance Adjuster And I’m Going To Total Your Car

November 15, 2023 11:55 AM

Published in The Autopian by an adjuster who agreed to write on the condition of anonymity. "In short, modern cars have so many complex components that they are very expensive to repair even with what looks like light damage. As the adjuster, you are under pressure to lock up as many claims as possible in the day to meet the company’s expectations. Does it look broken? Replace. Is it likely to be broken behind that part? Replace. When the software tells you you’ve hit the 75% or higher threshold of the value for the car, you wrap it up. Bam, the car is now deemed totaled by the insurance company."
posted by AlSweigart (65 comments total)

"Does that make me feel better about totaling cars? Nope. I still feel terrible. But the kicker is that the job pays better than what I was making when turning wrenches. So how do you leave? I haven’t found a solution to that question yet."

I don't want to go all socialism-or-barbarism, but let me just say that while capitalism may sound like a good idea on paper, it just doesn't work in the real world.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:57 AM on November 15, 2023 [66 favorites]

The worst part is that the totaled value of a car does not realistically cover its replacement cost. Used and new cars alike are incredibly expensive.

We would need regulators to step in and forcibly control the thresholds insurance companies may use here, but that kind of regulation seems fleetingly likely.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:05 PM on November 15, 2023 [17 favorites]

I am extremely grateful that our 2019 Elantra GT did not get totaled after it got hit while parked. The repair came out to something like $9k but, thanks to the pandemic and the car shortage, that was not enough to trigger a total. We love that car - it has the most storage space in its class. Now, the theft issues? That's another thing...
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:09 PM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Cars are so much safer than they used to be, but it does come with costs. In the old days you could cheaply jury-rig most of the moving parts until the body rusted out. There's something to be said for that model, but it's not a recipe for keeping passengers safe at 70 mph.
posted by rikschell at 12:22 PM on November 15, 2023 [20 favorites]

I didn't even bother making a claim when someone slid into the rear end of my 2004 Golf last winter. What was the point? The fuel in the tank is worth more than the car at this point. Kind of annoying that it was the first accident in that car since I bought it new and I couldn't even justify making a claim after all those years of insurance payments. I just bashed the dents back out and popped bumper clips back together to the best of my abilities when I got home.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:26 PM on November 15, 2023 [14 favorites]

More and more, cars are not built for repairability. Some of this is to make them better in other ways—safer, lighter (resulting in better mileage), etc. Some of it is to make them cheaper to manufacture. Just today, The Autopian ran a story about a "gigacasting" company being acquired by GM. Gigacastings are, as you might imagine, really big, complex castings, which take the place of several smaller ones. These sink more value into a single part that won't be repaired.

In many cases, an outside vendor is selling unitary modules that used to be several separate parts. These are lighter, cheaper to install, and the vendor gets to capture more revenue from the car maker. Everybody wins, almost. This was starkly illustrated to me at American Scientific Supply, which had a box full of unused modules combining a rear wiper motor and center high-mounted stoplight.
posted by adamrice at 12:31 PM on November 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

Now if that same accident had happened to my 2023 VW, instead of my 2004, it could have been totaled due to the cost of all the sensors in the bumpers.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:34 PM on November 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

In the old days you could cheaply jury-rig most of the moving parts until the body rusted out. There's something to be said for that model, but it's not a recipe for keeping passengers safe at 70 mph.

This. I feel fortunate to have survived a couple of the cars I drove back in the 80s -- a desperately rusted Honda Civic wagon and a Chevette "Scooter" with the structural integrity of a soda can, both of which I kept driving (on the highway even) after multiple minor accidents and subsequent jury-rigging.
posted by aught at 12:54 PM on November 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Timely! I just got rear-ended hard in my 2020 Prius (she held up like a champ, no injuries except for a sore back and neck) and I'm waiting to hear if the insurance adjuster will declare it totaled.
posted by maryellenreads at 12:59 PM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

no injuries except for a sore back and neck

Well, might get checked out for whiplash or some other more hidden injury. I've had friends who've been in accidents and reported exactly those words who a few months later were having serious complications.
posted by hippybear at 1:02 PM on November 15, 2023 [14 favorites]

Labor is fantastically expensive as well, even if the parts are available and someone knows how to get them in working order.

I had a claim on a RV recently where a single panel needed to be replaced just lifted and swapped, and it was 40hrs labor x/250hr shop rate... and BOOM 10k in human time.

Add complex tasks like bodywork/paint or troubleshooting electrical and you will hit 75% of value in nearly no time.
posted by vincentmeanie at 1:14 PM on November 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

We managed to essential deglove the front of our car by snagging a corner of it on a post whilst dragging it into the driveway. Entirely to mostly external mostly plastic parts of the car, but this was months ago and they still haven’t managed to get the parts to repair it.
posted by Artw at 1:49 PM on November 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Pretty wild how things have changed. I had a Honda Prelude Si that got punted squarely in the driver's door by an old Caddy doing a quick left through a gap in a line of traffic so not super fast, but also he was gunning it. I was driving at the time, and spun around a couple times.

