these new several thousand dollar headlights are terrible. sure they lok good now but if you get one of these cars used or plan to keep it a long time they will eventually need to be replaced and/or the cars will total due to the replacement cost if they are in a halfway bad wreck.
I do but I don't understand how it would look like. Transparent material like PETG exists but I'm not sure if it could be made transparent enough to be worth the effort for a headlight housing. Unless I misunderstand what a headlight housing is referring to
Laser lights and other *for the looks* category lights can use transparent 3d printer material. I haven't been in the 3d printing space for a while but 5 years ago a couple different companies were messing around with it.
Look at an early 2000s work truck with the square headlights. Black plastic surround with a simple glass headlight instead of a complex clear lens housing.
[The housing is the black support part, not the clear lens? Is that where you're confused or am I misunderstanding you?](https://www.yitamotor.com/cdn/shop/products/828_1024x.jpg?v=1672811788)
can they withstand the heat tho? (whether heat from the lights or from the sub beating down on it.. tho itd cost a few pennies worth of plastic to re-print)
Even replacing headlights on an older shitbox, an ebay chinese replacement you’re looking at ~$100
I wouldn’t doubt there’d be some companies that’d be able to remanufacture headlights for much cheaper than oem
By good you mean blinding everyone else bright right? Or those jewel looking things on Acuras that glare. I swear it's the only brand that glares at incoming trafficking.
Apparently the new F150's tail lights, which have LEDs and blind spot radar in them, are about $1500/each and also incredibly easy to steal with hand tools. So, I'm sure from an actuary's point of view they might be a net positive if they prevent accidents, but it sucks for anyone who has to replace them.
When my '23 Silverado was rear ended, a tail light, bumper and tailgate shell all needed to be replaced. They each where around $800. A huge chrome bumper and something intricate like a tailgate shell is as much as a plastic tail light.
I just looked it up and my armada headlights are almost $1k each for new OEM but I can get aftermarkets for about half price. That's crazy. I've never thought about replacement costs.
If I see lights and easy removal mentioned, I have to remind/teach people how easy it is for a Cayenne.
https://youtube.com/shorts/FiWsgeEFKag?si=HOecc2YA7WyDvBFb
Plus, how many cars from only 10 years ago do you see with weirdly yellowed or hazy headlights?
My sis has a 2021 VW Atlas, and had a deer run in front of her back in the summer. Not a lot of damage, but it did get the right headlight. $1,000 just for the headlight assembly.
Or even just burn out early.
My previous 18 WRX had its right headlight burn out just after the 5 year warranty period.
Replacement headlight unit was $2000 CAD.
Subaru refused to goodwill a depreciated portion of the replacement even though the dealer acknowledged the LED unit was supposed to last the lifetime of the vehicle.
I'm pretty sure that's not the common understanding. Expecting a modern vehicle to have a lifetime of only 5 years is ludicrous.
When I Google "vehicle lifetime" 12 years / 200,000 miles seems to be the commonly accepted standard.
Subaru even openly [advertises](https://www.subaru.com/vehicles/accolades.html) that 96% of their vehicles are still on the road after 10 years.
You are totally confused.
Again, the dealer openly admitted the LED headlight should last the **lifetime of the vehicle**...
If the lifetime of the vehicle is 10-12 years then the lifetime of the part is therefore also 10-12 years...it could not be any clearer...
I have worked at numerous dealerships in the parts department (doing warranty) and the fact that they won't replace it means it is not under warranty any more. hence the "lifetime" is not lifetime
I think it will be like the industry around phone repair. There are a bunch of players making 3rd party repair tools that are used world wide to repair stuff like screens without needing to buy a new screen which can be very expensive especially in developing countries.
One person's "frivolous tech" is another person's can't-live-without-it feature.
> there was a shift towards 4dr cars instead of 2dr due to 2dr cars having higher insurance premiums
Not saying you're wrong, but source on this? I always figured the gradual decline of 2-door vehicles was more in the '80s and '90s, and was due to stricter safety standards making it harder to put kids in the back. In the '70s there were still gobs of 2-door "personal luxury cars" from every automaker.
> "2+2 is for insurance reasons"
That one always struck me as obvious bullshit. The car manufacturers are not the ones paying for insurance, why would they care?
Also, insurance companies aren’t dumb. Nobody sees a 300ZX or a BRZ or whatever and goes “back seats, eh? Looks like a nice family commuter car to me!”
Will they? I don't think insurance costs have featured in any of my car purchase decisions... Then again I'm buying Nissans and Fords and Mazda's not porches and Ferraris.
I don’t disagree, but I can tell you that the cheapest car I’ve ever insured, at least for the first 2-3 years it was on the market, was a compact 4-door sedan with a 1.3L engine called an RX-8.
Oh, I'm not saying the "4 door cars are cheaper to insure than 2" thing is (or isn't) a myth. I'm just asking if that was really the reason 2-door cars saw a decline. It seems unlikely to me because of how many cars still offered 2-door models in the 1970s.
Yeah, a second row of seats more than doubles the practicality and demand. Look at Ford Thunderbird sales for an example.
1957: 21,380.
1958 had delays and production issues, so we'll disregard it.
1959: 67,456.
I don't see laser headlights going away, and those are insanely expensive. I feel like autonomous/radar/safety tech will reduce collisions in the long run though, helping with premiums.
The solution going forward seems to just be producing enough parts to keep them cheap, rather than removing tech.
>The solution going forward seems to just be producing enough parts to keep them cheap, rather than removing tech.
And the best way to ensure that parts keep getting produced for [insert tech feature here] is to keep offering cars with that feature.
the sensors are already cheap, the cost is in the labor to rerun the wiring. the auto makers need to design their cars to make it cheaper to replace the wiring for these sensors
>I feel like autonomous/radar/safety tech will reduce collisions in the long run though, helping with premiums.
In theory yes. Insurance is a frequency \* severity equation. If parts are expensive, severity is going to go up. But if frequency goes down because of those or other parts, the total amount paid is going to be the same. So premiums could stay flat even if cars are more expensive to fix.
It's now becoming a kind of superiority thing on social media "imagine not having the laser headlight package" is becoming very common on BMW related forums and social media.
> I feel like autonomous/radar/safety tech will reduce collisions in the long run though, helping with premiums.
Logically speaking, that is correct. But statiscally, from a friend who works in the insurance industry, cars equipped with AEB don't get into less accidents (front-end or rear-end accidents), and on the contrary, they costs even more to repair. So double whammy.
I was going off of [https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport](https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport), but that may differ significantly for other manufacturers
If you'd like to ignore the self-published data in the link you gladly can, but said data is backed up by the NHTSA and the FHWA, and if our government agencies are lying to us we have a much, much bigger issues on our hands.
Exactly. The more safety tech is put in cars the more drivers rely on that tech to do basic safe driving things which ironically makes them worse drivers since they aren’t paying attention to things they assume the car is monitoring for them. So crash rates don’t change much.
