Now, a broken windshield is more than a broken windshield － by John R. Quain NYT Feb. 4 2019 IT自動車の修理費上昇
Still other vehicles, including cars from Ford, General Motors and Dodge, require what is known as dynamic
recalibration, meaning the vehicle has to be test-driven according to very specific parameters.
“The repair facility may drive it 25 miles,” said Richard Beckwith, senior manager at Allstate’s Tech-Cor applied research and collision repair center. “It’s not for a joy ride but just to recalibrate the lane-departure warning system.”
Mr. Webley demonstrated the process on city roads and highways. Using a scanning computer plugged into an S.U.V.’s onboard diagnostic port, we had to drive on roads with clearly marked lanes, not an easy assignment around New York City. The vehicle also had to be driven at over 50 m.p.h. for at least 20 minutes － in clear weather － enough time for the sensing system to confirm that it was correctly calibrated.
Some cars, like certain model years from Honda and Mercedes-Benz, require both static and dynamic recalibration, adding an hour or two of testing to a typical repair. That, plus the added cost of the components, has raised the price of repairs after a simple fender bender, according to AAA.
Replacing a cracked or chipped windshield, for example, in a car with automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control and lame-departure warning systems could cost as much as $1,600.
Furthermore,
many cars are now bristling with embedded ultrasonic and radar sensors. So a relatively minor driving misjudgment that damages a side mirror and rear bumper could require fixing rear radar sensors used with blind-spot monitoring and rear cross-traffic alert systems. The price? As high as $2,050.
Even tapping a curb and putting a car out of alignment could require a $300 adjustment to make sure the driver-assistance system is still operating properly, Mr. Calkins of AAA said.
Consequently, Mr. Calkins recommends that new car buyers take two important steps: Check their insurance deductible so that they can cover potential driver-assistance-system repairs, and understand what safety systems are in their new cars so that they can make sure any repairs include those systems as well.
Of course, driver-assistance systems are supposed to reduce the frequency of collisions, justifying the added expense, and hopefully avoiding costly repairs. A recent study by the insurance Institute for Highway Safety of General Motors vehicles in 23 states found that models with auto-braking and forward-collision-warning systems had 43 percent fewer front-to-rear crashes reported to the police. It also found 64 percent fewer injuries from such collisions compared with similar models without the driver-assistance technology.
Moreover, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety estimates that assistance systems could prevent over 2.7 million accidents, 1.1 million injuries and nearly 9,500 deaths in the United States each year. The caveat: The driver-assistance systems would have to be in all vehicles on the road.
“The whole question in the industry is frequency” of preventing accidents, Mr. Beckwith at Allstate said, “but we’re dominated with vehicles that do not have this equipment on them now.”
“We field 15 million repair calls a year,” said Mr. Sprigler at Safelite, with about 10 percent involving advanced driver-assistance systems.
Those percentages should go up in the future given that all the top automakers have voluntarily committed to making automatic emergency braking systems standard equipment in all vehicles by 2022.
Down the road, as more semiautonomous driver-assistance packages are added, the complexity of such systems will increase, fusing together radar, camera, ultrasonic and lidar technologies. That will make repairs even more challenging, and consumer awareness of the technology even more important.
“Ultimately, if it's not operating properly,” Mr. Beckwith warned, “it might not avoid an accident.”
