A few years ago on this forum, someone posted photos of his Defender 110 that had been backed into a bollard in a parking lot. The vehicle was totaled. From the pictures, the damage looked noticeably less severe than this one.

It just goes to show how vulnerable those rear corners are — they really are the Achilles’ heel of the L663 Defender.

 

His bike took the bulk of it. He never lost consciousness, looked like arm and shoulder injuries, but it looked like he swerved enough to not take the full force of the impact.

I reviewed the estimate today, and it looks like they need to take the entire interior out to do the work. I think part of the decision to total is the high value of the salvage parts. Also, New York has a 75% rule for total loss.

 

A deer hit me - literally chose the voilent route - as I was going about 10mph around a corner, and it ran down a hill and head butted my front end, fell down, got up and ran off like nothing happened. There was no visuable damage besides a 2 inch crack on the bumper right next to the headlamp.

I regret taking it into body shop. They ended up having it for 2 months, and the repair bill was $14k.

I just got my McLaren back from the body shop after a year being in there for repairs for being rear ended at 5mph, and it was $60k in damage and visually it was barely noticeable. Wish I would've just let it be.

 

Not going to try and white-knight for the OEMs here, but the reality of the situation is that modern vehicles have competing and often conflicting design priorities today that were not nearly as complex in years past. Things such as regulatory burden, insurance institute safety requirements, supply chain availability, repairability, cost and customer priorities all have to be met... sometimes these run in the face of one another. They didn't necessarily design our trucks to not be repairable, but reparability was not as high on the list of priorities as other aforementioned aspects.

It is incredibly difficult to design and build modern vehicles these days - and its only going to get worse.

 

I think you are correct.

 

Hey ! you can't park there !!!

Ok, fixed it for ya'

 

Is that the new chocolate wrap? Tasty!

 

Had a conversation at an event a year ago or so with a body shop owner, the topic turned to "how's business" and be brought up the incredibly high number of vehicles being totaled hurting their numbers. I asked why and he said two things primarily: 1) Construction methods now using a lot of bonding agents make it hard to replace just one or two structures, you have to dig far into the vehicle and build back out, end up replacing major areas for what would have been a simple fix removing and replacing a few structures. 2) Possibly the most costly is the fear of liability on the part of the insurer and body shop, if any safety systems could have been affected in the slightest way they end up replacing them. One of these reasons, let alone both of them together, pushes the estimates incredibly high and then you factor in lead time on all of those parts creating high rental car costs insurers on the hook take into account.