Most of the glass was broken, the frame was racked, and if it hadn't been for the serious steel beam in the middle of the door I'd have been a lot more damaged than I was. Most of the left side was pretty hosed. Shockingly, they didn't total the car; it was in the shop for six weeks with a rental all that time.

I drove it for years after and it was just fine, though all the paint fell off because it was one of Those Model Years when everyone's paint eventually fell off.

I liked that car.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:02 PM on November 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Here's a good example, $5600 to replace a tail light.
posted by doctor_negative at 2:15 PM on November 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Five years ago, we were rear-ended and the insurance wrote the car off. Six months later, the same vehicle clocked up some toll charges, so I knew that some enterprising fix-it person had saved the car from the crusher. I also took that registration plate off our e-toll account.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:15 PM on November 15, 2023 [10 favorites]

Back in the late 70’s, I was driving a 1970 VW Bug. It got hit in the front, smashing in the fender, the bumper, and bending the front axel. I was able to get the fender, bumper, front axel, and with the help of a friend replace all three in an afternoon in an apartment parking space. This friend had a friend who painted cars. I got a deal on painting the fender. Easy and cheap. Around 2009, I was driving a 2003 Jetta. Another front end accident. Looked minor, less than the Bug, but it was $7000 to fix. I used to work on all my cars, but now when I look under the hood, nothing looks familiar, you need The Computer to fix anything, so I stopped fixing my own cars. $$$. I miss the good old DIY days.
posted by njohnson23 at 2:25 PM on November 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

It feels like we are caught in the bad spot between Rusty but Fixable and We Can 3D Print a Whole New Car in an Hour. I'd really like to get to there.
posted by emjaybee at 2:33 PM on November 15, 2023 [14 favorites]

I think the biggest problem with the insurance company totalling a car is that the car legally cannot be driven on the road unless it is repaired and inspected, at least in Georgia. The "totalled" status goes on the title. A good thing when we're talking about damage to safety features in the structure, not so great when the damage is expensive or mechanical which would be fixable and still safe.

There was one car I had that was totalled even though the frame and bumpers and things were ok. I didn't want the car to be totaled, it was right about the value of the car to get it fixed, about $8k. But, since the insurance company declared it totaled, I would not be legally allowed to drive it without jumping through hoops. I did end up letting that one go, but felt I had no choice.

If I would have never contacted the insurance company, I could have just made the essential repairs (probably leave off the cosmetic ones) and kept driving the car.
posted by LizBoBiz at 2:45 PM on November 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

One of the olde cars in my shop was hit so hard it definitely killed anyone who might have been in the passenger seat (hopefully no one was there!). Bent the (cast iron) rear axle (which is a feat), bent the chassis, destroyed the left side of the (wood-framed) body, etc., etc. Hit hard enough the prop shaft (from the transmission to the rear axle) was moved far enough to dent the center tunnel.

Someone pieced it back together with what they could find at home depot and some truly awful welding and literal baling wire and drove it for another 30 years. I drove it six miles home on the single-most-dangerous drive of my life and then took it apart to see what was wrong. So far I have replaced everything on the car except the engine castings. (All of this damage was pretty well hidden by bondo and the "allowances" you give ye olde classic cars.)

It should have been totaled way back in the day. Just surprised it didn't kill anyone in the interim. I'd rather stuff was totaled if there is any chance it's dangerous to other road users.
posted by maxwelton at 2:50 PM on November 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Doesn't seem worthwhile to own a car. I wonder if it would be cheaper for everyone involved if you got your car under some kind of rental/leasing scheme from a company that buys, maintains, and insures a fleet of a million absolutely identical cars. Same everything. No choosing options. You can have it in any color as long as it's black. If you total the one you're driving -- and you don't die -- you swap the wreck for an identical copy from the fleet. Let the company (whose mechanics are all absolute experts on that one make and model and feature set) use the parts from your wreck as parts for the other 999,999 identical cars in the fleet. Or would that be too communist for people to accept?
posted by pracowity at 3:00 PM on November 15, 2023 [18 favorites]

Teslas are an example of a not-very-good car built of some good parts and some not-so-good parts. Tesla is unique in its vertical integration as far as I know, but a few decades poking at the insides of cars has shown me that there is lots of potential for reuse in parts of cars, and less so in others. Reuse in cars, at any rate. Lots of parts of cars can be repurposed or recycled.
Tearing down cars to reclaim parts or ingredients (like steel from structural components, copper from wires, platinum from cats, etc) is lots easier and cheaper than repair.
Modern cars are more complex overall, but also more modular. The interactions between modules are well-understood enough to adapt to other purposes. I humbly suggest that non-repairable cars can be made to be a Good Thing if we can slip past the guard dogs to get the parts to use in non-car contexts, if for no other reason than that cars are bad and dumb. Of course that would mean unlocking the garbage...
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 3:05 PM on November 15, 2023

Labor is fantastically expensive as well, even if the parts are available and someone knows how to get them in working order.
A lot of this is because insurance companies require that repairers (here, anyway) provide a lifetime warranty on the repairs, so nobody is going to repair anything that can be replaced even if it would be far cheaper to repair it. In any case, body panels on modern cars are lightweight, super-thin high-strength steel that can't be paired and still retain the characteristics of the original panel. Add galvanising to that and it's pretty much impossible to repair most body panel damage, because the work to get that corrosion resistance back to the original is too expensive.

