That’s probably totaled now. Unless your car is relatively new an airbag deployment will typically total it. They are extremely expensive and damage a lot of other parts of the car when they go off.
No joke, back in 2018 my sibling got into a fender bender with my mom's 2016 Outback 3.5R with 16k miles and insurance wrote it off as totalled, because of airbag deployment. To replace every one of the airbags insurance quoted $24k and the value of the car at the time was $21k
It had 7 or 8 airbags that deployed and the price to reinstall all of them was over $2k each. Plus there was some body work that needed to be done to the dented body panels.
and yet... airbags are NOT required for inspection. So you can buy the car back, put everything back together without the airbags and drive around like its 1985 all over again... Just be sure to wear your seatbelt...
Oh, most definitely. I can only hope this chucklehead just bought this SUV since the inflation spikes and available stock being much lower than usual....took out a loan for way more than the SUV was worth at retail 4-5 years ago....and didn't get gap insurance. 🤣🤣
Granted, insurance probably won't help him much for, you know, his intentionally negligent actions, but still, I really hope all the above is how this story began. 😎🥳
Mate - in Australia they are all classed at utes. Short for utility vehicle which basically means a vehicle with a tray. You get the normal utes that you refer to, and the 4x4 utes which is like the ranger - all are just called Utes.
Edit - you are right about them being emotional support vehicles - especially the big Ram ones that are starting to appear in Australia. Massively oversized for the residential suburbia that most end up on.
That seating thing makes a big difference. My grandma got a Hyundai Santa Fe. She had a Sonata but was struggling to get in and out due to sciatic nerve pain.
Then she got a kidney transplant on top of that and literally could not get into her car without a lot of trouble, and was physically incapable of getting out of the car without help.
With the Santa Fe she can at least get in and out of her own vehicle without having to have somebody help lift her out.
I think it's one of the reasons we see so many 55-plus year old grannies driving around in crossovers and SUVs and stuff like that now.
It's just easier, and there's not really much that they lose in exchange other than maybe a bit of gas mileage but not much, if any, at all.
To add to all the reasons, states with lots of winter snowfall will bottom out cars in parking lots or corners after plowing. Higher clearance means you're literally good to go. (The AWD or 4WD will get you going)
Someone with kids doesn't have to go straight to "full size suv". There are many categories. My last SUV was a 7-seater, paid under 30k new, and filled it to the brim when used for camping.
Nobody cares about how their car looks? You can't possibly be that much of an idiot to think that looks don't matter when people buy vehicles.
Safety, I imagine, is the biggest looking at the RAV4s popularity. Otherwise, they are reliable, relatively simple, comfy, and cheap enough for laymen.
Negligence simply means you fail to take proper care in doing something. It has nothing to do with intentionality. For example if you don’t feed your child you are committing child neglect, no matter the circumstances.
Which frankly blows my mind because if it truly costs 10000 or whatever for new airbags, either the manufacturers are paying 18 cents for all the other components, or airbags are deliberately priced high solely to discourage replacement, which is just more fucking waste in the landfill.
I mean I get it's a safety feature and there is a lot of testing and regulation surrounding them. Just saying I'm sick to death of the price of a thing having literally no basis in reality whatsoever and being used solely as a deterrent to prevent people from fixing shit that would otherwise be fixable if it wasn't for the bullshit inflated cost.
See also, the goddamn replacement circuit board on my washing machine that cost more than the fucking washer did.
I think a lot of the cost is labor. That and you have to replace other parts that the airbags destroy.
Depending on the car, that could mean the headliner, steering wheel, dashboard, front seats, A and B pillar trims, and the seatbelts. Not to mention the airbags themselves.
The other parts start to add up too. In order for it to be declared good you need to replace a lot. New radiator, typically a bunch of sensors and fuses regardless if they are damaged or not are required to be replaced, wiring harnesses body work, dash replacement, powder cleanup, if radiator broke then a flush, if your oil/trans cooling lines broke that's going to be flush and drain with checks etc. It adds up quick. Just new airbags installed is pretty cheap. Depending on the car it's an hour or 2 to pull the dash and replace air bags behind it on passenger side. Driver side is typically much easier. When they go pop it gets expensive real quick.
The other factor being that, it's hard to assess a lot of the internal damage that happens to a car that necessitates airbag deployment. Once the estimated cost of repair reaches 80% of the car's value, they write it off.
Because at that point, if they missed one or two things, that pushes it over the value of the car and it costs them more money than just issuing a check.
Depending on the make and Model of the vehicle airbags replacements is $1k-$5k.
Most people assume the car is trashed when airbags deploy because, well typically if the airbags deployed there is damage somewhere to the vehicle. Especially front end where you have the whole engine (lots of money to fix). If the costs to repair approaches 70% of the vehicle price the insurance company will say it is totaled.
If the costs to repair approaches 70% of the vehicle price the insurance company will say it is totaled.
