Soft on the Outside

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Cars used to be able to take a hit. They weren’t as “safe,” it’s true. But the price you’re paying for that – literally – comes in the mail every six months or once a year, whenever the insurance mafia sends you the bill for it.

The bill – which has gone up by 26 percent on average over just the past 12 months – is based on the potential repair costs of fixing your late-model vehicle. Or the other guy’s. It doesn’t matter.

What does is that most of the cars on the road are soft on the outside. Their exterior panels are almost wafer thin, especially hoods. Raise yours and see. It is probably supported by a pair of small struts – because that’s all that’s needed to support a wafer-thin piece of metal you could probably bend by hand. You can imagine how much it will bend if you run into something.

“Bend” isn’t the right word, either. Bends can usually be fixed.

What will happen is the wafer-thin hood will fold up like a piece of cardboard – which might actually be preferable as hood material since cardboard is a lot cheaper to replace than a piece of wafer-thin stamped steel or aluminum.

Push on the fenders and watch them give. You can imagine what happens when they’re struck. It doesn’t take much to make them throw-aways. It’s literally hard to straighten them once bent and often not worth the expense of trying. So instead the panel must be replaced, which is also expensive.

See your bill.

The front and rear ends of all modern vehicles are covered in plastic so there is nothing to protect the plastic from being torn when the vehicle bumps into something (or another vehicle bumps into it). The plastic is held in place, typically, by plastic press-in rivets that snap easily, causing the entire front end to shear off the vehicle. The grille is also plastic and there is nothing to protect this very expensive piece of plastic from being broken by a wayward shopping cart. Same goes for those plastic headlight assemblies all new vehicles have. Also very expensive – and very easily damaged.

And just behind that plastic is a plastic radiator. And an aluminum AC condenser. Might as well cover them with cardboard, too.

Interestingly, this exterior fragility covers an underlying solidity.

The structure of the modern plastic-covered (and thin-skinned) car is very stout. Specifically, what you might call the passenger cage – which is an accurate way to describe it because that’s more or less what it is. This is the part of the car that has substance. It is – typically – the underlying welded-steel unibody onto which the superficial (cosmetic) parts of the car are bolted. Most of the vehicle’s weight lies in the structure of the cage. This weight has been increasing massively – literally, just the right word – along with federal “safety” requirements that can realistically be complied with only adding physical structure to the vehicle.

Which adds weight to the vehicle.

Which is why the average new car weighs massively more (about 800-1,000 pounds more on average) than a car of about the same size that was made before it was necessary to add all that weight to make the car “safe,” per government requirements.

This has created an interesting incongruity.

One the one hand, new cars are “safer” to be inside of if you are hit hard by something else – or hit something else, hard. The parts of the car you can’t see – the underlying structure – can absorb a lot of force. But this adds a lot of weight – and now you have a problem (if you are making cars) trying to comply with other federal regulations, especially those requiring the car deliver ever-higher-gas-mileage (and ever lower gas emissions). The heavier a vehicle is, the more gas it will use.

The more electricity it will use, too.

EVs are double-whammied in this respect because they are already overweight due to the exorbitant weight of their battery packs, plus the weight of their underlying structure, which must be weighty just the same as any other new car in order to be “safe” per government requirements. That’s why electric half-ton trucks like the Ford Lightning and Rivian R1 weigh more than three tons and cost a ton to insure, too.

It is also why everything else is costing more to insure.

In order to compensate for all that hidden structural weight, cosmetic weight has been shaved thinner than prosciutto. There is almost no structural solidity on the outside of a modern vehicle.

Just enough to cover things up. Leaving them very fragile on the outside. Minor impacts impart major expense. Because plastic usually must be replaced. And – oddly enough – plastic isn’t cheap, at least when it comes to car parts.

It’s the cost of all of this that’s being covered up.

Many people are understandably resentful about the rising cost of insurance – now about $2,500 per annum, on average –  but their resentment isn’t directed at the right target. Yes, the insurance mafia is just that. It uses the government to make us pay. Which means it can make us pay more.

But it is the government that really makes us pay – by imposing all of these costs.

Maybe we ought to have a say, given it’s us who have to pay for all of these costs. “Safety” is well and dandy, but it’s also hypothetical. The cost of covering a car based on those hypotheticals isn’t.

A point may come when most of us can no longer afford to pay these costs. And at that point, it won’t matter how “safe” new cars are.

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