Here in Australia, it seems that cars are 'written off' less often than in the US. Mostly, even if there looks like extensive damage, a car will be repaired as long as the airbags haven't deployed. If even one airbag has deployed, a car will almost certainly be written off. Most often, this marks the car as a 'repairable write-off' and it can be repaired but that flag stays on the car forever. Occasionally, a car will be flagged as a 'non-repairable write-off' and this means the car's VIN is flagged as 'destroyed' and the car can never be registered again.

I have a deep distrust of insurance companies, but they've become a necessary evil if you own a reasonably late-model car because the cost of repair for even a minor fender-bender can be enormous. I do have slightly higher trust in the company where I have classic car insurance, although you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get cover. At least, if they write my car off, I'll be paid out the value and get to keep the car so I can rebuild it. But they won't insure classic cars for market value, only for what it would cost to build. There would be lots of people that own a classic car and the finance cost is double or more the insured value, given the stupid prices people are paying for such cars these days.
posted by dg at 3:13 PM on November 15, 2023

One way car companies would be able to drastically reduce the cost of maintaining and repairing cars is to stop making every single fucking part for every single fucking car unique. For example, why do there have to be so many different wheel types, sizes and stud patterns? I mean, there's nothing logical to stop manufacturers from settling on a single stud pattern for every car, which would dramatically reduce the cost of wheels because the range would be minuscule. The same applies to things like brake rotors and pads. I mean, I know why they don't, but it's insane that we've got to this point where cars are so extraordinarily complex and every single part is unique to a specific variant of a specific model.
posted by dg at 3:22 PM on November 15, 2023 [19 favorites]

Or just, dramatically cut down on the number of models. Not what consumers want but companies are experts in guiding consumers to a choice not of their own making.
posted by Slackermagee at 3:34 PM on November 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

I mean, there's nothing logical to stop manufacturers from settling on a single stud pattern for every car, which would dramatically reduce the cost of wheels because the range would be minuscule.

Have you seen the Technology Connections about the standard headlights?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:54 PM on November 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

What if -- now hear me out here, I know it's a crazy idea -- what if instead of everyone having their own car, we built some sort of giant cars that could hold lots of people at once. They could drive around town on a pre-planned route dropping people off every few blocks. For longer trips from city to city, we could maybe chain a whole bunch of them together so more people could fit, and they could be on like a dedicated road stretching from one place to another. I know, I know, it's a wild, bizarre idea, but hey, the science fiction of today is the science fact of tomorrow!
posted by Saxon Kane at 4:04 PM on November 15, 2023 [31 favorites]

In Australia, there is no 'right to repair' laws that negate the use of DRM on VAG cars (maybe others as well, I have an old Audi). There are few things I can replace/fix myself without having a dealer recode the part to work with the car. In most cases the dealerships won't even allow it - you need to head to the black market for those situations, and it costs a bomb.

Forcing car owners into the monopoly of dealership only repair denies third party mechanics business, second hand part suppliers/wreckers an incentive to provide parts for extending otherwise useful cars lives and the ability for owners to fix/replace a simple part (ie a headlight, or an amplifier) on something they 100% own.

Yes, capitalism is the problem, not the solution.
posted by a non e mouse at 4:07 PM on November 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

It’s definitely a damned if you do and damned if you don’t kind of thing. Older cars are definitely more repairable but at the same time, they’re typically not as safe, less fuel efficient and don’t last anywhere near as long. When you see crash test videos of older cars, it’s pretty astounding how poorly they perform. There’s a vid where they crashed a 59 or so Chevy into a 2009 Chevy and the 59 basically disintegrated while the ‘09 took heavy damage but the passenger compartment stayed intact. That’s a large part of where insurance companies are at. It costs money to pay for repairs and to pay for totalled cars but they’d rather pay that vs what they’d pay for severe injury or death to the occupants. (My 2018 Subaru is a good bit more expensive than my 2013 Fit was but the crash ratings are far better on the Subaru and it costs less to insure, despite the fact the insurance company would be paying roughly 2x the value were it to be totaled.) Cars, however, are on the road longer than they’ve ever been. The computerization of cars may make them a lot more complex to repair, but your flip side is that they need less repairs and as long as you stay on the maintenance they’re likely to last a lot longer. Modern fuel injection and direct ignition means more constant and reliable engine performance, leading to less wear over time. The safety and reliability aspects of modern cars necessitate the more complex construction. It does unfortunately lead to what seems to be minor damage resulting in a car being declared totalled.
posted by azpenguin at 4:10 PM on November 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

The lights thing is infuriating. If you have a car from the days of standardized headlights, and something happens to the light (fender bender, time, police baton, angry ex, blowout on the freeway knocks the whole light out of the socket), you can replace it yourself, for, like, $20, if that. You probably won't even need to YouTube the instructions. A modern light? The light itself is going to be hundreds, and you probably will have to disassemble parts of the body, there will be easy to break plastic clips, proprietary tools...