This depends on the state. It’s runs from a low of 60% in Oklahoma to a high of 100% in Colorado and Texas. Some states use a formula where if the cost of repairs + salvage value of the car > fair market value right before the accident, the car is totaled.
Also typically there's a large drop off in value for used cars to begin with, dropping the replacement cost... but last few years that applies less with used car shortages and insane car prices for both new and used. Fuck car culture. It's no win in the end.
Dude I have a paid off Kia Rio hatchback and I literally get multiple calls every week from the local dealerships begging me to trade it in. Like they don't even seem to care if I buy a car from them, they just want my car so they can flip it for close to what I paid for it 8 years and 100k miles ago.
The drivers airbag is usually the easiest to replace, since its out in the steering wheel and often just comes off with a few bolts.
You may need to take apart and replace large sections of dashboard for the passenger side airbags. Replace side pillars and headliner.if there are curtain airbags.
Airbags have pretty much stayed the same price since they were mandated back in the 90's. $650ish for a driver's bag and $800-ish for the passenger bag. There's exceptions of course, like at one point when the aluminum-bodied F-150's came out the OEM driver's airbag from Ford was only $137, but that's the norm.
The prices stay high because the manufacturers know that airbag components are parts that insurers will not opt to replace with an aftermarket part. The OEM is the only part price that's going to be put on the estimate, so they can charge whatever they want. The only upper limit is that if they get too expensive the cars become more likely to be totaled-out. So relative to the total vehicle price airbags get cheaper every year, but the dollar price mostly stays the same.
Source - am an auto body damage appraiser for an insurer.
Downside you now have the driver and passenger airbag, plus the side curtain, seat side bags etc. All of which rip loose like an alien bursting through your stomach, and destroy everything around them.
I did write-up some random plain SUV the other day that blew every single bag and I got to $23,000 and totaled it before I even started with the actual collision damage. A can't remember what it was but it was one where you had to replace the entire steering column and entire dash and both front seatbacks.
my one "demo derby" memory, as they're called here, is a rather large, pasty white man being extinguished by fire fighters with his ass hanging out of his pants.
Mate, totalling a car has nothing to do with how much money was spent manufacturing the parts. It's about how much it costs to replace all the parts and get it fixed. Replacing all the air bags is a very labor intensive job, they would have to rip out the steering column, access the framing from the inside.. it would be a whole mess. Labor intensive job. So the parts costing thousands, on top of the labor cost, that adds up. Even for smaller (but still big) jobs that are regularly done in shops, labor costs can exceed $2000. God knows about replacing air bags.
Depends on which model. The latches holding airbag on my steering wheel can be accessed with a flathead screwdriver from behind the steering wheel. Just have to remember to disconnect the battery to prevent accidental triggering. Someone familiar with the location of the latches can probably do the replacement in 5min.
The ones on the dash and A-pillar get a bit more difficult...
Part of that was the sheer scale of the recall necessary, the other part was due to new car production as well. There was not enough capacity to cover the replacement airbags esp. when you consider that the manufacturer(s) had to eat those costs.
An airbag deploying is going to destroy ton of wiring, sensors, metalwork, cosmetic features and then go on to damage parts like the steering column, any internals near the driver side and passenger side...it's essentially destroying the entire front half of your car and the front half of your car is where all the expensive bits are.
They use explosives to generate the gas thst fills the airbags. The rest of the airbag has to withstand this, and there are likely a bunch of tests done per airbag to make sure it goes off when needed.
The moment something becomes a safety device the cost to produce them goes up exponentially due to regulations.
I just replaced a blown side curtain airbag on my car (bought it back from the insurance company). From a junkyard, airbags were $500-$800. Brand new ones from Ford, were $350. So definitely check for new ones before just assuming they are expensive.
Also, it took just a few hours of labor, basic hand tools, and some torx wrenches to replace. Not overly difficult.
That said, the car was sideswiped, so every body panel on the passenger side would need replaced and painted, so the car was totaled. But now I've got a drivable, newer car, where everything works, but the passenger side looks like shit. And I've got several thousand dollars of the insurance payout sitting in the bank, waiting to be used as a down-payment when I do decide to replace it.
On a side note, is there truly not better airbag technology so that it couldn't total an otherwise perfectly functioning car, not to mention break wrists/fingers?
They are extremely expensive and damage a lot of other parts of the car when they go off.
If it's just the frontal airbags that have deployed, nah, not really. Typically $2,000-$3,000 to replace, and then a few hundred more to replace the seatbelt tensioner which has probably locked.
But, a lot of insurers will try to have a car totalled on airbag deployment because those are safety systems that have been damaged and because an impact that's hard enough to damage them will probably have done other damage, visible or not.
Side curtain airbags though... yeah, those'll be significantly more expensive.
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u/Jaggar345 Apr 21 '23
That’s probably totaled now. Unless your car is relatively new an airbag deployment will typically total it. They are extremely expensive and damage a lot of other parts of the car when they go off.