Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Apollo is Back – My Tesla Repair Process!”.
Yo, what is up guys, mkbhd here and uh, as you can see, i’m back in my car. It’S been about three months and uh. You might have remembered that it was already back in november of 2018 last year that i originally got in that accident and didn’t have my car for the beginning of it. I’Ve been taking notes since then on the entire process, my tesla repair process. So this is that timeline, how it broke down and why it took three months and why it didn’t take three days or a whole year so that day of the accident, i made that video, obviously that you guys saw detailing pretty much what exactly happened.
Number one rule don’t stand a truck’s blind spot for too long. So after that happened, i towed my car or got it towed to the tesla service center nearest to me in new jersey, now tesla service centers. They don’t do bodywork, they do other types of repairs and technical problems and troubleshooting and things like that, but they would hold on to it until i could tell them what body shop to send it to, because obviously this needs body work and uh. This is usually the part where, if you have your insurance, your insurance would get a rental car for you to drive accurate.
You might have seen on twitter uh super nice they’ve worked with me on the second ever autofocus video they reached out to me before. I even had the chance to get the police report, so i could give it to the insurance so that i could get a rental car uh. So big shout out to them. They said hey.
If you need any wheels while you’re getting your car replaced. We’Ll hook you up, so that’s what i’ve been doing. I was driving an accurate mdx, which was then replaced by they had to swap it out with an acura rdx, so they’re suvs. They were fine, but a crash or something an incident that happens on the highway. In new jersey has to be filed as a police report from state police which, since they’re much slower than actual local police, took uh three weeks, so the incident was november 16th. The police report came in december 8th, so i finally get the police report december 8th. The trucker is, of course, entirely found at fault, so the truck driver’s insurance will be paying for the repair of this car entirely. So that’s a good step one.
So from there the car gets moved to the body shop. The body shop is j b body shop. It’S in new york, it’s relatively close to the service center, so they tow the truck there and that’s where they’ll complete the initial assessment figure out what sort of repairs they have to do create an estimate for how much it will cost all that will happen there. So they completed that primary inspection on december 24th before starting the disassembly uh total value of the repairs were estimated at 39, 561 and 94 cents, not cheap. Obviously, that’s why i’m glad we got the insurance part figured out, but i mean it kind of makes sense.
You guys saw the initial photos like obviously a lot of the car on the entire left side was damaged. You’Re gon na have to replace parts, new doors, new, mirror new rear three quarter panel, the whole left side of the car. Basically, so now they’ve done the insurance paperwork. They have the estimate, the initial estimate for how much it’s going to cost. They have their labor costs.
Then they can get started here is, i think, the best part and where it really hinged on why this took the three months it did and why it didn’t take the nine months they could have taken. So the body shop, jmb body shop. They were super legit and i could tell that like as soon as i was walking in to pick up my car like outside. They had lamborghinis and mclarens and and porsches and other high-end cars and a bunch of other teslas already sitting there they’re clearly very experienced and trusted in performing repairs on high-end cars. So i was glad that this was the shop that we chose, but the place that this all hinged is the body shop.
Once they completed that initial inspection, they were able to determine that they had 100 of the parts needed for the repair in stock already. So the doors the side panels, all the sort of things that needed to be replaced. They had them all in stock, but that was no accident. So the key here is so tesla has uh what you call a certification program similar to like apple, might have a certification program.
They do, and so the key you can take your tesla to like any body shop you want. Theoretically, like you can take your imac to any computer store, you want to get repaired, but what you’ll want to do is take your tesla to a tesla certified body shop for that repair. Those body shops have the connection to order official parts from tesla. They have the tooling and the expertise required to do a complete, undetectable repair. The way tesla would do it in theory.
You could go to somewhere else, but you wouldn’t have that same experience. So this body shop jmb, they are an aston martin, certified body shop and a mclaren certified body shop and you can check out all these other badges they have on their toolbox. So they have the tooling and the specialization to handle these, including teslas, and, like i said there were some teslas that were already there along with apollo getting repaired. So that was the thing had they not had all the parts in stock, even one or two things. They would have to submit an order to tesla and then wait for tesla to ship them, those official parts which has notoriously taken three six, sometimes nine months or even longer, for certain parts to get shipped from tesla to body shops to complete repairs. So i was super lucky to find this body shop that had all of the the parts needed to do the repair and that minimized that amount of time and they could get right started on the repair they actually had to do so they got right started um By january 3rd, all the structural work was done, all the suspension and alignment, and things like that they were finished with. They were texting me to keep me up to date with how they were doing on the car.