People say, oh, the old sealed beams sucked, but that's just a matter of updating the standards. I've also heard that it's about looks, but for that argument to hold water, there would have to have been at least one beautiful new car designed since 1984, and there hasn't been.

I expect disagreement on that last point, because a lot of people are just wrong, and I'm very frustrated that there is nothing I can do about it. Nevertheless, it is a fact that if you Google "most beautiful car ever," you will see at least a few cars with sealed beam headlights, and the owners of those impossibly beautiful and fancy cars can get away with a $20 headlight repair, unlike you, with your practical modern car.
posted by surlyben at 4:28 PM on November 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

Metafilter: a lot of people are just wrong, and I'm very frustrated that there is nothing I can do about it.
posted by genpfault at 4:57 PM on November 15, 2023 [39 favorites]

As a postscript to my earlier comment, Australia does in fact have right to repair legislation, but it doesn't appear to cover DRM, just access to workshop manuals and certain diagnostics.

Just wanted to fix that oversight on my part.
posted by a non e mouse at 5:11 PM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

The headlight thing seems crazy to me too, but I could offer some speculation -

1. The move to FEMs (Front End Modules) where a tier integrator would produce a single module containing the lamps, radiators, cooling fans, AC condenser, grille, crumple zone, bumper, washer bottle, wiring... in ye olde days, each part was individually located and secured to the vehicle on the assembly line, which then caused stack tolerances to build.

There are numerous advantages to using FEMs - huge part count and fastener reduction, mass reduction, packaging efficiency, safety. You probably also don't want anyone with a screwdriver being able to make off with your headlamp in 30 seconds in the car park...

2. IIHS / other safety standards demand a certain beam travel distance and focus to not blind oncoming drivers. Reflector headlamps (the sealed beam ones you mentioned) simply cannot deliver high scores on this metric as far as I am aware. Projector headlamps - a long tube with a focusing lens at the end - can deliver a long range focused beam that doesn't blind other road users, but they have a lot of physical depth which extends back into the engine bay which complicates repair and replacement. Then you get all the tech on modern lights - auto high beam, auto-levelling lights, directional headlamps, etc, which adds cost.
posted by xdvesper at 5:16 PM on November 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Simply, I guess, to make one modern acceptable car you need trillions of dollars of factories and a global supply chain. A hundred years ago, one person could bang one together out of sheet metal and castings in their garage in a summer. It's like, what is the cost of one iPad? Ten trillion dollars and a billion engineer-hours (hand wave). What's the cost of two? That and another five hundred bucks. I dunno where I'm going with this. Shit isn't getting simpler, though.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:28 PM on November 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Such a missed opportunity for the "...IN A CAVE, WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS" quote. ಠ_ಠ
posted by Riki tiki at 6:15 PM on November 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

[smugly enjoys walkable neighbourhood with great transit and bike connections to the rest of the city]
posted by clawsoon at 6:55 PM on November 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

[smugly enjoys walkable neighbourhood with great transit and bike connections to the rest of the city]

I think about this every time someone who “saved” money by the moving to the suburbs complains about being broke and it’s like … you’ve gifted how many tens of thousands of dollars per year to the SUV industry rather than, say, your retirement? Even just having a blowout party every few months would at least be more fun than taking a car commute on the chin every morning.
posted by adamsc at 7:22 PM on November 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Dad bought a new-ish car with cameras embedded all over. I told him, even a fender-bender will total this car and he didn't believe me.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:58 PM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Does it look broken? Replace. Is it likely to be broken behind that part? Replace. When the software tells you you’ve hit the 75% or higher threshold of the value for the car, you wrap it up. Bam, the car is now deemed totaled by the insurance company."

This really doesn't sound unreasonable to me. If anything, a 75% threshold sounds really generous.

Automobiles aren't investments. They're remarkably complex tools that got that way for very good reasons. The only thing slowing down overall complexity is the move to electric motors.

What if -- now hear me out here, I know it's a crazy idea -- what if instead of everyone having their own car, we built some sort of giant cars that could hold lots of people at once. They could drive around town on a pre-planned route dropping people off every few blocks. For longer trips from city to city, we could maybe chain a whole bunch of them together so more people could fit, and they could be on like a dedicated road stretching from one place to another. I know, I know, it's a wild, bizarre idea, but hey, the science fiction of today is the science fact of tomorrow!

And when they don't go where I need to go, I have to buy a car. Like virtually everyone who owns a car. At that point, your crazy idea is crazy because it's utterly useless.

It's always amazing how many MeFites cannot understand the utility owning a car can bring, and the value it adds to simply earning a better living than otherwise possible. As if people who buy a car cannot figure it out themselves. Do you think the average person will drop $40k or more on an automobile because they can't figure out something better to do with the money?

Dad bought a new-ish car with cameras embedded all over.

