New cars are getting too expensive to fix

This summer, while visiting an old friends scrap yard, a brand new BMW 3-series car rolled in - literally. A teenager was "driving dad's car," says shop owner, with little apparent structural damage. The teen walked away, and normally the damage wouldn't have been hard to repair. But the BMW had so many air bags "it looked like a balloon parade". The new car, worth more than $30,000, was totaled.

Costly air bags, expensive electronics, and lightweight body materials are driving up the cost of fixing new cars. Not only do many more parts have to be replaced rather than repaired, but fewer and fewer body shops can afford the special equipment and training required to do the work. "We're moving closer and closer to the disposable car."

Repairing a new car a decade ago, for example, cost an average of $2,578 per claim, while in 2007, the cost had ballooned to $3,681, a 43 percent increase that has outpaced inflation.

Normally it takes a lot of damage to total a brand-new vehicle. Insurance companies calculate the value of a car before the accident and subtract its value as scrap. As long as the result is more than the cost of repair, the car is worth fixing.

But many new cars today cost so much to fix that it's becoming harder to justify repairs. The BMW that came to the yard had dual front, side, and side-curtain air bags. Federal safety rules do not allow air bags to be reused. So each bag would have had to be replaced with a brand new one. The sensors and pyrotechnics that set them off also required replacement. Add the cost of labor, more than $1,000 for each air bag, and even more for the sensors, and the result is a totaled car.

Before the advent of air bags, only 8 percent of damaged cars were totaled. Today, the figure is nearly 24 percent and rising. Not only do the number of air bags (two in front have been required since 1996) increase costs, today's new "smart" air bags, with sensors that control whether they deploy and how hard, cost more than older bags. Seat belts, too, have "once-and-done" pretensioners that have to be replaced - even on unoccupied seats - after an accident.

There's a lot of electronics in cars, today that weren't there in the past. And if they're damaged, they are going to have to be bought new. There's only one source, the automaker, so you're going to pay full retail price.

While air bags are the most expensive technology to repair after a crash, other high-tech items are also pushing up repair costs. The Ford's F150 pickup, uses a magnesium radiator mount - which gets crunched every time an F150 runs into anything. Magnesium is strong and light, but brittle. Even if it bends without breaking in an accident, a body shop can't bend it back. Like air bags, it has to be replaced at a cost of more than $300.

To meet fuel-economy requirements, automakers are using more lightweight parts. Magnesium, titanium, and carbonized plastic are among the rapidly expanding number of components found under the hood.

And then there's aluminum. more cars are coming with all-aluminum bodies and frames, such as the Audi A8, Acura NSX, Honda Insight, Mercedes CL, as well as the Jaguar XJ8. So far, few body shops are authorized to fix these cars. So if you wreck one in a remote area, insurance companies will factor in the cost of shipping it to an authorized shop.

Body shops that deal with aluminum have to wall off separate work areas and buy tools separate from those used on steel cars. That's because steel shavings can contaminate aluminum.

Because aluminum is difficult to weld, most parts are "bonded" (glued) and riveted together. A riveting tool to replace aluminum parts costs $10,000. Another tool to remove rivets runs $9,000. The total investment in training and tools to run an aluminum-body repair shop can run as much as $200,000.

Even if your car remains accident-free, some of today's high-tech parts can leave you with big repair bills. The celebrated find for car thieves these days is xenon high-intensity-discharge headlights. They can cost up to $3,000 each. That's just for the part, not labor.

Stories of thieves ripping these headlights out of Audis and Nissans - and doing thousands more in body damage - are becoming legion in urban areas. Even when the lights aren't stolen, repairs can be expensive. One body shop that had to remove the lights from a new Audi A8 found they had to be sent back to the manufacturer to be reactivated; otherwise, they wouldn't work.

Now Nissan and other automakers have started using taillights with multiple LEDs rather than a single inexpensive light bulb. The LEDs light faster in a panic stop to give drivers following more warning, but they're also more expensive to replace.

They've already raised rates on cars with xenon headlights. "Aluminum cars are too new to have reliable figures. And the companies are trying to stay competitive. But it will happen," he says of higher rates for aluminum cars.

To reduce costs, the repair industry is now pushing for measures that would allow body shops to use "preowned" never-used air bags from cars in junkyards.


If today's cars are harder to repair, the skills needed to repair them are also harder to come by.

Technicians - don't dare call them mechanics - often have to complete four years of school: two years of technical school and two more to obtain an associate's degree. There's no shortage of general technicians, but there is a big shortage of qualified people to work on drivability and emissions issues.

These specialist technicians need advanced reading, problem-solving, and basic electronics skills. The best people to find are those who have worked in the IT information technology industry.

I'm not sure what the future holds. However, I do know, that since with todays computers in our cars, the cars almost diagnose themselves. With technian rates being over 100$ an hour, it is worth-while to do alot of the maintanance yourself.

BMW charges in excess of 350$ for 8 liters of 10w50 oil, and a filter for an average 3-Series. This is a 20 minute task and should not cost you more than 50$, the difference is that the dealers need to re-coup their costs for higher paying technicians, and equipement.

At the end, knowledge is power!