Here’s Everything That Had To Be Replaced After My Tiny City Car Crashed Into A Crossover

Last week, my fleet had one heck of a bad span of 24 hours when my wife crashed her beloved 2012 Scion iQ into a Hyundai Santa Fe, and then less than a day later, she got rear-ended while driving my 2008 Smart Fortwo. It took a little over a week for a local body shop to fix the damaged Scion. Here’s everything that needed to be fixed after our tiny city car ate the rear end of a big-ish crossover.

It has been quite the weird week since Sheryl’s 2012 Scion iQ went into the shop. She temporarily took possession of my 2008 Smart Fortwo. Now, this car is a total pile of crap, one that I will sell later this month for $800 to $1,000. It has a rotted-out exhaust, it’s been two presidencies since the ABS last worked, and the body is just garbage. I’m talking paint peel, rust, and business graphics that I could not remove without destroying the plastic underneath.

Surprisingly, my little Smart has worked shockingly well for Sheryl for the week.

It has started every time, the air-conditioner blows cold, and it gets about the same 40 mpg fuel economy as the Scion. Yet, because my wife is so unlucky, she managed to score two tickets for the front license plate being in the wrong place. I’ve never gotten a front plate ticket before, so I couldn’t stop laughing. At any rate, Sheryl’s put about 1,100 miles on the car in a week, and the car did it in stride.

But now, Sheryl is finally back in her iQ, giving my Smart a break. What I was surprised by was how many parts the body shop replaced for so little money.

More Than Just A Boop

If you missed it, here’s what I wrote last week about the crash:

I received one of the scariest texts of my life at 11:53 a.m. on Sunday. Sheryl’s been going through an unfortunate run of bad luck and wasn’t able to attend EAA AirVenture Oshkosh with me this year. Instead, she was working on the Sunday I was headed home.

At the time, I had Super Cruise on and running in my Chevrolet Silverado EV press loaner. I received a text from Sheryl, which read “Just got in an accident” on the truck’s infotainment display. I knew Sheryl was driving somewhere, so I began to fear the worst. Sheryl continued, telling me that she had looked away from the road for a moment and accidentally crashed into the back of a Hyundai Santa Fe. Or, more specifically, she said she hit one of the Hyundai Santa Fe generations that “doesn’t have a rear bumper.”

My wife rear-ended a Hyundai Santa Fe from about 2019 or 2020.

Depending on the configuration, these are crossovers that weigh around 4,000 pounds. A Scion iQ weighs about half that. Smaller cars tend to lose in crashes with larger cars, and I wasn’t at all surprised to hear that the Hyundai more or less had a big knot on its bumper, while the Scion had some crumpling.

Here’s what I saw when I got home and saw the car:

Starting at about the middle of the front end, the front bumper begins to warp. Then there’s the hood, which is crumpled and bent inward at the middle. Moving right from there, the crumple gets worse, with the hood losing a good couple of inches. The bumper and the headlight appear pushed in a few inches. The right fender also got bent and pushed back. At least you can technically get into the engine bay, but that’s facilitated by reaching your hand into the new side hood scoop.

Things are worse under the skin. The hood release no longer functions, and neither does the air-conditioner. There’s also a concerning tapping noise under the hood when the vehicle is running. Finally, the steering is now a bit goofy as the steering wheel is nowhere near straight while the steering itself is sloppy.

Sheryl was scared to call this in to her insurance. Based on how Illinois calculates value, her car is worth around $5,500 or so. That means it wouldn’t take much damage to total the car. But the car was broken enough that not getting it fixed wasn’t an option.

We took the car to our local Crash Champions, and the shop warned us that the car could be totaled if they couldn’t find the parts to fix it. Scion sold fewer than 16,000 of these cars in America, and some parts are getting rare. The car getting totaled due to parts availability was a real threat. Sheryl already had the front bumper replaced after hitting a shredded truck tire. Back then, the body shop that she took the car to for that job had claimed that she got the last new bumper in America.

Thus, we were genuinely shocked when we were given the news that not only was the car not totaled, but the body shop was going to fix it all for under $3,000. First, the shop gave us its findings.