That would be virtually every car being sold now. Even the cheapest ones have a full set of cameras and sensors to watch the surroundings for the occupants.
posted by 2N2222 at 8:10 PM on November 15, 2023 [10 favorites]

2N2222: consider that many of us understand that utility is due to a historical context where the built environment was customized for only one transportation option, with companies like GM and Standard Oil very conscientiously steering policies in ways which ensured future business. Once someone lives in a city where transit was removed and worsened to support driving, where neighborhoods were deliberately segregated to keep pedestrians and transit out, etc. it is true that a car has high utility but that doesn’t mean that it’s the only way to live or the best. It also doesn’t mean that the optimal design is each adult owning at least one car – for example, if you aren’t making long distance / rural trips every couple of days it’d be cheaper for many people to rent than own and take transit or bike the rest of the year, but there’s a very profitable industry spending a lot of money to reduce the odds of you questioning things like that analytically.

Your aside “Do you think the average person will drop $40k or more on an automobile because they can't figure out something better to do with the money?” is a great example of that blind spot. Someone spending twice as much as they need to on a vehicle is not paying for additional utility but rather other things, like impressing their neighbors or buying luxury furnishings to distract themselves from just how much low-quality time they’re spending in traffic.


Tying back to the article, one of the reasons why you’re seeing so many people question car culture now is that its inherent unsustainability has become more prominent. Not just the whole destroying the planet part, or even the lower health and quality of life for everyone around parts, but also the cycle of attempts to put bandaids on intrinsic problems: cars are more expensive now because they have various attempts to make them less dangerous, but drivers have reacted by getting more aggressive (the risk is largely born by the people they hit, not them) so now we’re multiple iterations into even more complex safety systems, and the costs keep increasing … and more people start to ask whether it might in fact be better not to have a system where everyone is expected to operate heavy machinery under all conditions simply to function in life. If you really like cars, getting the 90% of trips which don’t need one off the road is only going to help for the few trips which do, too.
posted by adamsc at 8:45 PM on November 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

Thats all well and great but we don't live in a world where everything was set up around the idea that people don't have cars. So you can tut-tut about these people and their poor decisions or realize that they are making these decisions based on their own circumstances, which for many people, and probably most people with a car, does not include reliable public transport. Everyone can't live in the city center, rents there are already high keeping alot of people out of the neighborhoods that have transport.

I lived for 5 years in Munich without a car, and it was totally fine. The public transport is reliable and efficient, but that's only in the city. If you live outside the city, just 30 minutes by train, you're already in a place that doesn't have good public transport service, except to the city.

And look, I lived my first 2 months in Sydney without a car. My commute to work by transport is amazing, but that's just about it. If you're not going to the core of downtown, the trip can take 3x as long as with a car. It was incredibly hard to furnish a new apartment using only the bus and car sharing (for picking up larger items), and in the end, those together cost me more than $400 AUS (about $200 USD) in a month. Thats not counting the cost to my partner as well.

So yeah, we got a car, because fucking-a my time is worth something to me and I dont want to spend all day on the fucking bus when I could do it incredibly fast and efficient with a car and then have time to relax. That doesn't mean I don't want the public transport in my area to improve, but until I does, I'll go with the car.
posted by LizBoBiz at 10:26 PM on November 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

[smugly enjoys walkable neighbourhood with great transit and bike connections to the rest of the city]

Hah, I did the opposite. Lived in the inner city for 8 years without needing a car because everywhere was walkable or within reach of public transport. I honestly didn't even really need a fridge, because the supermarket downstairs WAS my fridge, I'd stop by on the way home and pick up exactly what I needed to make a meal and ate it all with no leftovers. Hurray for supermarket self-serve where you can buy just 15 cents worth of ginger at a time without it being awkward.

After 8 years of that I moved far away from the tiny shoebox apartment in the city and built a large and modern 5 bedroom house with the latest eco-friendly tech on the fringe, it's still farmland and pasture out there that's slowly being turned into houses like mine. I like not having to breathe in all the traffic fumes 24/7 in the city, whenever I go back to the city I am shocked at how bad it all smells - yes you can walk everywhere, but there's still way too many cars on the streets from morning till night, especially older cars from 10 years ago with crappy emissions controls.

The noise in the city was also something you only realise once you leave it, it's pin drop quiet out here. I have 250mbps fiber internet, I work from home, I put maybe 2,000km on my car per year, if I do drive, there's so much parking available there's no stress at all.
posted by xdvesper at 11:24 PM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Bam, the car is now deemed totaled by the insurance company

I think the biggest problem with the insurance company totalling a car is that the car legally cannot be driven on the road unless it is repaired and inspected, at least in Georgia. The "totalled" status goes on the title.

What happens to the "insurance totalled" cars? Are they physically destroyed by a scrapyard, driven illegally in the US, equipped with false papers or simply shipped abroad to a developing country for someone there to buy and drive?
posted by Paul Slade at 11:38 PM on November 15, 2023

making every single fucking part for every single fucking car unique.

.. and yet, the cars themselves all seem to look the same. There's the SUV one, the family hatchback one, the big posh saloon one and that's about it.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:15 AM on November 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

What happens to the "insurance totalled" cars?