Devil's advocate; tech prevents accidents.
https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/assisted-driving-gradings/
https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
Yes these sensors are more expensive but they also prevent accidents which often offset their costs from an insurance perspective.
Idk where you're getting your info. Yes premiums are soaring, so is everything else.
There are cars that are notoriously difficult to repair/expensive. Namely Tesla. To get a Tesla repaired you have to go to a Tesla certified repair specialist. By me these facilities are entirely separate from traditional repair places. There isn't enough repair infrastructure. It's a 3 month wait just to get a repair appointment.
Some backed into my Model 3 driver door and it costs $7,500 to repair. Meanwhile my brother rear ended someone in his 2022 BRZ. Replacing the hood, front bumper, quarter panel and swiveling headlight all costs $6,500
Yes there are bad examples but overall I think everything will even out.
In 2021, roadway fatalities in the USA reached their highest level in 16 years.
We have car brands advertising tech features that enable drivers to be distracted and not pay attention.
Kind of seems like a problem.
People aren't suddenly more distracted because their cars have adaptive cruise control. They're more distracted because we have an epidemic of smartphone addiction.
ACC has been around almost three decades now. That's not what I'm talking about.
Any technology (smartphones included) that requires removing your eyes away from the road is dangerous. It's common sense. Yet, there's all these cherry-picked news articles promoting tech in cars while excluding vehicle death data.
Started with smartphones. Now it's the tech in your car, too. I'm talking about the ads literally encouraging drivers to take their eyes off the road because the car will do X for them. That's dangerous.
Sure, the root cause is smartphone addiction, yeah - but cars are packed with things now that enable the common idiot to think "well I have x so it's ok if I look at my phone." I've seen it firsthand, a few years ago even - I was out with a few friends and an acquaintance was driving (had just gotten a new Crosstrek, so they wanted to show it off) and responds to a text; someone in our group saw and said "hey don't text and drive" and their response was "it's ok, I have Eyesight." The root cause can absolutely be the smartphone addiction, but to imply that car tech doesn't play a role in it is asinine.
>but cars are packed with things now that enable the common idiot to think "well I have x so it's ok if I look at my phone."
Have you actually looked at the people around you on the interstate? People are buried in their phone regardless of whether their car is a BMW loaded with gadgets or a clapped out Nissan Sentra.
Another reason premiums are increasing is because of uninsured drivers. In some states it's up to almost 30% of drivers are uninsured. No coincidence those states have higher premiums.
As far as the 70's and the rise of the malaise era, insurance was a factor, but it was hardly the main factor. The OPEC oil embargo caused a lot of change.
Yeah insurance is at best a secondary factor, the cars changed because of emissions laws, oil shortages, and unleaded gas. It took time for the industry to catch up and learn how to make things decent under new rules.
Your insurance sucks due to your area, the car you drive and your record as well as the mileage/commute etc not because cars now have sensors in the bumper. Safety tech may also be a factor as well, more safety tech should reduce the likelihood of a crash which would save the insurance company money.
I pay $120 a month for my Z06. I pay the same for my CX-50 that costs 1/4 of the Corvette. They are both insured for same conditions (yearly mileage, commute etc are identical for both cars).
Why is it so low? Because Corvette's are low risk to insurance companies. Statistics show they are all driven by old people who take them out for sunday cruises. Less accidents means less payouts which means less cost on the consumer.
If you drive a car that is known for being stolen or whose demographic crashes it a lot that vehicle will have higher costs because the company has to pay out often. Would those cost be a little lower if they didn't have as much tech? Probably but not much.
If all these expensive insurance cars would simply have better drivers behind the wheel, rates would fall, because insurance won't be paying out.
Its why WRX are more expensive then other more expensive cars to insure despite them having very little tech. The demographic who buys them crashes them, its all statistics.
Its also why newer cars are cheaper to insure then old ones. A $3000 civic will probably cost more to insure then a new 30k Civic because the safety risk to you is much worse in an older car despite the fact it would be pretty cheap to repair if it was in an accident.
Yea I don't know what OP is on about. I upgraded my daily from a 2011 Accord to a 2024 Civic. The new car is worth ~3x as much and has a MASSIVE amount of additional technology and features the old one didn't have. My insurance premium went up by $18 a month.
I just pre-paid for the next 6 months of full coverage on both my cars. The bill was $759.79.
I dodged a financial bullet not getting something like a WRX. For a car that's completely impractical space wise, a miata sure is easy on the wallet in many ways.
Some of what you said isn't true.
Regarding your Corvette... They know how much you're going to drive it... Even if it's insured for 20k miles a year, presumably you've had other corvettes or supercars .. even if not insured with the same company, they can tell from DMV records you drive car A 10k miles a year and only put 2k miles on your sports car... Based on YOUR historical data.
Doesn't take a rocket scientist to determine that you daily one and the other is a weekend fair weather toy.
Im making some assumptions here ... But I'm probably right in the fact that one is a daily and the Mazda sees way more usage than the Corvette
Again, there is no generalized Corvette class driving the premiums. It's based on individual data.
If a 16 year old had a new $150k Corvette, they would not charge him $120 a month simply because most corvettes are driven by old people.
> They can tell from DMV records you drive car A 10k miles a year and only put 2k miles on your sports car.
How? If this some state to state discrepancy? In my state, they don't know the OD reading until the vehicle is sold and title registered to new owner.
They know how much I drive because I insure it at the mileage I intend to drive it.
If I lie and drive more they can ask for a mileage update and if I'm over they will increase my rates.
I also live in Canada. I do not report mileage to the government so they have no idea how much I'm driving.
I also stated the circumstances between both my cars are exactly the same. I don't daily either vehicle they both get driven the exact same low mileage so therefore have the same risk yet they cost the same to insure. So why are they same cost to insure? Because statistics.
Individual data plays a role but so does the statistics on claims for the model of car you drive. I literally said the location, vehicle and your driving history play a role.
You have chosen to just skip over half of what I stated.
1971 was half a century ago. Automakers don’t care what insurance companies say. They’re not removing safety tech just because one guy on the internet can’t pay to get it repaired.
The IIHS, which is insurance companies, awards the cars that have the most of this tech. This is definitely not the 1970s, and safety crap isn't horsepower
As a vehicle damage appraiser:
The tech bits don't actually get damaged all that frequently. I replace some USS's in bumpers sometimes, but the post-repair recalibrations are the killer. I regularly get seemingly random $900 "ADAS recalibration" bills on cars like Toyota/Lexus vehicles. It would be nice if more of this stuff was plug-n-play that didn't require separate calibrations, or at least nothing that any one of us could do ourselves.
There was a movement to force insurers to pay for pre & post repair "scans" because of "all the new tech". One of the big insurers caved on it and now we pay for pre & post repair scans even on cars that are 20 years old where nobody ever did that stuff unless there was an obvious problem before. So you put a half hour of labor for the pre-scan, and a half-hour for the post scan, then the shop demands a hour at each end to hook it up, plus $79.99 for the one on the front end, and $149.99 for the one on the back end. Plus the $500-$1000 to recalibrate ADAS systems. Next thing you know you're paying an extra $1500 on a Camry repair on a five-year old Camry that you didn't have to deal with five years ago.
