So I’m driving along minding my own business when suddenly I’m accosted by gun toting lunatics. After a frantic car chase, I managed to get away. But my car is a mess! It is riddled with bullet holes! Now replacing the glass is easy enough, but how hard is it going to be to get the bullet holes repaired?
But seriously, I’m watching a movie and the car after a gun car chase is riddled with bullet holes and got me to thinking. How easy/hard would it be to repair? I’m guessing you would need to replace all the panels. Are there some panels that cannot be (easily) replaced? What likely internal damage would a car have taken? How repairable would it be?
I’ve been rear-ended by a truck going 55 mph and was within $1000 of the car being totaled. They were able to straighten out the frame, install new wire harnesses and weld complete rear and side panels to the rest of the car. Had I not known the specifics about the accident, I would have no clue of the extent of the damage.
In fact, a year later, I traded the car back to the same dealership that performed the work, and they could not tell. It was only after the deal was done and signed that the body shop told them about the repair work while I was still there. They were not happy, but I asked them what was the problem? Don’t you stand behind your work.
The question is tired up more in @Si_Amigo’s scenario: almost any amount of damage is repairable given enough money, but you could very quickly get to the point where the cost to repair is more than the car is worth, either to you or your insurance company.
As said above, holes in body panels are cheap and easy. But that’s the tip of the gunfire damage iceberg. And doubly so if the enemy was firing automatic rifles like AKs or M-16s rather than shooting at you with quaint 9mm pistols.
A bullet goes through a computer or wiring harness, that’s gonna be expensive. It tears up the instrument panel on a late model car? Serious money. Holes some airbags? More serious money.
Even fixing holes in upholstery and the innards and backside plastic panels of seats gets pricy. Seats, at least fancy ones, now have motors, fans, heating & cooling systems, etc. All of which are fragile by bullet-hole standards.
Yes, this, plus the general unknown. A knicked wire may cause intermittent problems and be a huge headache for owners and insurance companies alike. Odds are a sufficiently riddled car would just be totaled.
Given some distribution of gun fire (let’s say mainly from the rear) I wonder what the odds are of that?
I had not considered the upholstery. That would definitely have at least a few holes in it, at least the backseat. The trunk compartment would as well certainly.
What else is in the rear half/quarter of a car that would be particularly expensive?
Well, you can’t base the question on Hollywood fantasy. The fact is that, after the bullets pass through the skin of the car as if it were heavy aluminum foil, they would also being doing severe damage to the interior of the car. The radiator, the battery, the various components under the hood, the exhaust system, and God knows what else would be trashed. The car would be a complete loss.
I watched the movie, “Assassin Club”, last night and, in one scene, our hero was being chased by several cars filled with villains. One had a mounted machine gun that was firing a stream of bullets at his car. Miraculously, he escaped and still had a working automobile when, in reality, it should have been torn to shreds in seconds.
A while back at a local range a fellow put a rifle shot through his back door into an adjacent Chevy Spark. The Spark was hit just behind the rear drivers side door. Tore up a wiring harness and the Spark was immobile. Almost 4K to repair. We joked that it was about $5 a pound. The fellow paid out of pocket of course as he didn’t want to involve his insurance company.
Backseat upholstery isn’t going to stop a bullet from going to through to the seats in front and / or the instrument panel.
Also, you better hope that your enemies are using standard rounds and not an armor piercing cartridge. The M16 armor piercing cartridge can penetrate up to 12 mm of rolled homogeneous armor (RHA) which means it’s going to go through the back of the trunk, the back seat, the front seat, you, the instrument panel, the firewall, and then into the engine compartment and whatever it runs into there.