Many of them are simply resold with a “branded” title (like “salvage”, “flood”, “junk” etc) for parts/repair and resell etc. If you search eBay Motors or Craigslist or simply google for salvage title cars you’ll find them for sale.

I remember after major hurricane flooding in Texas, hundreds of flooded insurance written-off high end cars being shipped up to the SF Bay Area to be resold to buyers who probably wouldn’t know to look for signs of flood damage…
posted by inflatablekiwi at 3:15 AM on November 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

[smugly enjoys walkable neighbourhood with great transit and bike connections to the rest of the city]

I managed with rarely driving my car in our walkable neighbourhood for 20 years. My office was a lovely 20 minute walk from my house. Then a year ago my employer moved out to suburbia in a building surrounded by hectares of tarmac parking lots and multi lane expressways. I have to drive to work now and I hate and resent the 25 to 40 minute drive that has replaced my daily walk. The public transit in this city was designed to get people into the downtown core, not across town and out into the burbs, and I don’t want to spend 1.5 hours and 3 transfers on the bus.
posted by fimbulvetr at 5:33 AM on November 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

And when they don't go where I need to go, I have to buy a car. Like virtually everyone who owns a car. At that point, your crazy idea is crazy because it's utterly useless.

It's always amazing how many MeFites cannot understand the utility owning a car can bring, and the value it adds to simply earning a better living than otherwise possible. As if people who buy a car cannot figure it out themselves. Do you think the average person will drop $40k or more on an automobile because they can't figure out something better to do with the money?

I agree - one of the things that I think is immensely frustrating about this discussion is making it seem as though there's a viable option that people aren't choosing in most towns and cities. Carless life was very doable when we lived in a large city away without the majority of our family nearby - I biked to work year-round and my wife walked or took the bus. Our life was very simple and so it was very easy to build our life around not having a car.

Now we are parents with a kid whose daycare is not walking distance because where we live you have to take any spot that opens up. They also have a chronic illness that includes regular medical touch points as well as emergency ones. We have jobs that are about 10km apart and my wife works shift. We have aging parents who need support (one of whom doesn't drive) that are scattered across three homes that are not close to one another. I was in the emergency room last year five times with parents and kid, three of which happened overnight.

I hate owning two vehicles and know it's financially not great in isolation and would relish returning to the simple life that we once had that allowed us to get by without as much vehicle availability. But what I think people who don't have cars seem to realize is - most of the people who I know (including us) were able to get by carless by having a relatively simple life that is largely controlled by your needs. My car trips are 95% places I have to go, not want to go.

There are a lot of things that I would LOVE to simplify about my life - we are able to afford to live next to the hospital where my wife works and a grocery store gets built in the vicinity, I work permanently from home, our daycare is in the same neighborhood, three households of parents move into our area - but that is all stuff that is outside of our control and is the result of a century's worth of bad urban planning.
posted by openhearted at 5:55 AM on November 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

Y'all are making me feel even more smug, since I'm raising my disabled daughter as a single parent and took care of my mother for the last years of her life with ALS without a car.

(I should probably add something here like "your hate makes me stronger.")

xdvesper: I like not having to breathe in all the traffic fumes 24/7 in the city...The noise in the city was also something you only realise once you leave it

As somebody pointed out, cities aren't noisy, cars are noisy; cities don't give off traffic fumes, cars give off traffic fumes. I'm sure you realize the irony of using your car to escape what you hate about cars.
posted by clawsoon at 6:22 AM on November 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Y'all are making me feel even more smug, since I'm raising my disabled daughter as a single parent and took care of my mother for the last years of her life with ALS without a car.

Congrats, you're a more capable, better person than I am. I will leave this thread feeling worse about my ability to figure things out the way that you have. Goal achieved in how you're interacting here I guess?
posted by openhearted at 7:00 AM on November 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Congrats, you're a more capable, better person than I am.

If you actually knew me, instead of a couple of sentences about me on the Internet, you'd probably be, like, "Nah, that might be fine for him, but it's not for me," and you'd feel better about yourself.
posted by clawsoon at 7:06 AM on November 16, 2023

This thread probably should not turn into a referendum about car ownership and urbanism.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:52 AM on November 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

A different thing that I'm wondering about is how much the repair-isn't-worth-it phenomena is driven by the overvaluation of American and Western European labour compared to labour in much of the rest of the world. If everybody in the global supply chain leading up to the making of a modern car was paid fairly, from rubber plantation workers in Indonesia to automotive chip fab workers in Malaysia, would there be a more sensible repair-vs-replace ratio?
posted by clawsoon at 8:33 AM on November 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

The "totalled" status goes on the title.

It does, but in most states, you can still drive (and more importantly insure) a totaled car. My inlaws car was totaled by hail - they drove it for another 3 years, until a wheel fell off.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:40 AM on November 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Also my cars aren't loaded up with cameras, but you can still repair many things on them. (the cameras are plug & play things that cost less than $100) - all the software is in the radio/entertainment console.

