This article is misleading. If a car crash is bad enough that it damages the frame of a car, it's going to get totalled anyway. So either way it's going to go to a junk yard and get slowly parted out.
Not on unibody cars. There isn’t a big increase in frame area in this car versus any other unibody out there. The difference here is the unibody isn’t actually a unibody, it’s a multipart unibody that is bolted together. A standard unibody, which is just about everything on the road today that isn’t a pickup truck, is all three of those frame pieces you see in that picuture, but as one giant piece. That big piece of metal you are normally used to seeing in car assembly photos. There are no frame rails under it. The unibody being split into segments is the first real change to the unibody design since GM started using it in the 80’s.
Not necessarily. On some vehicles the exterior panels are part of the frame and you may only have cosmetic damage but fixing it would costs tens of thousands.
There is no affordable car today that you can make any money today that you need to use. They require money in order to maintain it well enough to use.
Tires are expensive. Gas is expensive. You’ve got filters and oils and fluids to replace, and headlamps. Without the required disposables, a car is basically useless.
A house without running water, or power, or natural gas, or a furnace filter, or water softener, or lightbulbs, or toilet paper, etc. still provides shelter without all of those things.
A car gets you from point a to point b until it doesn’t. At that point it’s disposed of.
My next vehicle will be. no reason to have a gas anything. Unfortunately I’m in the middle of a divorce, so I have no idea how long it will be before I can make any positive changes. Fuck I don’t even know where I’ll be living in 8 months.
Won’t be a problem because more and more people don’t want a car.
Car manufacturers know this and that’s why they are focusing on self-driving cars. Taxis will be replaced by robo-taxis owned by manufacturers and private firms.
Within 20 years, will be like a luxury like owning a horse
I agree, I think the real problem is the cost to maintain one and the economics around it. For too long the expectation was to put as little money as possible into maintaining it and getting a new one some years later. We need to stop making them the massive status symbols they’ve become.
Has anyone come up with a guess on the cost of swapping out an entire cast body section vs replacing or refurbishing the parts that would be there without the cast?
I think point is without the cast body section you could just replace broken parts which may be significantly less. In practice though I don’t think it matters that much. Small accidents hopefully don’t damage the frame and if they do it’s often a bit dubious repairing it.
Yeah, I think once you get to the point where the car needs the frame worked on, it’s probably going to get scrapped whether it has a cast frame or not.
What this seems like is it would replace things that are normally spot welded or glued together, things I can think off the top of my head that are like this are the front radiator support and strut towers in various cars. When these items are bent or rusted you can usually buy these peices. See skyline r34 strut tower rust issues. On this new proposed design your options would be to replace the whole front or rear third of your car, or precision cutting and welding a piece in, which may be inaccessable because of the casting design.
Welding a casting is a lot more dubious even if you can access it easily. If the original material was welded together chances are it can be rewelded without much issue. Most successfull welds in cast material I’ve seen have been in compression, it tends to split around the weld when you put it under tension.
Probably because trucks are industrial vehicles built to be driven millions of km*, and therefore are a much bigger investment, so the repair is more often “worth it” than for personal vehicles.
Also, one truck can have the cargo capacity of many cargo vans, and one bus in pendular movement has the capacity of many personal cars, so each truck/bus repair will have a greater impact.
*At least, that’s the case for buses, according to a schoolbus driver when I was a kid.
This is for cars and small SUVs. The trucks still have frames. The cars and small SUVs are already unibodies. Just not multi-segmented unibodies. The two differences are that its multi-segmented, and the metal is cast, instead of forged in a stamping press.
My guess is increase part cost but reduce repair labor. Similar to replacing transmission or engine today. Not worth it for a shop to usually do the repairs them selves but replace the whole unit and send off to a remanufacturing plant
The frame is a much smaller portion of the vehicle than these cast parts.
Once a frame is damaged the vehicle often gets totalled out because it would be so much to replace, basically disassemble the vehicle or try to repair the frame and have poor safety risks from then on.
These casts are a lot more than where a frame is. Damage to the casts will happen from accidents that never would have damaged a normal frame.
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