How much is it to repair a newer car today?
I almost did not read an article today publish in the Detroit Free Press but something told me to go back and read it.
The headline read “$34K to repair a car? High-tech features mean higher repair bills” so I clicked on it and was very surprised.
With all the advanced technology and the accident avoidance systems in the new vehicles what happens if you actually do get into an accident, the pocket book of your insurance company, which means eventually your pocket book could suffer greatly?
During an appearance on Autoline, an industry-focused conference and program, John Van Alstyne, CEO and president of I-Car, a nonprofit focused on vehicle repair education stated that to repair a "left front corner hit" on a Kia K900 will cost you or your insurance company $34,000, that is U.S. dollars not South Korean wons. In article John was quoted as saying at the conference:
The Kia K900, for example, has a ton of technology around the front and the corners of that vehicle
Due to that technology and the other cost to repair the vehicle such as more parts are needed and additional labor is required for resetting, calibrating and scanning operations, the cost balloons to $34,000. The luxury sedan cost about $51,000 new.
For example Dean Fisher, chief operating officer of Carstar, which operates a franchise network of independent collision repair shops was quoted in the article talking about other fixes. He stated that fixing collision damage is now a multilayered process. He provided as an example the case of a side mirror with blind-spot monitoring that must be removed when he stated:
When you remove the mirror from the door to paint the door handles and everything, you may have to recalibrate the security system, the interlocking system in the vehicle and the blind-spot monitoring…Simple repairs, such as painting a bumper, might need additional work to ensure safety systems are functioning properly before the vehicle is released…If you paint over the sensors, you have just changed the trajectory of that sensor
What does that mean, well repairs that might have cost just a couple of hundred dollars years ago can now cost substantially more.
He pointed to an example of a car headlight when he stated:
With LED and xenon and then adaptive headlights, where it actually turns a corner with you as you're turning … those headlights can move in the range of $800 to frankly $2,000
The technology is great but it comes with a heavy price. When are they going to make vehicles that will never get in an accident? I would assume the vehicle repair shops would not like that one.
The example of the KIA might be on the extreme end but I can see where the repair cost are going and that is up.
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