Dents, dings and other miscellaneous damage to body panels are the just some of the quirky and inevitable realities of car ownership that affects drivers of all makes and models.
Whether you, or the people you trust with your precious set of wheels, are bad at parking, the victim of runaway shopping carts or fall victim to the driving mishaps of other drivers, the replacement or repair of damaged body panels and bumpers are procedures for which owners will commonly put off or begrudgingly shell out the funds.
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Such common incidents can result in very expensive trouble for owners of Rivian’s popular R1T electric pickup truck, as several dissatisfied customers took to social media to report five-figure repair estimates for seemingly minor dents in one vulnerable part of the car.
Small dents turn into big headaches for owners
A recent video by Florida-based, paintless dent repair specialist Matt Boyette, known as “The Dent Slayer” on YouTube, showed how he saved an R1T owner a quoted $40,000 due to a dent in the truck’s rear panel by working his methods on the dent.
Similarly, Ohio R1T owner Chris Apfelstadt took to his Rivian owners' Facebook group in February 2023 to report similar damage that resulted from a rear-end collision. Unlike the owner serviced by the Dent Slayer, Apfelstadt was given a final repair bill of “over $42,000” from a Rivian-certified repair shop.
YouTube electric car personality and Tesla modification enthusiast Rich Benoit, better known as Rich Rebuilds, reported in May 2023 that he faced a repair bill of $37,475 after a rear end collision damaged the same body panels on his Rivian (RIVN) -).
These expensive repair costs are the result of an unfortunate design flaw of this truck. The steps taken for the sleek and futuristic design of the R1T to separate itself from run-of-the-mill pickup trucks results in certain complications when it comes to collision repair.
“You have to understand how these vehicles are made; this isn’t a bed like a normal pickup truck, this is more like an SUV. The quarter panel […] is tied to the cab of the truck, it goes all the way across the roof across the vehicle, all the way to the rear view side mirror,” explained Boyette in his video. “In order to replace this panel, all that has to be cut off; the back glass has to be taken out, the panoramic roof has to be taken out, the windshield, the battery pack has to be removed. There’s a lot of disassembly that has to occur in order to for this to get fixed the conventional way at a body shop.”
A stark reality for future buyers
Though Rivian made use of large body panels to create a sleeker car, huge repair bills like the ones that the R1T owners faced could become a reality for other prospective EV owners, as both Tesla (TSLA) -) and Toyota (TM) -) set out to use gigacasting methods to produce cheaper electric cars in the future.
Gigacasting speeds up the process of creating a vehicle through the elimination of welding joints — traditionally done by people or robots — by making large components of the car out of a huge single casting. The downside of such methods is that damage to said components can result in owners facing the same reality of the mentioned R1T owners, where the littlest of damage can impact a major part of the car.
Mix the possibilities with Tesla’s reputation for poor build quality and you have a recipe for disaster put in the hands of owners. This is already a reality for Tesla owner Nizar Kamel, who took to social media in August 2023 after discovering large cracks in gigacasted components in his five-month-old Model Y that were large enough to jeopardize the car’s structural integrity.
Hey @Tesla my 2023 Model Y has cracks though the metal on its front cast, is this normal? @elonmusk any thought on this build quality? #Tesla #modely #teslahelp pic.twitter.com/arfr2QRmkr
— Nizar Kamel (@Nizzysaurus) August 24, 2023
As the race to innovate and introduce the next best thing in electric vehicles to the most amount of people, potential buyers should be warned about what these innovations actually innovate and what headaches they can result in.
