My Tesla was beat up – can you fix it at a Tesla Authorized Repair Center or a “regular” repair shop?

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How do I use my experience to get an estimate for a simple repair at both a Tesla Certified and “regular” body shop?

I’ve written about Tesla collision repairs before here and here , about 5 years ago. This summer, I had the opportunity to do a similar repair again! My previous repair was to the rear of my 2018 Tesla Model 3, and the new repair was to the rear of my 2022 Tesla Model Y. The last time, my wife got confused when she ran out of the garage and hit the garage door in the process. It was closing. This time, it was raining and a car hit my car with great force. I was shocked because the damage was so small. My conclusion 5 years ago was:

“In my articles about Tesla, I have constantly focused on how affordable the cars are and how they cost less to own than other luxury sedans, and can even be as affordable on a total cost of ownership basis as regular cars like the Toyota Camry or Honda Accord. I would say that This repair experience calls that assertion into question. If insurance companies saw the cost of repairing a Model 3 as twice as much as repairing a Honda, wouldn’t Tesla’s insurance rates be twice as expensive? Maybe it would cover much more than just repairing your car Medical bills and damage your vehicle causes to others Perhaps the significantly enhanced safety of the Model 3 will reduce bodily injury claims enough to counteract the higher repair costs Perhaps the superior active safety systems will continue to reduce the number of accidents.

“I believe that as millions of Tesla vehicles are sold over the next decade, more body shops will learn how to repair cars and competition will drive down vehicle repair costs.

“So, right now, Tesla insurance rates are very in line with Honda and Toyota rates in my situation and I hope they continue to improve, but the fairly high repair costs will likely pose an issue if those costs don’t continue to rise.” under.”

The rest of this article will explain my experience – how things changed and how I chose to deal with it.

Hit by an uninsured motorist

Without going into all the details, I was hit by a car driver who severely damaged several cars and did not have enough insurance to cover the damage. I could have gone to my insurance company and asked them to fix my car, but I decided to work with the insurance company of the person who caused the damage to avoid a claim on my insurance policy. It’s not clear to me whether this is necessary to keep interest rates low, but that’s what I did. This encouraged me to do the repair at a lower price, because I knew the return would be relatively low. I could also have sued the person who hit me and gotten damages that way, but I didn’t really want to do that. Fortunately, the car was in good working order, including the tailgate operation, so I had plenty of time to make the repair when I wanted to. So I got two repair estimates, one from a highly rated Tesla Certified Repair Shop and one from a highly rated body shop.

So, what did you learn from this estimate? Even though the tailgate worked fine, they insisted on replacing it, and the body and paint work cost $95 per hour, the same as 5 years ago. You could call the labor rate a win for consumers, since everything else has gone up in price, or you could say it’s still higher than what we would expect to repair a Honda or Chevy, especially now that Teslas are much more affordable than they were 5 years ago . I think the total of $5,140.50 is quite high for such minor damage to a car probably worth $20,000. It’s about half work and half parts and paint.

So, from this estimate, I learned that if an auto repair shop treats the car like a “normal” car, they will just fix the damage. They suggested spending half as many hours of physical labor (6.2 vs. 12.5) because they would only be fixing the dented verses replacing the tailgate. The paint job was also less than half (4.3 vs. 11.1), as they suggested painting the car a much smaller amount. The cost of paint is about a third, $154.80 versus $444, since much less of the car will be painted. Another big difference is that the labor rate is $54 per hour versus $95 per hour. The total cost of the proposed repair is $827.54 vs. $5,140.50, a difference of over 6 times!

What should I do?

When deciding what to do, I thought about the 15 or so other accident repairs my family has been involved in over the past 40 years and how things turned out. Some of these repairs were done at high-end shops for $5,000 or so, and some were done at more affordable body shops for about $750. There has of course been significant inflation in the last 40 years, so I double or triple the prices for old repairs. Of course, those older cars didn’t have the advanced sensors and cameras found in a Tesla. This means that if any of these devices are affected, you’ll need to have them repaired by someone who knows what they’re doing if you’re interested in doing Autopilot and FSD (which I do). Fortunately, the vast majority of accidents my family has been in are cosmetic only (knock on wood). What I found from that experience is that if you make a high-quality repair, it will last a long time. Maybe 10 years or more. I’ve found times when I’ve used a lower priced body shop that it looked good for about 3-5 years and then started fading, peeling, or some other minor issue.

This highly rated “non-certified” shop has better quality than some of the cheaper places I’ve used for older cars, but I assume the paint might peel or discolour within 5 years. So, the relevant question is, if this happened to my 9 year old Tesla (the car is now 4 years old), how much would my family care and how much would it impact the resale value. I can say that once a car is 9 years old and it’s not a special limited edition (like an Indy Pace Car), most people don’t care much. The Tesla Model Y is far from being a limited edition car, the best-selling car in the world. It’s just a modern Toyota Camry. Will this affect resale value? Granted, the dealer would probably knock $2,000 off the car’s value, while I think a private party would probably knock $1,000 off the car’s price. Now, even if the car is repaired at an authorized Tesla store, you will get some reduction in value just because CARFAX will show an accident. Another factor in my decision was the impact on the environment. It seems like a waste to spend extra time and materials replacing the liftgate, which works perfectly fine. The old tailgate probably won’t be reused, because it’s damaged. The additional panel has some environmental impact.

Readers will probably be able to tell that I am justifying my decision to go for the cheaper repair. I realize it’s a risk and I wouldn’t have made this decision if FSD cameras were affected, since maintaining this business is important to me (both as a CleanTechnica writer and for my own personal use).

conclusion

I think Tesla as a company has made great progress in training a lot of people to fix their cars, so there’s no longer a huge wait to get your car fixed (at least in Tampa, FL). However, my experience is that they can be very careful in replacing parts that don’t need to be replaced. This can raise insurance rates significantly. I’ve noticed that insurance rates in states where Tesla offers insurance are very reasonable, but in some states that don’t offer Tesla insurance (like Washington state where my son moved), rates are several times higher for Tesla vehicles versus a typical Toyota or Nissan. Tesla needs to continue working on all of this to lower the total cost of ownership of its cars. Of course, the company now seems more interested in focusing on making FSD work better, but I hope they continue to work on other projects because my experience is that FSD is amazingly great but is still several years away from being uncensored in the areas I drive In it.

If you want to utilize my Tesla referral link to get bonus points, here’s the link: https://ts.la/paul92237 – but as I said before, if another owner helped you more, please use their link instead of mine. If you want to learn more about Tesla’s new referral program (August 2024), Chris Boylan wrote an excellent article about it.

Disclosure: I am a shareholder of Tesla (TSLA), BYD (BYDDY), Nio (NIO), XPeng (XPEV), NextEra Energy (NEP), and several ARK ETFs. But I’m not offering any investment advice of any kind here.