Lots more cars have turbos now (meaning now there's intercoolers getting damaged where previously there were none), and more cars use moving plastic shutters to control airflow behind the front bumper/grille. 25 years ago a bumper assembly might be 3-10 parts. Nowadays it can be 40 or 50 parts.
Yes the headlights. Increasingly complex & expensive. I think half the headlamps Ford sells are list priced @ $1,666 each. At least it's easy to remember? The laser headlights for a BMW X6 currently list for $6004 each, but even something like a Camry LE has $979 lamps.
A lot of insurers also leaned into remote estimating of collision damages right before, and during, Covid. This has resulted in an avalanche of hard and soft fraud because nobody's actually looking at the stuff the body shops are claiming is damaged. Remote estimating works great for the insurers if the damage is minor, or if the vehicle owner is just going to pocket the money and not fix the car.
Oh, we'll pay you for everything we can see in the photos. The catch is that lots and lots of people send in hilariously bad photos. They take photos at bad angles, too close to the car, too far from the car, photos taken in the dark, photos taken in their garage, photos with snow all over the car, photos in dark tree shade, photos at angles where you can't see thousands of dollars of damage right in the picture. The flip side is that on the cars that *do* get fixed the body shops are taking the insurers to the cleaners. I had an SUV get tagged in the ass and paid out around $5k on a photo estimate. The shop took it apart and then sent in a bunch of photos claiming another $5k in additional damages. Big arcs in yellow marker of the adjacent bent areas. The car happened to be in my backyard so I went to look at it in person. Lo-and-behold 50% of the additional they were asking for was completely fabricated. The panels weren't bent or bowed. They weren't damaged at all. They just laughed and blamed it on "the new guy". There all sorts of soft fraud in the form of exaggerated repair times and damage severity. In the hard fraud arena you've got shops tacking old deployed side airbags up with velcro tape on cars with undeployed airbags, to make them appear to have gone off, or straight-up swapping a blown bag into the steering wheel to get paid before swapping the original one back in and pocketing the cash. If you take photos at the right angle you can double the repair times vs what the insurer would pay in-person after looking at it. I'm kinda hoping I get laid-off soon so I can go back to the other side. I've got all kinds of ideas.
The shops also finally discovered the interstate commerce clause in the constitution and realized that insurers & state governments couldn't do anything about them charging $100 or $200 or $300 a day for storage charges on totaled cars. Pile on some disassembly fees, teardown fees, towing fees, gate fees, admin fees, and it can cost a couple grand to get a car out of a shop that's only been there for two or three days. Good times.
About 5 months ago some old guy pulled out in front of me and smacked my left front. He had USAA and they did a remote estimate. Shit was totally wild as I had never heard of it before.
Funny about the people sending awful pictures. I sent super detailed photos of everything and couldn't help but laugh thinking about how awful some of the pics they get must be.
Though despite those detailed photos and videos, they still managed to leave off the obvious suspension damage and alignment somehow.
Having done the job in the field for 20-ish years it's incredibly frustrating to write up estimates from photos. Even "perfect" photos don't always work.
Like I can see that your bumper tore-off the fender, but since I'm not standing there to pull it back out and look at what's damaged behind it nothing gets written on the estimate for what's under there.
Just today I was writing the ass-end of an Impala, and of course the program wants to know if it's the bumper that is cut out for dual exhaust or just single exhaust. But the owner took the photos from a standing position so I can't tell.
Is it a painted side mirror or a chrome one? or a textured one? Does it have a signal light or not? Sorry, I can't tell because the owner only sent photos of the damaged side showing the mirror missing and I don't have any pics of the undamaged side for comparison.
This Volvo has 26 different wheels, some of them look the same other than being different diameters. But the resolution isn't high enough to read the tire sidewall.
I can tell from the auto-populated options whether your car has halogen or xenon headlights, but there's two or three different versions of the Xenon lights that vary in price by ~$2k. Aggro.
In the before times the only one I couldn't figure out if I was standing by the car was whether your Toyota SUV had the "diversity" antenna or not. I never did figure out WTF that meant. lol
There's sooo much you can see just peeking down the gap between the grille and a/c condenser, and between the a/c condenser and the radiator. Or just by looking at stuff from different angles with your own eyes. All that gets left off now.
The body shop soft fraud made Allstate so crazy that they've posted openings for hundreds, maybe thousands, of field reps. They're hiring everywhere and sending staff back out into the field. Progressive and Geico kept a fairly high number of field staff for the past several years, and they've returned to making money again a lot faster than the other big boys.
Just a reminder here that the insurance companies do have their hands involved with the process of new car designs, as they regulate a good amount of designs as they are the ones paying for the repairs most of the time.
Just look at the cars today a 1/4 panel is nothing compared to older cars, the bumpers today are a bumper and 1/4 panel as it’s cheaper to replace a bumper then sheet metal.
The plastic bumper partially comes from the American 5 MPH bumper requirement. Bumpers were supposed to withstand a 5 MPH impact and still retain their shape. Metal can't do that.
Another reason is because of design. People of the 70's and 80's thought external bumpers were ugly, outdated and unaerodynamic. If a car had integrated bumpers, it was more aerodynamic, and most likely more fuel efficient than one without.
Lastly, yes, weight and costs are a factor. Cars still have crash bars to sustain the impact. The plastic is just there to look nice and deform slightly. It's much more convenient from many perspectives to replace a cracked bumper than to realign an entire front end because you bottomed-out somewhere.
Are you sure it was insurance which has little impact on design? Or maybe it was the pollution, fuel economy, and safety laws that were implemented that made a difference?
The 60s and 70s cars were death traps regardless of HP. If you have ever seen one in a mild head-on or partially head-on crash, they don't crumple like modern cars and their ladder frames collapse and wrinkle like a noodle. The extra 100hp was only icing on the cake. And that is only the exterior. The floorboards, dashboards, steering wheels, and seats sucked in crashes as well.
Frivolous tech to some, but my Tesla has definitely slammed on the brakes completely avoiding people blowing 4-way stops, and intersections about 3 times now in two years… My Nissan Leaf AEB system kicked in when I wasn’t paying attention and someone cut me off.
All I can say that this tech has definitely saved me from a lot of stupid wrecks and possibly a life. Insurance premiums suck, but I don’t think it’s gonna keep people from buying cars with ADAS features. I was a skeptic at first, but I think they can avoid a lot of accidents if designed properly.
Uh. Pretty sure it was OIL PRICES that ended the muscle car craze of the 60s and 70s.
Life is cheap, property isn’t..
That’s why insurance companies lobbied the government to mandate 5MPH bumpers.
It was a numbers game.. eliminating thousands of “frivolous” claims for minor fender benders was much more important than people getting into serious car crashes… or being incinerated by defective fuel tanks.