My opinion: most people don't want to drive a slightly wrinkled car, so insurance adjusters are just doing what the majority of the people want. Yes, a subset of people don't want to take the loan hit and can't afford a newer vehicle in an accident, but nothing in life is designed for that subset of people.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:44 AM on November 16, 2023

This thread probably should not turn into a referendum about car ownership and urbanism.

Any thread that mentions cars will get that one dude who says, essentially, "It's simple. Everyone should just stop driving cars. You guys are dumb for not understanding that."
posted by pracowity at 8:52 AM on November 16, 2023 [7 favorites]

Yeah! He'll show up any minute now, I'm sure.
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:59 AM on November 16, 2023

He's already been here.
posted by pracowity at 9:24 AM on November 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

In case anyone's wondering how pathologically attached people can get to the "decisions" they have made in the course of their car-dependence, try driving a Toyota Prius in the US for a year.
You don't have to ride a bike, even. Just view the world of Suburbia from inside a utilitarian, relatively efficient, still gas-drinking, small-ish for the US car.
People in their high-power combine harvesters with the luxury furniture inside will absolutely lose their minds around you, as they drive towards their destinations at the same speed in the same traffic.
posted by tigrrrlily at 9:36 AM on November 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

pracowity: Any thread that mentions cars will get that one dude who says, essentially, "It's simple. Everyone should just stop driving cars. You guys are dumb for not understanding that."

You mean you haven't single-handedly rebuilt your city to be perfectly walkable? No wonder you're feeling defensive.

(I basically stumbled into this neighbourhood because I wanted to be near my daughter's elementary school instead of a 30 minute bus ride away. I've been without a car for a long time, but it wasn't until I moved into this specific neighbourhood that I realized that being car-free could be a pleasure instead of a chore, even with a kid. A bunch of activists in the 1980s brought the neighbourhood into existence, and, sadly, there aren't many more like it in the rest of the country.)
posted by clawsoon at 9:42 AM on November 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not feeling defensive. I haven't driven in going on four decades -- I let my license expire long ago -- but that's because I had the luxury to move to places where a person can get by without a car 99.9 percent of the time and call a taxi when only a car will do. Most people don't have that luxury.
posted by pracowity at 10:08 AM on November 16, 2023

As somebody pointed out, cities aren't noisy, cars are noisy; cities don't give off traffic fumes, cars give off traffic fumes. I'm sure you realize the irony of using your car to escape what you hate about cars.

No need for the toxicity Clawsoon, I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just saying, having experienced both, the city is great in some ways, and shit in some other ways. Since I took a remote job, wouldn't it make sense that I vacate my city apartment for someone else who needs it for the proximity to work and can live a car free lifestyle rather than hoarding it for myself? That is better for the environment, no?
posted by xdvesper at 1:47 PM on November 16, 2023

My only experience with car totaling was very much indisputable, as the damn thing was eaten by a sinkhole. Nevertheless, the experience with the adjusters was eye opening -- because a sinkhole in a major urban area will tend to impact quite a lot of cars, and also in quite a lot of ways. Some friends who were parked not that far from me were not considered "totaled" despite having been basically frozen into giant blocks of ice (sinkholes in January!) and indeed were repaired. They smelled pretty terrible, and no idea whether their longevity was, you know, less than it ought to have been. I guess if it happened today they'd all be completely written off.

(Also I would just like to offer solidarity to the car-havers. I haven't had a car since the sinkhole, and lemme tell you, it fucking blows chunks to not have a car! I live in a major city with mass transit and have no kids and even so, I hate not having a car so much. It makes my life a hundred times more difficult every single day. It's just that the only thing I hate more than not having a car is driving a car.)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:52 PM on November 16, 2023

xdvesper: No need for the toxicity Clawsoon, I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just saying, having experienced both, the city is great in some ways, and shit in some other ways. Since I took a remote job, wouldn't it make sense that I vacate my city apartment for someone else who needs it for the proximity to work and can live a car free lifestyle rather than hoarding it for myself? That is better for the environment, no?

To me it doesn't seem that way, especially since you're chewing up farm and pasture land with your big new eco-tech house, leading to knock-on habitat destruction as the displaced farming is pushed outward. I'm no environmental saint myself - you should see the amount of disposable plastic packaging I go through, as just one example - but at least I'm not convincing myself that what I'm doing is actually a good thing.

But we are, as someone pointed out upthread, getting a long way from the repairability issue. So to bring it back around, one thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet in the article or discussion is the patenting of repair parts.

Back In The Day, you could buy pretty good replacement parts for cheap. But then automakers discovered the magic of repair part design patents, and now you can only buy from the manufacturers for many years after the car comes out. This is very profitable for them, and very expensive for consumers.

Every few years an American lawmaker will introduce a bill to limit those patents - the PARTS Act, or the SMART Act, or the PARTS Act again - but from what I've been able to find, those acts somehow never seem to make it very far.
posted by clawsoon at 2:48 PM on November 16, 2023

HA! HA! HA! I've not thought about this in years. I love this story. My first car, 1977 Datsun 810 6-cylinder c1990 purchased for $700. Total $#!t car, but hey--it runs.

