My Tesla Got Hit — Fix It At A Tesla Certified Repair Or “Regular” Body Shop? – CleanTechnica

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How is my experience getting an estimate for a minor repair at both a Tesla Certified and a “regular” body shop?

I’ve written about Tesla collision repairs before here and here, about 5 years ago. This summer, I got the chance to do a similar repair again! My previous repair was to the rear part of my 2018 Tesla Model 3, and the new repair was to the rear part of my 2022 Tesla Model Y. Last time, my wife got confused backing out of the garage and hit the garage door while it was closing. This time, the weather was rainy and a car slid into my car with considerable force. I was shocked that the damage was so small. My conclusion 5 years ago was:

“In my articles on Tesla, I have consistently focused on how affordable the cars are and how they cost less to own than other premium sedans, and can even be as affordable on a Total Cost of Ownership basis as regular cars like a Toyota Camry or Honda Accord. I would say this repair experience puts that assertion in question. If the insurance companies see that it costs twice as much to repair a Model 3 as a Honda, won’t Tesla insurance rates be double? Maybe, maybe not. Insurance covers a lot more than just fixing your car. It also covers medical bills and the damage your car does to others. Maybe the greatly enhanced safety of the Model 3 will lower bodily injury claims enough to counter the higher repair costs. Maybe the superior active safety systems will continue to reduce the number of accidents.

“I do think that, as millions of Tesla vehicles are sold over the next decade, more body repair shops will learn to fix the cars and competition will lower the costs of repairing the vehicles.

“So, for right now, Tesla insurance rates are very compatible to Honda and Toyota rates in my situation and I hope they continue to improve, but somewhat higher repair costs have the potential to be a problem if these costs don’t continue to go down.”

The rest of this article will explain my experience — how things have changed and how I choose to deal with it.

Hit By An Underinsured Motorist

Without getting into all the details, I was hit by a motorist who did significant damage to multiple cars and didn’t have enough insurance to cover the damage. I could have just gone to my insurance company and had them fix my car, but I decided to work with the insurance company of the person that caused the damage to avoid a claim on my policy. It is unclear to me if that is necessary to keep my rates low, but that is what I did. This encouraged me to get my repair done at a lower price, since I knew the payout would be relatively low. I could also have sued the person that hit me and recovered damages that way, but I didn’t really want to do that. Luckily, the car worked fine, including the operation of the rear hatch, so I had plenty of time to do the repair when I wanted to. So I got two estimates for the repair, one from a highly rated Tesla Certified Repair Shop and one from a highly rated body repair shop.

So, what did I learn from this estimate? That even though the liftgate worked fine, they insisted on replacing it, and the body and paint labor was $95 an hour, the same as it was 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 is still higher than the rate we would expect for a Honda or Chevy repair, especially now that Tesla vehicles are MUCH more affordable than they were 5 years ago. I think the $5,140.50 total is very high for such minor damage on a car probably worth $20,000. It is about half labor and half parts and paint.

So, from this estimate, I learned that if the body shop was just treating the car like a “regular” car, they would just repair the damage. They proposed spending half as many hours of body labor (6.2 vs. 12.5) because they would just repair the dent verses replace the liftgate. The paint labor was also less than half (4.3 vs. 11.1), since they proposed painting a lot less of the car. The cost of the paint is about a third, at $154.80 vs. $444, since a lot less of the car is to be painted. Another big difference is the labor rate is $54 an hour vs. $95 an 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?

In deciding what to do, I thought about the 15 or so other accident repairs my family has been involved in over the last 40 years and how things turned out. Some of these repairs were done at top quality 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 am doubling or tripling the prices of the older repairs. Of course, those older cars didn’t have the advanced sensors and cameras that exist on a Tesla. That means if any of those are affected, you are going to need to get them repaired by someone who knows what they are doing if you care about Autopilot and FSD working (which I do). Luckily, the vast majority of accidents my family has been involved in are these cosmetic only ones (knock on wood). What I found from that experience is that if you get a top quality repair done, it will last for a long time. Maybe 10 years or more. I have found the times I used a lower priced body shop, it looked good for about 3 to 5 years and then it started to fade or peel or some other minor problem popped up.

1. This highly rated “non certified” shop is better quality than some of the cheaper places I’ve used for older cars, but I’m assuming the paint might peel or discolor in 5 years. So, the relevant question is, if this happens on my 9 year old Tesla (the car is 4 years old now), how much will my family care and how much will it affect the resale value. I can say that once a car is 9 years old and it isn’t some special limited edition (like an Indy Pace Car), most people don’t care that much. The Tesla Model Y as the best selling car in the world is as far away as possible from being a limited edition. It is just the modern day Toyota Camry. Will it affect the resale value? Certainly, a dealer would probably knock $2,000 off the value of the car, while I think a private party would probably knock $1,000 off the price of the car. Now, even if the car is fixed at the Tesla Certified Shop, you will get some reduction in value just because CARFAX will show an accident.
2. Another factor in my decision is the impact on the environment. It seems like it is wasteful to spend more time and materials to replace the liftgate, which is working perfectly fine. The old liftgate probably wouldn’t be reused, since it is damaged. The extra painting has some environmental impact.

Readers probably can tell that I’m justifying the decision to go with the cheaper repair. I realize it is a risk and would not have made this decision if the FSD cameras had been impacted, since keeping that working is important to me (both as a writer for CleanTechnica and for my personal use).

Conclusion

I think Tesla as a company has made significant progress training lots of people in repairing their cars, so there isn’t a huge wait anymore to getting your car repaired (at least in Tampa, Florida). That being said, my experience says they may be too cautious in replacing parts that don’t need to be replaced. This could significantly raise insurance rates. I’ve noticed the 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), the rates are many times higher for Tesla vehicles versus a regular Toyota or Nissan. Tesla needs to continue to work on all of this to drive down the total cost of ownership of its vehicles. Of course, the company now seems more interested in focusing on getting FSD working better, but I hope they continue to work on other projects because my experience is that FSD is amazingly great but still several years away from being unsupervised in the areas I drive in.

If you want to take advantage of my Tesla referral link to get Reward Credits, here’s the link: https://ts.la/paul92237 — but as I have 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 has written an excellent article on it.

Disclosure: I am a shareholder in Tesla [TSLA], BYD [BYDDY], Nio [NIO], XPeng [XPEV], NextEra Energy [NEP], and several ARK ETFs. But I offer no investment advice of any sort here.