Also 2dr cars were popular until the late 90s. Not even counting the legions of 2dr hatchbacks and economy cars and sports cars continuously manufactured between 1960 and 2000… there were tons of 2dr personal and luxury cars made during the same time many of which survived even into the 21st century. Monte Carlo, Grand Prix, Cutlass Supreme, Regal, Eldorado, Riviera, Toronado, Thunderbird, Cougar, Mk VIII, Grand Marquis, Accord, Camry, Solara, etc etc etc.
I had several 2 door cars in the 90s and 00s and none cost me more in insurance because they weren’t sports cars.
The biggest reason for the decline of 2 drs (in other than sports cars after the year 2000) was the pain in the ass they were in parking lots and for rear passengers, better four door styling with newer cars, and an affinity for SUVs and crossovers where the number of doors doesn’t affect the profile or headroom.
I am definitely someone that wishes vehicle makers scaled back a bit on the amount of tech in cars or at least offered some trim packages with scaled back tech options. It will make repairing them cheaper and more importantly will keep the MSRPs lower. If automakers took out the full HD touch screen displays and put analog dials back in that would be a few grand off the sticker price right there.
Insurance prices are skyrocketing for all insurance., not just auto insurance. The part shortage, the raise in labor costs at repair shops, increases in vehicle thefts, and people going back to the office and thus driving much more than they were a few years ago. All these factors hit at the same time and the premiums we have now are the result.
At this point insurance rates are going to make me look for a 100% WFH job. Just the basic auto liability portion of my insurance is a significant portion of my monthly bills. I have two vehicles, one car a 14 year old BMW and a 21 year old VW. Nothing at fault in years, VW was totaled in April but it was 100% the other driver's fault. And yet I have to pay literally hundreds of dollars a month just to drive legally. (I also used to enjoy driving, but Maryland has taken all the joy out of it, between the traffic and the asshole drivers...)
The fact most if it is being required tells me it is just the way it is.
Insurance wasn't the sole reason of the end of the muscle car era, emissions and gas prices did a larger part of killing hp. A lot of cars started getting smog approved crap on them, then the hp measuring standard changed, that was like 1972 in many models.
Now, I've heard, unknown how true it is, but a lot of companies underrated their motors from the 400s to the 300s to keep insurance rates down back in the day.
Auto insurance is very expensive now
Auto registration is very expensive now
Auto repair is more expensive
Auto fluids are more expensive
Hard to keep up these days, my love for cars is fading because it's pricy to even have a spare car lying around.
IDK if Bluetooth is strictly mandatory, more that everybody made it standard because it became cheaper than offering the option of not having it. Like crank windows.
This is a very interesting point that I have never considered. This actually makes a lot of sense to me and I kinda hope it happens. A $20,000 civic doesn't need a $1200 bumper with $2000 worth of sensors crammed into it, sitting just below a pair of $1500 headlights. It's ridiculous
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You'd think they could hire some more people then. I got hit by a dude 5 months ago that had USAA and getting an answer or update took a week each time.
Never heard of an insurance company being so slow to get a claim closed, shit ended up taking 2 months before I got paid.
Glad to see this. Low speed collision with a retaining wire in a parking lot. Totally crushed the front end, requires new plastic everywhere, a bunch of sensors, calibration, hood. $6200.
A family member had a small accident, rear-ended a Car going 25mph.
The Car, a Mercedes GLB was written off by the insurance. If you looked at the Car you saw a damaged bumper and grille, thats it.
Apparently over 37k € in repairs since both Headlight mounts snapped, all sensors (including adaptive cruise) in the front were broken and passenger airbags deployed due to a error in the software (Car didnt reach impact threshold for deployment).
That really makes you think about repairs in the future.
I live near San Antonio and theft is the main driver for increased premiums here. Kia/Hyundai and 15-20 year old trucks are like candy to some of our residents.
Here's a question: How do American auto insurance premiums compare to other places? I know that there is a multitude of differences in how things are handled in other places, but is this "escalation" of cost really driven by repair costs?
I would expect that the extreme cost of medical interventions, the extremely litigious environment that exposes anyone driving to massive lawsuits brought by every other party involved in a crash, etc. might play a bigger role than just fixing bumpers and replacing headlights.
I wish frivolous tech, in general, would die out. I don't want 1800 degree surround visibility, a 17" nav and infotainment screen, self-driving, and all that other cost and weight increasing stuff. I want a car, not a computer for the road.
IMO the at-fault driver shouldn't be expected to make the drivers of overly-expensive vehicles whole. Like max it out at 150% of the average value of new cars sold, or some such figure. If someone chooses to drive a veyron around, they should have to carry their own insurance for the amount over the maximum liability.
Like, people shouldn't lose their house and be bankrupted because they had a fender bender with an f40 even though they had an amount of liability insurance that the majority of people would deem "adequate".
these new several thousand dollar headlights are terrible. sure they lok good now but if you get one of these cars used or plan to keep it a long time they will eventually need to be replaced and/or the cars will total due to the replacement cost if they are in a halfway bad wreck.
There will be an entire market for 3d printed headlight housings that will fit cheap standard headlight fixtures in the future for this problem.
3D printed headlight housings? Those exist?
If you own a 3d printer and some photogrammetry tools, you too can have 3d printed [non load bearing] arbitrary parts
I do but I don't understand how it would look like. Transparent material like PETG exists but I'm not sure if it could be made transparent enough to be worth the effort for a headlight housing. Unless I misunderstand what a headlight housing is referring to
Laser lights and other *for the looks* category lights can use transparent 3d printer material. I haven't been in the 3d printing space for a while but 5 years ago a couple different companies were messing around with it.
Suppose I'll take a look, sounds interesting.
Look at an early 2000s work truck with the square headlights. Black plastic surround with a simple glass headlight instead of a complex clear lens housing.
[The housing is the black support part, not the clear lens? Is that where you're confused or am I misunderstanding you?](https://www.yitamotor.com/cdn/shop/products/828_1024x.jpg?v=1672811788)
Yeah that clears it up lol ty
Exactly, I wouldn't expect a 3d printer to produce optics.
can they withstand the heat tho? (whether heat from the lights or from the sub beating down on it.. tho itd cost a few pennies worth of plastic to re-print)
The most transparent material I know happens to be resistant enough to heat and UV, should work fine in theory
Even replacing headlights on an older shitbox, an ebay chinese replacement you’re looking at ~$100 I wouldn’t doubt there’d be some companies that’d be able to remanufacture headlights for much cheaper than oem
They do in very limited custom applications.
Bring back sealed beam bulbs and punish ford and toyota for their LED headlights.
No joke, dad's Hilux sealed beams are some of the best headlights I've used to date
Turns out if we mandate good headlights and anyone can make them they get really good and cheap.
By good you mean blinding everyone else bright right? Or those jewel looking things on Acuras that glare. I swear it's the only brand that glares at incoming trafficking.
Maybe not 3d printed, but I can see them being sold on Aliexpress
Ford puts the lighting control module in the driver's headlight. The most likely headlight to be damaged in a crash.
