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We used a one-piece body side, and so that means if you damage like the rear fender, the repair operation, depending on the level of the damage, you can either do body work or you have to cut out a portion of the panel, re-weld the new panel on,
So, a problem of design that didn't really think about repairability
I like the rivian cars, but i have worked for years as a hardware engineer and i am 100 percent certain this was a known issue. I have seen design scrutinized on so much less and this is just such an obvious issue...
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.
Not gonna happen for multiple obvious reasons, but here's one that would make you not want to buy one - it'd be a budget car for a price of a BMW.
And you're not gonna want to buy it second-hand, because of the risk of unimaginable extent of software garbage the previous owners would leave you with.
Tinker cars are for tinkering, good luck untinkering it.
You can already do that though. Basically any truck just has a control on the dash to disable the passenger side airbag in case you neet to put a car seat there. You can also just remove the airbags in any existing vehicle as is. It really isn't hard to do. People are just hesitant to do so because if you screw up then you can set the airbag off.
More importantly though why would the software being foss effect the airbags? The airbags shouldn't be interacting with the vehicle software at all.
People have been doing dumb things with their cars since the invention of cars. Making them harder to repair via locked down software isn't the fix for that.
Airbags are definitely a part of the can bus these days, they trigger based off of a number of inputs like the gyro, speed, acceleration, etc. I suppose they could just put in a seperate, secure system for the airbags that cannot be tampered with.
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.
The mecedes g wagon was developed with easy repair ability in mind. At least regarding the outer shell and maybe the frame. Straight and rectangular sections that can easily be welded. As all good ideas it went to shit of course.
Germans will not save us with simple engineering. Everything in their cars is so fucking complicated to work on.
It's like they have a division of how to make mechanics work hell
You read my comment, right?
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.
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.
Idk who your insurance is but ive never heard of one that won't let you keep the car plus pay you out the insurance minus what the car is worth in its current state (scrap metal value). You'd have a salvage title after its repaired and inspected but when you're living paycheck to paycheck anyways who cares.
