I love cars, but I also know cars are bad for the environment, whether they are powered by gas, electric, or diesel. New cars, in particular, take energy and raw materials to build, and often cost more to run and maintain. For me, that upfront environmental impact is all the more reason to keep older, efficient cars on the road even in the face of rising repair costs. But there must be a balance in the quest for efficiency.
If you do care about the planet, the most efficient choice in the U.S. right now is to buy a used, well-maintained EV. No one built a brand new car for you, and the carbon footprint from assembling it is now spread across multiple owners. The longer you drive it, the cleaner it is (versus a combustion car).
For nearly two years, I have been driving around L.A. in what was, as of December of 2024, the cheapest used Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo in the United States. I love EVs for driving around cities just as much as I love a high-compression, light-flywheel, manual gearbox, mid-engined monster for a canyon run: each is fit for its purpose. I did not buy a used EV to make some kind of political or environmental statement—I saw personal value and a fun public experiment. After all, a Taycan depreciates rapidly from new, and not because it’s a badly made car.
What originally stickered for $139,000 was mine for $64,800 plus tax with only 26,000 miles. Over the approximately 12,000 miles since, it has been a superb car: comfortable, fast, dynamic, and overwhelmingly reliable, albeit with a few software hiccups and two genuine mechanical repairs, all sorted under the Porsche Certified pre-owned unlimited-mile warranty. Although a Taycan is still a semi-exotic Porsche to many, the four-seat electric wagon is my family’s most “normal” car.
Which is why I let a friend borrow it for a trip to the lake with his wife. My friend isn’t a car enthusiast, but he had no history of accidents, shenanigans, or other red flags in the 30 years I’ve known him. The perfect person to trust with a loan. And so I never would have predicted the phone call I received over that weekend: He’d been in an accident with my car.
Fortunately, no one was hurt. Also fortunately (for our relationship), the accident wasn’t his fault, as insisted by him, bolstered by a police report, and cosigned by my insurance adjuster. In fact, he was stopped at a red light and rear-end/sideswiped by a young woman who, as it turns out, had a long history of accidents in her short driving career.
And while I was upset to get the phone call, my rage subsided quickly when I saw the accident site photo. This didn’t look like a big deal at all. The rear bumper was scraped, and perhaps the parking sensor was damaged. The painted-over fender needed replacing, as did the HRE 522M wheel. I figured maybe $3000-4000 for the body work, another $4000 for the wheel, a couple of weeks in the shop, and that would be that.
Boy, was I wrong.
It would be 73 days, and it would cost my insurance company over $35,000 before I got my car back. Hypothetically, if the car was not insured under an agreed-value classic car collector’s policy, it would likely have been outright totaled, despite being easily repairable.
What? How?
It turns out the impact on the damaged wheel, plus the force of the car being shoved several feet while the brakes were applied, damaged the air suspension. It wasn’t just damaged on the corner that was hit. Both the gas strut and control arm assembly were cracked on the opposite corner as well, even without a direct impact! When the air suspension lost pressure, the air supply unit, control module, and a bunch of other four-figure components went down with it. Once the suspension needs to be disassembled to that degree, Porsche isn’t going to reassemble it with old hardware, so the invoice includes thousands in bolts, bushings, collar nuts, washers, carriers, and so on.
And because it's an EV, performing this work requires removing the high-voltage battery pack: 24 hours at $340 an hour. If you aren’t used to paying for mechanical work, this is a huge rate, even for Porsches, even in Los Angeles.
So while the cosmetic bodywork amounted to little more than $5000 or $6000, the mechanical and electrical repairs escalated like Bitcoin in 2020, eventually landing in the mid-twenties. Factor in a new wheel from HRE, three flatbed transports, and assorted random billables, and that’s how the total made it to $35,000.
The air suspension took second place on the bill; the Achilles' heel for late-model luxury car service, gas or electric alike. It was almost $20,000. This and all other repairs would have been similar to a gas-powered Panamera or Cayenne. But if you're predisposed to hate EVs, here's another piece of ammunition towards that view. Nearly $8000 of this bill, over 20% of it, went to battery pack labor. (The pack itself was, and is, totally fine).
As these once-pricey EVs get cheaper, the cost of repairs raises the value required to avoid getting totaled. This is a shame. Otherwise working, good-condition cars with most of their carbon footprint already amortized might be scrapped. Yes, battery packs and cells can be recycled, but it’s not done at a large enough scale yet. More importantly, the best thing we can do for the environment is keep already-built EV’s on the road for as long as possible. Fortunately, battery packs are lasting longer in cars than originally expected (ironically part of the reason for the slow build of the battery recycling ecosystem).
To their credit, both South Bay Certified Collision Center in Torrance, CA, and McKenna Porsche did an excellent job repairing my car. This is not a story about getting ripped off, and I’m not arguing that any other shop could do it cheaper. The fact that my Taycan got a completely refreshed air suspension means it drives perhaps even better than it did before. And because I have agreed value insurance and the accident wasn’t my fault, none of the enormous stack of dollars it took to fix my car came out of my pocket. I could have chosen to total the car, but I chose to fix it. Such is the benefit of that type of policy. And I intend to keep driving this car because I very much like it.
If we are going to have more EV’s, which we should, because they are good for many things, then we need to ensure that these cars survive minor collisions. That could mean changing what the word “totaled” means for an EV on the insurance side. It could also mean training up enough technicians so that a battery pack removal doesn’t command a higher hourly rate than what I pay for Lamborghini Countach restoration. It should also mean that car companies, perhaps German ones, should design battery packs so that they’re more easily removed or that other major components can be replaced around them.
In either case, we can’t have EVs meeting a premature demise. There’s nothing more wasteful than a car that could be working, but without working math to justify fixing it.
Matt Farah is a lifelong car enthusiast who began his automotive career at dealerships, rental agencies, and detail shops before discovering the power of YouTube in 2006, with his channel The Smoking Tire. Farah has a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, with a concentration in Photography, helping not only create YouTube content but also providing his own photography for his Editor-at-Large position at Road & Track.
He has hosted and produced television series on NBC Sports, G4 Network, SPEED, and Esquire. The Smoking Tire Podcast is #1 in the category every week of the year. Now at 800+ episodes, The Smoking Tire podcast is the definitive guest stop for who’s who in the auto industry. Farah’s Westside Collector Car Storage is a game-changer in luxury, concierge parking that expanded to a second location in 2023.