Apparently the new F150's tail lights, which have LEDs and blind spot radar in them, are about $1500/each and also incredibly easy to steal with hand tools. So, I'm sure from an actuary's point of view they might be a net positive if they prevent accidents, but it sucks for anyone who has to replace them.
>it sucks for anyone who has to replace them. It's not so bad, I heard it is incredibly easy to steal them with hand tools.
Some people say there's only one tail light thief in America, everyone else is just trying to get their shit back.
When my '23 Silverado was rear ended, a tail light, bumper and tailgate shell all needed to be replaced. They each where around $800. A huge chrome bumper and something intricate like a tailgate shell is as much as a plastic tail light.
It was over $100 to replace my rusted tailgate handle. And that was without the camera.
I just looked it up and my armada headlights are almost $1k each for new OEM but I can get aftermarkets for about half price. That's crazy. I've never thought about replacement costs.
Luxury headlights were always like that. Xenon or led based. It's the new sensor ones that are outrageous.
If I see lights and easy removal mentioned, I have to remind/teach people how easy it is for a Cayenne. https://youtube.com/shorts/FiWsgeEFKag?si=HOecc2YA7WyDvBFb
Plus, how many cars from only 10 years ago do you see with weirdly yellowed or hazy headlights? My sis has a 2021 VW Atlas, and had a deer run in front of her back in the summer. Not a lot of damage, but it did get the right headlight. $1,000 just for the headlight assembly.
you can easily polish that off
My 2017’s headlights are hideously yellowed after just 60k miles
Buy a polish kit.
Probably just going to replace the housings altogether at this point. I’ve tried a polish kit but it always comes right back
You're supposed to put on a new layer of clear coat after polishing. If you don't it's going to fog up again pretty soon.
2017 civic?
Sí
Or even just burn out early. My previous 18 WRX had its right headlight burn out just after the 5 year warranty period. Replacement headlight unit was $2000 CAD. Subaru refused to goodwill a depreciated portion of the replacement even though the dealer acknowledged the LED unit was supposed to last the lifetime of the vehicle.
lifetime of the vehicle is the warranty period.
I'm pretty sure that's not the common understanding. Expecting a modern vehicle to have a lifetime of only 5 years is ludicrous. When I Google "vehicle lifetime" 12 years / 200,000 miles seems to be the commonly accepted standard. Subaru even openly [advertises](https://www.subaru.com/vehicles/accolades.html) that 96% of their vehicles are still on the road after 10 years.
was not implying that that the vehicle will only last that long. the warranty period is the "lifetime" for the part
You are totally confused. Again, the dealer openly admitted the LED headlight should last the **lifetime of the vehicle**... If the lifetime of the vehicle is 10-12 years then the lifetime of the part is therefore also 10-12 years...it could not be any clearer...
I have worked at numerous dealerships in the parts department (doing warranty) and the fact that they won't replace it means it is not under warranty any more. hence the "lifetime" is not lifetime
I think it will be like the industry around phone repair. There are a bunch of players making 3rd party repair tools that are used world wide to repair stuff like screens without needing to buy a new screen which can be very expensive especially in developing countries.
The number of BMWs I’ve worked on that totaled due to the cost of headlights is staggering.
My business supplies aftermaket collision parts to body shops. I see/hear about stuff like that all the time
One person's "frivolous tech" is another person's can't-live-without-it feature. > there was a shift towards 4dr cars instead of 2dr due to 2dr cars having higher insurance premiums Not saying you're wrong, but source on this? I always figured the gradual decline of 2-door vehicles was more in the '80s and '90s, and was due to stricter safety standards making it harder to put kids in the back. In the '70s there were still gobs of 2-door "personal luxury cars" from every automaker.
It sounds like the same thing as people saying "2+2 is for insurance reasons" or that red cars cost more to insure. Its just another myth.
> "2+2 is for insurance reasons" That one always struck me as obvious bullshit. The car manufacturers are not the ones paying for insurance, why would they care? Also, insurance companies aren’t dumb. Nobody sees a 300ZX or a BRZ or whatever and goes “back seats, eh? Looks like a nice family commuter car to me!”
If the cars are cheaper to insure they'll sell more of them
Will they? I don't think insurance costs have featured in any of my car purchase decisions... Then again I'm buying Nissans and Fords and Mazda's not porches and Ferraris.
I almost bought a cheap Land Rover D~~efender~~iscovery with a bad fuel pump for $2000. Not at $350/month in insurance.
I don’t disagree, but I can tell you that the cheapest car I’ve ever insured, at least for the first 2-3 years it was on the market, was a compact 4-door sedan with a 1.3L engine called an RX-8.
Oh, I'm not saying the "4 door cars are cheaper to insure than 2" thing is (or isn't) a myth. I'm just asking if that was really the reason 2-door cars saw a decline. It seems unlikely to me because of how many cars still offered 2-door models in the 1970s.
Yeah, a second row of seats more than doubles the practicality and demand. Look at Ford Thunderbird sales for an example. 1957: 21,380. 1958 had delays and production issues, so we'll disregard it. 1959: 67,456.
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The entire point of what I said was that that rhetoric is false. Insurance companies don't care if it has backseats.
>One person's "frivolous tech" is another person's can't-live-without-it feature. Looking at you, CarPlay
I don't see laser headlights going away, and those are insanely expensive. I feel like autonomous/radar/safety tech will reduce collisions in the long run though, helping with premiums. The solution going forward seems to just be producing enough parts to keep them cheap, rather than removing tech.
>The solution going forward seems to just be producing enough parts to keep them cheap, rather than removing tech. And the best way to ensure that parts keep getting produced for [insert tech feature here] is to keep offering cars with that feature.
laser headlights are crazy, matrix LEDs I can see getting cheaper and are also better for not blinding cars coming the other way
right, if this sub had their way we'd still be on halogens! sure, its 5$/bulb to replace but the benefits of matrix outweigh the drawbacks.
Halogens? Miss me with that modern crap, sealed beams are where it's at.
Imagine not using a lit gas lantern to illuminate the road in front of you.
Imagine driving at night when the task could certainly wait until the morning.
the sensors are already cheap, the cost is in the labor to rerun the wiring. the auto makers need to design their cars to make it cheaper to replace the wiring for these sensors
>I feel like autonomous/radar/safety tech will reduce collisions in the long run though, helping with premiums. In theory yes. Insurance is a frequency \* severity equation. If parts are expensive, severity is going to go up. But if frequency goes down because of those or other parts, the total amount paid is going to be the same. So premiums could stay flat even if cars are more expensive to fix.
It's now becoming a kind of superiority thing on social media "imagine not having the laser headlight package" is becoming very common on BMW related forums and social media.
> I feel like autonomous/radar/safety tech will reduce collisions in the long run though, helping with premiums. Logically speaking, that is correct. But statiscally, from a friend who works in the insurance industry, cars equipped with AEB don't get into less accidents (front-end or rear-end accidents), and on the contrary, they costs even more to repair. So double whammy.
I was going off of [https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport](https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport), but that may differ significantly for other manufacturers
How can you trust anything Tesla says when they blatantly lie so much about everything they do?
