The unibody design, while still bad, actually seems to be a bit of a red herring in this case. The article describes that the actual cause for disassembling the entire vehicle was that they had to replace the tailgate, and had to repaint the body to match the new tailgate. Painting the body basically required disassembling the entire truck (which is also ridiculous).
For the painting though, even in "simpler" cars, vehicle painting is ridiculously overpriced and complex, IMO. I've been quoted nearly $2000 to fix a dent the size of a nickel on my basic 10 year old car because the body shop said they'd have to repaint the entire door, then repaint all of the panels adjacent to the door to blend it in. In other words, fixing a dent the size of a nickel somehow requires repainting an area thousands of times larger. It's ridiculous. There must be a better way.
If you don’t care if the paint matches, you can repair only the small area. You can even use a rattle can if you want and don’t care about the appearance. If you want the paint to match closely and blend so the eye can’t readily see that a repair has been done, you need to do a lot more work to accomplish that.
I had a driver back into my parked classic Mustang. They were not at all happy with the eventual cost of the repair, thinking that they could just pay out of pocket a few hundred bucks (really) because the dent wasn’t that bad in their opinion. Well, tough. The eventual repair was the entire fender and blend time for the hood and door, with associated labor for disassembly and reassembly because the car started with no detectable damage and that’s the state to which it needs to be returned.
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For the painting though, even in "simpler" cars, vehicle painting is ridiculously overpriced and complex, IMO. I've been quoted nearly $2000 to fix a dent the size of a nickel on my basic 10 year old car because the body shop said they'd have to repaint the entire door, then repaint all of the panels adjacent to the door to blend it in. In other words, fixing a dent the size of a nickel somehow requires repainting an area thousands of times larger. It's ridiculous. There must be a better way.