Dents & Depreciation: How Dents Cost You Cash
Dents, unfortunately, are a feature of driving. For anyone who’s been walked outside to see someone has hit their car or been rear-ended in traffic, you’ll know that aggravated feeling. Many of these dents are simple to fix; C&D Dent Guys has spent years reversing this damage in the Southwest.
But for thousands of people, it’s easier to simply put off or even forgo repairing the dent altogether, usually to save money. While that makes intuitive sense, leaving the dent there can actually cost you money in more ways than one. In this blog, we’ll discuss the ways that dents hurt your bottom line.
Aerodynamics & Dents
When you look at your vehicle every day, you may not see it as a finely tuned, expertly crafted piece of powerful machinery. Well, maybe when you first buy it. But unless you have a supercar, you tend to think of your car as just what you use to get from point A to point B.
Your car is incredibly complex, though, including the aerodynamics of the car. Aerodynamics is the study of air and how solids interact with the air they move through. Every car on the road has likely been painstakingly analyzed for their aerodynamic properties, especially now that good fuel economy is a must for car buyers.
One of the biggest metrics that determine the efficiency of a car is the drag coefficient. In layman’s terms, the drag coefficient determines how smoothly your vehicle moves through the air. The higher the coefficient, the less smoothly your car travels. Teslas, with their round and sleek design, have low coefficients, while Hummers are incredibly high.
When you have a dent in your vehicle, you alter the way your car behaves in air. A dent that you sustain on your vehicle can actually lower your drag coefficient, which will cost you money every day you drive. This won’t be a big blow in the short term, but the longer the dent stays, the longer you’ll suffer from worse fuel efficiency.
Dents & Devaluing
While dents can cause long term money loss, it also can hurt your wallet in the short term. In fact, the moment your vehicle sustains a dent, you’ve lost money. So why do people forgo getting their dents fixed? For some, it’s indifference. For others, it’s the idea that dent removal is prohibitively expensive. But in most cases, the cost of not repairing the dent will outweigh the repair cost.
Rust
Rust is a big issue with dents, for instance, since cracks can often form that let water touch unprotected metal. If water gets in touch with unprotected metal, it can rust the metal and reduce the effectiveness of it. Rust on your metal will decrease the value of it as well, so it’s best to handle cracks in the paint before it gets worse.
Paint
While the metal itself can get damaged, paint can also be an issue as well. Cracks can expose your paint to the weather, which can make it flake, peel, and chip. If you’ve ever seen a car that is rusted and has paint falling off, it may have started with a single crack in the paint.
Dent Stiffening
Like a crack in a windshield, allowing it to stay may mean a bigger problem and bigger repair cost. Weather can make your dent stiffen and grow as time goes on, which makes the eventual repair that much more costly. All of these aspects of a dent make time your worst enemy.
Dents & Perception
A final, and less overt way that dents harm people is the perception that dents impress upon the people viewing it. Unfortunately, dents come with ideas that you may not care about your vehicle, or that you may be a reckless driver. People seeing your vehicle may make assumptions of you before a word is even spoken.
Warranted or not, perception drives behavior much more reliably and vehemently than true investigation. The perception that is glued t someone with a dented vehicle may be far from the true nature of that person. To avoid people getting the wrong idea, it helps to get the dent removed as soon as possible.
Paintless Dent Repair
Paintless dent repair is a simple, and economical way to repair dents that aren’t too large. This process, as the name suggests, removes the reliance on repainting the vehicle to fix the dent. Instead, using careful tools and techniques, we can return the car back to normal. This process is cheaper on average since it removes the need for paint.
PDR will only be viable for dents that haven’t progressed too far, though, so you’ll want to schedule an appointment as soon as you notice the dent.
Choose C&D Dent Guys For Your Dent Repair
Have a dent in o your vehicle that needs to be fixed? Let the experts at C&D help. Contact us today to schedule an appointment!