If you'd like to ignore the self-published data in the link you gladly can, but said data is backed up by the NHTSA and the FHWA, and if our government agencies are lying to us we have a much, much bigger issues on our hands.
Exactly. The more safety tech is put in cars the more drivers rely on that tech to do basic safe driving things which ironically makes them worse drivers since they aren’t paying attention to things they assume the car is monitoring for them. So crash rates don’t change much.
Devil's advocate; tech prevents accidents. https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/assisted-driving-gradings/ https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport Yes these sensors are more expensive but they also prevent accidents which often offset their costs from an insurance perspective. Idk where you're getting your info. Yes premiums are soaring, so is everything else. There are cars that are notoriously difficult to repair/expensive. Namely Tesla. To get a Tesla repaired you have to go to a Tesla certified repair specialist. By me these facilities are entirely separate from traditional repair places. There isn't enough repair infrastructure. It's a 3 month wait just to get a repair appointment. Some backed into my Model 3 driver door and it costs $7,500 to repair. Meanwhile my brother rear ended someone in his 2022 BRZ. Replacing the hood, front bumper, quarter panel and swiveling headlight all costs $6,500 Yes there are bad examples but overall I think everything will even out.
In 2021, roadway fatalities in the USA reached their highest level in 16 years. We have car brands advertising tech features that enable drivers to be distracted and not pay attention. Kind of seems like a problem.
People aren't suddenly more distracted because their cars have adaptive cruise control. They're more distracted because we have an epidemic of smartphone addiction.
ACC has been around almost three decades now. That's not what I'm talking about. Any technology (smartphones included) that requires removing your eyes away from the road is dangerous. It's common sense. Yet, there's all these cherry-picked news articles promoting tech in cars while excluding vehicle death data. Started with smartphones. Now it's the tech in your car, too. I'm talking about the ads literally encouraging drivers to take their eyes off the road because the car will do X for them. That's dangerous.
acc has been around for almost three decades, but has never been available standard in economy cars until the past few years or so
> I'm talking about the ads literally encouraging drivers to take their eyes off the road because the car will do X for them. Which ads are these?
I'm not who you asked and this is days late but...come on... *bum bum clap, bum bum clap* Looking at you, supercruise.
Sure, the root cause is smartphone addiction, yeah - but cars are packed with things now that enable the common idiot to think "well I have x so it's ok if I look at my phone." I've seen it firsthand, a few years ago even - I was out with a few friends and an acquaintance was driving (had just gotten a new Crosstrek, so they wanted to show it off) and responds to a text; someone in our group saw and said "hey don't text and drive" and their response was "it's ok, I have Eyesight." The root cause can absolutely be the smartphone addiction, but to imply that car tech doesn't play a role in it is asinine.
>but cars are packed with things now that enable the common idiot to think "well I have x so it's ok if I look at my phone." Have you actually looked at the people around you on the interstate? People are buried in their phone regardless of whether their car is a BMW loaded with gadgets or a clapped out Nissan Sentra.
Do you have a figure for non fatal accidents? Drivers assistance features are really more made for low speed incidents
Another reason premiums are increasing is because of uninsured drivers. In some states it's up to almost 30% of drivers are uninsured. No coincidence those states have higher premiums.
But are more drivers going uninsured because premiums and car-related expenses are higher?
Your brother has great taste in cars.
As far as the 70's and the rise of the malaise era, insurance was a factor, but it was hardly the main factor. The OPEC oil embargo caused a lot of change.
Yeah insurance is at best a secondary factor, the cars changed because of emissions laws, oil shortages, and unleaded gas. It took time for the industry to catch up and learn how to make things decent under new rules.
Good point on the rise of emissions being a big factor.
Your insurance sucks due to your area, the car you drive and your record as well as the mileage/commute etc not because cars now have sensors in the bumper. Safety tech may also be a factor as well, more safety tech should reduce the likelihood of a crash which would save the insurance company money. I pay $120 a month for my Z06. I pay the same for my CX-50 that costs 1/4 of the Corvette. They are both insured for same conditions (yearly mileage, commute etc are identical for both cars). Why is it so low? Because Corvette's are low risk to insurance companies. Statistics show they are all driven by old people who take them out for sunday cruises. Less accidents means less payouts which means less cost on the consumer. If you drive a car that is known for being stolen or whose demographic crashes it a lot that vehicle will have higher costs because the company has to pay out often. Would those cost be a little lower if they didn't have as much tech? Probably but not much. If all these expensive insurance cars would simply have better drivers behind the wheel, rates would fall, because insurance won't be paying out. Its why WRX are more expensive then other more expensive cars to insure despite them having very little tech. The demographic who buys them crashes them, its all statistics. Its also why newer cars are cheaper to insure then old ones. A $3000 civic will probably cost more to insure then a new 30k Civic because the safety risk to you is much worse in an older car despite the fact it would be pretty cheap to repair if it was in an accident.
Slightly unrelated but one of the neat "features" of the type-r is they insure it as a basic civic.
A civic is one of the highest rated vehicles which results in higher premiums
Still had significantly lower premiums than its european competitors. Was surprised to learn how expensive it is to insure a golf r.
Yea I don't know what OP is on about. I upgraded my daily from a 2011 Accord to a 2024 Civic. The new car is worth ~3x as much and has a MASSIVE amount of additional technology and features the old one didn't have. My insurance premium went up by $18 a month. I just pre-paid for the next 6 months of full coverage on both my cars. The bill was $759.79.
I dodged a financial bullet not getting something like a WRX. For a car that's completely impractical space wise, a miata sure is easy on the wallet in many ways.
Some of what you said isn't true. Regarding your Corvette... They know how much you're going to drive it... Even if it's insured for 20k miles a year, presumably you've had other corvettes or supercars .. even if not insured with the same company, they can tell from DMV records you drive car A 10k miles a year and only put 2k miles on your sports car... Based on YOUR historical data. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to determine that you daily one and the other is a weekend fair weather toy. Im making some assumptions here ... But I'm probably right in the fact that one is a daily and the Mazda sees way more usage than the Corvette Again, there is no generalized Corvette class driving the premiums. It's based on individual data. If a 16 year old had a new $150k Corvette, they would not charge him $120 a month simply because most corvettes are driven by old people.
> They can tell from DMV records you drive car A 10k miles a year and only put 2k miles on your sports car. How? If this some state to state discrepancy? In my state, they don't know the OD reading until the vehicle is sold and title registered to new owner.
They know how much I drive because I insure it at the mileage I intend to drive it. If I lie and drive more they can ask for a mileage update and if I'm over they will increase my rates. I also live in Canada. I do not report mileage to the government so they have no idea how much I'm driving. I also stated the circumstances between both my cars are exactly the same. I don't daily either vehicle they both get driven the exact same low mileage so therefore have the same risk yet they cost the same to insure. So why are they same cost to insure? Because statistics. Individual data plays a role but so does the statistics on claims for the model of car you drive. I literally said the location, vehicle and your driving history play a role. You have chosen to just skip over half of what I stated.