Sending me pictures which was cool and then there were the cosmetics, so it’s a wrapped car. Obviously you replace it with naked parts. You got to wrap those parts too things like that.
So once you’ve done the actual structural work and the suspension work, then they start the cosmetic work and they even threw in some bonuses like uh, buffing out the chipped glass and the headlights and repairing the paint chips in my hood in the front bumper. That part. I can confirm was definitely them taking care of me. They didn’t have to do all of that. They just had to do the actual repair to the broken piece, but anyway, on january 14th, i got another insurance adjustment notification. Basically, they’d had someone come to inspect the car before they disassembled it.
This was an adjustment since they’d actually disassembled it and done the integral repair parts. So they had an adjustment that added 9449.65 to the cost of the repair after the disassembly, so that brought the total to just over 49 000 of damage repaired, and that includes labor costs. I actually have the bill right here and uh. You can see it.
That is the uh. The total estimate amount, plus the one supplement – amount – totals 49 000 of repairs, total balance due from customer thanks to the truck drivers, insurance, cooperating zero dollars, so they finished everything by february, 4th, uh and the funny part was they had re-wrapped the whole left side with All the new parts and then i got a text and a picture from them. Saying: hey, look: we re-wrapped the left side, but now the wrap on the left looks like crisp and fresh and new and the wrap on the right. It’S a year and a half old, so it kind of looks like a little bit faded a little bit warmer in color from being in the sun. Do you want to just go ahead and re-wrap the whole car, so it matches and it looks nice and clean uh, and i just said yes because i i’d been waiting so many weeks at that point might as well get it right might as well finish it Off so that’s what they did so february 13th. I went in to go pick it up.
I actually had a look at the shop and got to meet the people who actually worked on. My car saw a bunch of the other cars there, but yeah when i drove it off. I feel like that car basically looked just like it did the day. I got it wrapped, initially clean af and then yesterday, valentine’s day i got uh. I did a winter wheel swap also because the last time i drove it, i still had the summer tires on it. So it’s been that long, but that’s basically the timeline the three months since november 16th, it kind of seems like it flew like it just happened, but it also kind of took forever.
While i was waiting for it to come back but three months between the incident, all the repairs and getting the car back yesterday, i’ve learned a couple things. One is that i really do like the electric car experience more than the gas car experience, and this is no offense to gas cars. Obviously i don’t know who’d take offense to that, but like at a certain point, i was actually getting like disappointed that i would wake up and the car wasn’t at 100 refueled overnight, like an electric car, would be still have to go to a gas station and Also, i was that guy that like got out of the car and then realized it was still running and had to get back in and turn it off before, leaving because, obviously, with these electric cars, you put it in park, you get out and it’s off. You’Re done you walk away and it locks.
So just those little things like. I really appreciate those things all over again. I think my advice that i can offer to people who are in maybe a similar spot that i was if you’re looking to decide where to get your car repaired number one definitely pick a certified body shop for the possibility of a better experience. Number two. If you can try to call the body shop or get in touch with them and figure out if they have parts in stock and if they have the parts that you think will be in stock, maybe you got a fender bender ask them if they have the Front bumper in stock things like that, because that made a world of a difference.
I could probably still be waiting here halfway through that repair process. If i’m still waiting for tesla to send parts but yeah, that’s pretty much it. I hope you guys are able to learn from my experience from what i’ve gone through in the past couple weeks, but i am so glad to have this back and to be driving it daily and i’ll.
Hang out in the comments and talk with you guys on twitter, as i usually do about this sort of follow-ups to the story. There’S going to be differences now with selling this car and with getting different, i mean you don’t want to sell a repaired car. The same way as just a regular used car, so there’s all kinds of future updates that will come from this and we’ll be in touch about that. But until then that’s everything i got thanks for watching talk to you guys, the next one peace .