It's like 1991,92. I'm a college student. I'm in Fremont, CA and I just got something "printed" for school at this desktop publishing/copy place on the corner of Mowry and Farwell. I'm exiting the parking lot behind a pickup truck who is turning left. I'm just behind them turning right.

The driver get's themselves waaay out into the roadway, then chickens out, dumps the truck into reverse and--without looking back--drives their bumper into my left side panel. This crumples the first foot of the quarter panel, crushing the headlight. We exchange information. Like a dutiful driver I turn this over to my insurance company CSAA. Meanwhile, I take a hammer, bang out the dent, buy a new bulb at NAPA and I'm sorted.

Later, the driver's insurance company calls me to give me a settlement offer for the damage. They say the cost to repair exceeds the value of the car (the front panel is one continuous piece up the A pillar to the roof and back down to the right front panel), so they're going to call the vehicle "totaled". They access the value of the vehicle as something like $500-600 bucks. Great, I already fixed the damage on my POS and I could use the cash (college student, remember?).

THEM ...that's 600 minus the "Salvage Fee" of $200.

ME Oh? And pray tell what is a salvage fee?

THEM. Because we're paying you the "value" of the vehicle, we have effectively bought the car from you. If you want to keep the car, as the new owners we get to claw back the value we could get from auto-wreckers, the "salvage", for the vehicle.

ME. AH-NO! First, the car is not "for sale", so you can't "buy" the vehicle simply by exceeding some arbitrary "value" when you settle the damage your insured did...bla...bla.

You get the drift.
This went on for weeks.
They ultimately caved.
Fast forward 5-7 years and I'm on Junipero Serra taking the soft left going North into San Francisco, and some work truck merging from behind me on 19th side swipes me crossing two lanes. Totally their fault. Same situation--'salvage fee'. This time I lost the argument.
1 for 2
posted by xtian at 7:09 PM on November 16, 2023

It feels like we are caught in the bad spot between Rusty but Fixable and We Can 3D Print a Whole New Car in an Hour. I'd really like to get to there.

My limited experience is that there is no such thing as 3-d printing anything sizable in an hour. If you could print a car body, it would take a week or a month. I can’t see that changing radically unless there’s some radical technology change. If the printer was cheap enough it could still be economical, but I’m not waiting underwater breathing through a straw for it to happen.

posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 8:10 PM on November 16, 2023

Clawsoon - Yeah, I agree that none of us are ultimately blameless in terms of emissions and pollution, we just make the best choices we can in our circumstances.

I think that it's clear with population growth and lack of housing in our most desirable cities - something unlikely to be remedied in coming years - new houses must be built. In that case, it's the most optimal for people who can work from home and who care about energy efficiency to be the ones to build those houses on the fringe.

Even people who claim that living car free in the inner city is virtuous would have had to use their financial muscle to out-bid someone else for the right to rent or own the apartment, relegating them to the fringe where they might have to make a long commute. In that sense, only new housing counts as incremental change.

Of course, we could say that higher rent and sky high property prices in the inner city should serve as a signal for developers to evict residents and demolish aging buildings in the city core to construct huge residential towers, but that's a 5-10 year time horizon...

Farming doesn't get pushed "outward" - anywhere good for farming has already been mostly utilized in the past 100 years. Dramatically increased farm productivity have outpaced population growth for decades, and many of the smaller and oldest pastures and farms on the city fringe are now better used for housing. The ones I see on the city fringe are maintained as break-even / traditional / hobby / lifestyle ventures, they do stuff like Air-BNB stays to help them pay their bills - they don't have a chance of competing commercially agains the industrial mega-farms that are hundreds of km from the city.

---

As for the replacement parts... in theory, this gets captured as cost-to-insure as part of lifetime ownership costs, just like how people will (should!) factor in that Toyota has lower repair and insurance cost, and higher resale value than Ford, in that article. Though, it does mention Toyota is also doing the same... so maybe the issue is, fine, patent the part, and if you don't price gouge on it, then the consumer doesn't lose out, premiums don't go up, no harm no foul. In particular, repair parts like the grille or hood or bumper have a direct impact on crash safety, so perhaps the government agreed with the lobbying that it shouldn't be outsourcing safety critical parts to unknown suppliers from low cost countries who didn't participate in the original crash testing regime.

If you want a peek behind the curtain... I was involved in an aftermarket parts role (about a decade ago) where we did have many conversations around pricing parts for which there were no competitors. There was even a debate about pricing the aftermarket repair part below cost just to keep the customer happy - particularly around the cost/benefit of the FEMs I mentioned earlier - far cheaper to manufacture, but more expensive in a crash because even minor damage would lead to you replacing the entire assembly rather than just the affected parts. I seemingly recall that the rationale at the time was to pass on some of those savings from FEMs to the rare customer who ended up in a crash by offering them a FEM at lower than cost price which was effectively cross-subsidized by the 99 other customers who didn't get into a crash. This was because we didn't want a sudden jump in insurance payouts which would lead to cars being scrapped early, and then the follow on increase in insurance premiums.
posted by xdvesper at 8:40 PM on November 16, 2023 [1 favorite]