Your Honda Deserves Respect

Or your Mazda, Chev, Toyota, Kia….. and you deserve respect and safety too.

The repair industry spends far too much time talking about very good repair shops fixing very expensive cars. Most non-industry articles you will read about car repairs suggest that these high end cars are very difficult to fix and require extra skill and care, and by implication your less expensive cars (that many more of us drive) can be fixed by more or less anyone working with old equipment.

It is true that the specialized equipment for the correct repair of high end cars is very expensive and very specific training is needed.  But it is not at all true that less expensive cars are easy to repair and do not require good current equipment and training.

The $100,000 car is very safe and strong but it mostly gets this strength and safety through the use of expensive components which can be replaced in very predictable and repeatable procedures.  

Your $30,000, or less, late model car is also a very safe and strong car, but it is also light to allow good fuel economy and designed not with expensive modular components  but with very accurate and sophisticated use of lighter materials welded together very precisely.

Repair and replacement of structural sections is not as obvious as it is with the more component built high end cars and it actually takes more skill and care to do these repairs correctly. If that very high strength light metal is heated too much, or at all in some cases, during the repair it becomes light weight non-high strength metal and will not perform as it should in the next accident. Correct removal and replacement of a section is far more time consuming than a repair with some heat applied, but if this is the required procedure then this is what needs to be done.  Modern cars can have any combination of five or more different types of steel, two or three different types of aluminum, five or more types of plastic, composite parts made up two different materials and perhaps some unrepairable magnesium parts.

These cars can be repaired and be completely safe after the repair, but not without the right training, equipment and respect for the process.