The Repair

The inspection document was fascinating to look at because the team at Crash Champions had circled every scratch and ding, regardless of whether it was there already or not. You’ll be surprised how many tiny scratches a daily driver might have!

Anyway, the first of the pictures showing crash damage depicts what we feared most, and it’s a bent core support. The body shop said that having too much damage to this piece would have likely totaled the car. However, it was found that the bend was minor enough that the core support was able to be pulled back into place.

The part that received the heaviest damage under the skin was the front crash bar’s absorber, which partially collapsed, as designed.

The vehicle’s fuse box was also broken and cracked, which was determined to be the cause of the non-functional air-conditioner.

Other broken parts included the front bumper cover, the right headlight, the upper grille, the radiator’s vertical support, the upper tie bar, the hood, and the emissions label. Amazingly, Crash Champions had found all of these parts quite quickly. The only part that took a while to be shipped was the new emissions label that was to be stuck into the underside of the new hood. Yep, the repair of the car was delayed by a sticker!

Thankfully, the inspection found no real suspension issues and, unexpectedly, even the right fender survived, which I didn’t expect to be the case. Everything else was in good enough shape that all Crash Champions had to do was pop those parts off of the bad bumper and stick them onto the good bumper.

The body shop said that it spent $951.44 on parts, $719.20 on body labor ($58 x 12.4 hours) and $435 on refinishing labor ($58 x 7.5 hours). Add in $285 in paint, plus tax and other small fees, and the total came to just $2,517.28. Of that, Sheryl’s deductible was $500.

It’s Better Than Before

We got the car back today, and honestly, I’m blown away. The car looks better than when we got it!

Originally, the hood and front bumper cover of the car was faded just a little from 13 years of being in the sun. The hood also had innumerable chips in it from nearly 120,000 miles of highway driving. Now, the front end is all clean and fresh, without faded paint or chips. Crash Champions also did a fantastic job with paint matching, because it’s super hard to tell that the new color is slightly bolder than the old color.

Crash Champions even fixed parts that were completely unrelated to the crash. An oil change shop had broken the lever inside the car that pops the hood. That part was replaced, and the hood works just like new. The air-conditioner also blows cold once again, which is relieving because I had no idea how I was going to fix that. Sheryl reports that the car drives fine again, or at least, just how it did before the crash.

So, overall, the car came back to us in substantially better shape than it was before it even got into the crash. As of now, I’m telling Sheryl to think of it as paying $500 to get a new headlight, the hood release fixed, and fresh paint. Of course, her insurance rates will also probably go up, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.

Sheryl is just happy to get her car back, and she gave Ike a hug and promised never to hurt him again. We both give a huge thanks to Crash Champions of McHenry!

Sheryl was so broken up about this whole thing. Initially, she was depressed because not only did she wreck her friendly little car, but she also ruined the day of an innocent stranger and their kid. She catastrophized over how things could have been so much worse. What if Sheryl had been traveling faster? What if she were driving something bigger than a city car? What if she hit a pedestrian, and not a car? She could have hurt someone, she thought. She couldn’t forgive herself for hurting an innocent kid.

If you take anything from this post, it’s that you have to minimize distractions in your vehicle. Stop staring at billboards, put down the phone, and maybe enjoy breakfast after you get to the office. Minimizing distractions for safety is what Sheryl definitely learned through all of this.

I reminded Sheryl that, at least in this case, this was a low-speed crash, nobody was hurt, and the Hyundai actually came out better than the Scion. Modern cars like the Scion and the Hyundai are designed to sacrifice themselves to save you, which is why the Scion looked so bad despite the low-speed crash. I also reminded Sheryl that, at the end of the day, cars are just piles of rubber, glass, metal, and plastic.

Cars can be replaced, but human cloning doesn’t exist, so there’s only one of you. The important thing is to learn from the mistake that caused the crash and then never let it happen again. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s part of what makes you human! Screw ups where nobody gets hurt, like this one, can be used as vehicles for valuable life lessons. The lesson here is to focus on the road and not on other, less important things.

Ike got a second chance at life, and I’m sure Sheryl will continue to cherish the little car. With some luck, you’ll see this tiny car hitting over 300,000 miles one day.