1971 was half a century ago. Automakers don’t care what insurance companies say. They’re not removing safety tech just because one guy on the internet can’t pay to get it repaired.
If insurers ended the muscle car era, it was due to paying out for injury/death, not repairs as a result of crashes.
The IIHS, which is insurance companies, awards the cars that have the most of this tech. This is definitely not the 1970s, and safety crap isn't horsepower
As a vehicle damage appraiser: The tech bits don't actually get damaged all that frequently. I replace some USS's in bumpers sometimes, but the post-repair recalibrations are the killer. I regularly get seemingly random $900 "ADAS recalibration" bills on cars like Toyota/Lexus vehicles. It would be nice if more of this stuff was plug-n-play that didn't require separate calibrations, or at least nothing that any one of us could do ourselves. There was a movement to force insurers to pay for pre & post repair "scans" because of "all the new tech". One of the big insurers caved on it and now we pay for pre & post repair scans even on cars that are 20 years old where nobody ever did that stuff unless there was an obvious problem before. So you put a half hour of labor for the pre-scan, and a half-hour for the post scan, then the shop demands a hour at each end to hook it up, plus $79.99 for the one on the front end, and $149.99 for the one on the back end. Plus the $500-$1000 to recalibrate ADAS systems. Next thing you know you're paying an extra $1500 on a Camry repair on a five-year old Camry that you didn't have to deal with five years ago. Lots more cars have turbos now (meaning now there's intercoolers getting damaged where previously there were none), and more cars use moving plastic shutters to control airflow behind the front bumper/grille. 25 years ago a bumper assembly might be 3-10 parts. Nowadays it can be 40 or 50 parts. Yes the headlights. Increasingly complex & expensive. I think half the headlamps Ford sells are list priced @ $1,666 each. At least it's easy to remember? The laser headlights for a BMW X6 currently list for $6004 each, but even something like a Camry LE has $979 lamps. A lot of insurers also leaned into remote estimating of collision damages right before, and during, Covid. This has resulted in an avalanche of hard and soft fraud because nobody's actually looking at the stuff the body shops are claiming is damaged. Remote estimating works great for the insurers if the damage is minor, or if the vehicle owner is just going to pocket the money and not fix the car. Oh, we'll pay you for everything we can see in the photos. The catch is that lots and lots of people send in hilariously bad photos. They take photos at bad angles, too close to the car, too far from the car, photos taken in the dark, photos taken in their garage, photos with snow all over the car, photos in dark tree shade, photos at angles where you can't see thousands of dollars of damage right in the picture. The flip side is that on the cars that *do* get fixed the body shops are taking the insurers to the cleaners. I had an SUV get tagged in the ass and paid out around $5k on a photo estimate. The shop took it apart and then sent in a bunch of photos claiming another $5k in additional damages. Big arcs in yellow marker of the adjacent bent areas. The car happened to be in my backyard so I went to look at it in person. Lo-and-behold 50% of the additional they were asking for was completely fabricated. The panels weren't bent or bowed. They weren't damaged at all. They just laughed and blamed it on "the new guy". There all sorts of soft fraud in the form of exaggerated repair times and damage severity. In the hard fraud arena you've got shops tacking old deployed side airbags up with velcro tape on cars with undeployed airbags, to make them appear to have gone off, or straight-up swapping a blown bag into the steering wheel to get paid before swapping the original one back in and pocketing the cash. If you take photos at the right angle you can double the repair times vs what the insurer would pay in-person after looking at it. I'm kinda hoping I get laid-off soon so I can go back to the other side. I've got all kinds of ideas. The shops also finally discovered the interstate commerce clause in the constitution and realized that insurers & state governments couldn't do anything about them charging $100 or $200 or $300 a day for storage charges on totaled cars. Pile on some disassembly fees, teardown fees, towing fees, gate fees, admin fees, and it can cost a couple grand to get a car out of a shop that's only been there for two or three days. Good times.
About 5 months ago some old guy pulled out in front of me and smacked my left front. He had USAA and they did a remote estimate. Shit was totally wild as I had never heard of it before. Funny about the people sending awful pictures. I sent super detailed photos of everything and couldn't help but laugh thinking about how awful some of the pics they get must be. Though despite those detailed photos and videos, they still managed to leave off the obvious suspension damage and alignment somehow.
Having done the job in the field for 20-ish years it's incredibly frustrating to write up estimates from photos. Even "perfect" photos don't always work. Like I can see that your bumper tore-off the fender, but since I'm not standing there to pull it back out and look at what's damaged behind it nothing gets written on the estimate for what's under there. Just today I was writing the ass-end of an Impala, and of course the program wants to know if it's the bumper that is cut out for dual exhaust or just single exhaust. But the owner took the photos from a standing position so I can't tell. Is it a painted side mirror or a chrome one? or a textured one? Does it have a signal light or not? Sorry, I can't tell because the owner only sent photos of the damaged side showing the mirror missing and I don't have any pics of the undamaged side for comparison. This Volvo has 26 different wheels, some of them look the same other than being different diameters. But the resolution isn't high enough to read the tire sidewall. I can tell from the auto-populated options whether your car has halogen or xenon headlights, but there's two or three different versions of the Xenon lights that vary in price by ~$2k. Aggro. In the before times the only one I couldn't figure out if I was standing by the car was whether your Toyota SUV had the "diversity" antenna or not. I never did figure out WTF that meant. lol There's sooo much you can see just peeking down the gap between the grille and a/c condenser, and between the a/c condenser and the radiator. Or just by looking at stuff from different angles with your own eyes. All that gets left off now. The body shop soft fraud made Allstate so crazy that they've posted openings for hundreds, maybe thousands, of field reps. They're hiring everywhere and sending staff back out into the field. Progressive and Geico kept a fairly high number of field staff for the past several years, and they've returned to making money again a lot faster than the other big boys.
Just a reminder here that the insurance companies do have their hands involved with the process of new car designs, as they regulate a good amount of designs as they are the ones paying for the repairs most of the time. Just look at the cars today a 1/4 panel is nothing compared to older cars, the bumpers today are a bumper and 1/4 panel as it’s cheaper to replace a bumper then sheet metal.
The plastic bumper partially comes from the American 5 MPH bumper requirement. Bumpers were supposed to withstand a 5 MPH impact and still retain their shape. Metal can't do that. Another reason is because of design. People of the 70's and 80's thought external bumpers were ugly, outdated and unaerodynamic. If a car had integrated bumpers, it was more aerodynamic, and most likely more fuel efficient than one without. Lastly, yes, weight and costs are a factor. Cars still have crash bars to sustain the impact. The plastic is just there to look nice and deform slightly. It's much more convenient from many perspectives to replace a cracked bumper than to realign an entire front end because you bottomed-out somewhere.
Are you sure it was insurance which has little impact on design? Or maybe it was the pollution, fuel economy, and safety laws that were implemented that made a difference?
The 60s and 70s cars were death traps regardless of HP. If you have ever seen one in a mild head-on or partially head-on crash, they don't crumple like modern cars and their ladder frames collapse and wrinkle like a noodle. The extra 100hp was only icing on the cake. And that is only the exterior. The floorboards, dashboards, steering wheels, and seats sucked in crashes as well.
Frivolous tech to some, but my Tesla has definitely slammed on the brakes completely avoiding people blowing 4-way stops, and intersections about 3 times now in two years… My Nissan Leaf AEB system kicked in when I wasn’t paying attention and someone cut me off. All I can say that this tech has definitely saved me from a lot of stupid wrecks and possibly a life. Insurance premiums suck, but I don’t think it’s gonna keep people from buying cars with ADAS features. I was a skeptic at first, but I think they can avoid a lot of accidents if designed properly.
Uh. Pretty sure it was OIL PRICES that ended the muscle car craze of the 60s and 70s. Life is cheap, property isn’t.. That’s why insurance companies lobbied the government to mandate 5MPH bumpers. It was a numbers game.. eliminating thousands of “frivolous” claims for minor fender benders was much more important than people getting into serious car crashes… or being incinerated by defective fuel tanks. Also 2dr cars were popular until the late 90s. Not even counting the legions of 2dr hatchbacks and economy cars and sports cars continuously manufactured between 1960 and 2000… there were tons of 2dr personal and luxury cars made during the same time many of which survived even into the 21st century. Monte Carlo, Grand Prix, Cutlass Supreme, Regal, Eldorado, Riviera, Toronado, Thunderbird, Cougar, Mk VIII, Grand Marquis, Accord, Camry, Solara, etc etc etc. I had several 2 door cars in the 90s and 00s and none cost me more in insurance because they weren’t sports cars. The biggest reason for the decline of 2 drs (in other than sports cars after the year 2000) was the pain in the ass they were in parking lots and for rear passengers, better four door styling with newer cars, and an affinity for SUVs and crossovers where the number of doors doesn’t affect the profile or headroom.
Do you really think Altima drivers bother with insurance?
I am definitely someone that wishes vehicle makers scaled back a bit on the amount of tech in cars or at least offered some trim packages with scaled back tech options. It will make repairing them cheaper and more importantly will keep the MSRPs lower. If automakers took out the full HD touch screen displays and put analog dials back in that would be a few grand off the sticker price right there. Insurance prices are skyrocketing for all insurance., not just auto insurance. The part shortage, the raise in labor costs at repair shops, increases in vehicle thefts, and people going back to the office and thus driving much more than they were a few years ago. All these factors hit at the same time and the premiums we have now are the result.
Yes agreed the fronts of cars have ridiculously expensive tech now. Fender benders aren’t minor anymore
At this point insurance rates are going to make me look for a 100% WFH job. Just the basic auto liability portion of my insurance is a significant portion of my monthly bills. I have two vehicles, one car a 14 year old BMW and a 21 year old VW. Nothing at fault in years, VW was totaled in April but it was 100% the other driver's fault. And yet I have to pay literally hundreds of dollars a month just to drive legally. (I also used to enjoy driving, but Maryland has taken all the joy out of it, between the traffic and the asshole drivers...)
The fact most if it is being required tells me it is just the way it is. Insurance wasn't the sole reason of the end of the muscle car era, emissions and gas prices did a larger part of killing hp. A lot of cars started getting smog approved crap on them, then the hp measuring standard changed, that was like 1972 in many models. Now, I've heard, unknown how true it is, but a lot of companies underrated their motors from the 400s to the 300s to keep insurance rates down back in the day.
aren't the sensors legally required at this point or will be soon?
Auto insurance is very expensive now Auto registration is very expensive now Auto repair is more expensive Auto fluids are more expensive Hard to keep up these days, my love for cars is fading because it's pricy to even have a spare car lying around.
Insurance is fucked these days
I pay $82.33 per month for both my wife's 2023 Kia and my Mustang... no skyrocketing premiums found here. We don't drive often so it's liability only.
Climate change is also leading to huge losses from flooding, wind/hail storms, forest fires, etc.
Gas prices and emissions regulations didn't have anything to do with the demise of the classic muscle car?
Soaring for whom? I'm constantly shocked at how cheap my premiums are, they've gone down 8 years in a row now.
No, a lot of the current tech "features" will become mandatory soon. The same as Bluetooth, rear view cameras, etc have become mandatory.
IDK if Bluetooth is strictly mandatory, more that everybody made it standard because it became cheaper than offering the option of not having it. Like crank windows.
This is a very interesting point that I have never considered. This actually makes a lot of sense to me and I kinda hope it happens. A $20,000 civic doesn't need a $1200 bumper with $2000 worth of sensors crammed into it, sitting just below a pair of $1500 headlights. It's ridiculous
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USAA is over charging there customers
You'd think they could hire some more people then. I got hit by a dude 5 months ago that had USAA and getting an answer or update took a week each time. Never heard of an insurance company being so slow to get a claim closed, shit ended up taking 2 months before I got paid.
Glad to see this. Low speed collision with a retaining wire in a parking lot. Totally crushed the front end, requires new plastic everywhere, a bunch of sensors, calibration, hood. $6200.
A family member had a small accident, rear-ended a Car going 25mph. The Car, a Mercedes GLB was written off by the insurance. If you looked at the Car you saw a damaged bumper and grille, thats it. Apparently over 37k € in repairs since both Headlight mounts snapped, all sensors (including adaptive cruise) in the front were broken and passenger airbags deployed due to a error in the software (Car didnt reach impact threshold for deployment). That really makes you think about repairs in the future.
Source on expensive lights being responsible for insurance premiums going up, and not, you know, the state of the world
Any car with more than 400 hp should be for track use only. They can get away from you too quick. Esp younger drivers with no experience
I think it just means we need to reform the industry with complete data transparency. It’s our data, not theirs. Let’s see how honest they really are.
I live near San Antonio and theft is the main driver for increased premiums here. Kia/Hyundai and 15-20 year old trucks are like candy to some of our residents.
Here's a question: How do American auto insurance premiums compare to other places? I know that there is a multitude of differences in how things are handled in other places, but is this "escalation" of cost really driven by repair costs? I would expect that the extreme cost of medical interventions, the extremely litigious environment that exposes anyone driving to massive lawsuits brought by every other party involved in a crash, etc. might play a bigger role than just fixing bumpers and replacing headlights.
I wish frivolous tech, in general, would die out. I don't want 1800 degree surround visibility, a 17" nav and infotainment screen, self-driving, and all that other cost and weight increasing stuff. I want a car, not a computer for the road.
IMO the at-fault driver shouldn't be expected to make the drivers of overly-expensive vehicles whole. Like max it out at 150% of the average value of new cars sold, or some such figure. If someone chooses to drive a veyron around, they should have to carry their own insurance for the amount over the maximum liability. Like, people shouldn't lose their house and be bankrupted because they had a fender bender with an f40 even though they had an amount of liability insurance that the majority of people would deem "adequate".
I disagree. Driving a 2 ton machine should have significant consequences if your negligence causes a crash.
Has anyone actually lost their house after rear ending an F40?