Autobello Piccolina

Ehm... my game is updated to the latest version... but this isnt in my game... wut...

 

The Piccolina is coming out in the next update.

 

I am an idiot, I forgot how to read lol my bad

 

We have been debating this point back and forth for a while now, but neither of us have offered any empirical information on why it would be easier and more economical to repair a separate rear fender or an integrated rear fender.

According to this 1965 Beetle ad, the cost for a replacement beetle rear circa 1965 was $21.09 USD, or about $166.64 when adjusted for inflation. This figure does not include labour, but there was an U.S. industry wage survey in 1964 that revealed the average wage of autobody workers. By averaging the figures on page 11 of the document (page 17 of the PDF containing the document) under the column marked "Average Hourly Earnings", we arrive at a figure of roughly $3.45 as the average hourly wage for an American autobody worker in 1965.

Now, I don't know exactly how long it takes to replace a rear fender on a Volkswagen beetle, but I do know that a variant of the same ad claims it requires undoing ten bolts, and that an engine (four bolts, plus all electrical and fuel hookups) takes only ninety minutes to replace. If we estimate that undoing all the bolts, placing the new fender, and redoing all the bolts takes 75 minutes, that would give us a labour cost of $4.31.

That brings the total cost to replace a Volkswagen rear fender in 1965 (In America, a country where there was an established dealer network) to $25.40, or approximately $200.70 in today's money.

If you can demonstrate that repairing the integrated rear fender of a Fiat 600 in any country with an established Fiat dealer network was lower than this figure (or a new figure calculated based on the actual time it takes to replace a beetle's rear fender), then I am willing to concede the point.

I'm also interested in any anecdotal evidence that the rear fenders on the 600 were easy to repair. If you can provide an anecdote by a third party (preferably either a prominent figure in the Italian autobody industry or somebody involved in the design of the 600), then I might also be swayed.

 

Here's your empyrical data:

- Even today, repairmen try to avoid replacement and use body-filler whenever possible to keep repair costs down. At the time, replacement was likely not even a possibility under consideration.
- There must be a reason if every manufacturer sooner or later dropped separate fenders for integrated panels.
- A larger quarterpanel ain't necessarily fixed, they are usually removable too, so a removable subpart only adds unnecessary complexity.

 

• Replacement of body panels was in fact a possibility under consideration, and the fact that it was mentioned in several VW ads of the period (including this now-infamous ad) indicate that it was a very common technique. Once a panel is damaged beyond a certain point, the amount spent on labour to fill or pound out dents exceeds the cost of a replacement panel.
• Then please identify this reason and relate it to why, at that specific point in history, it made more sense to have integrated panels than separate ones.
  
• Please provide evidence that cutting out a quarterpanel and welding in a new one is as economical as replacing a bolt-on panel. I need to see some true-to life evidence here, preferably with hard numbers.

 

That's because the '30s design of the Beetle allowed it, and protruding, separate fenders were much more exposed to damage.

Visit a body shop. Ask how much a full panel replacement is, and how much they'd ask for repairs. No body shop worth its name will suggest panel replacement as an inexpensive solution. Like, ever.

From Sam's Auto Body & Paint website:

Simpler to produce (one pressing for a larger panel), to assemble (no need for rivets to keep subparts together, less assembly steps).

Aerodynamics. Structural integrity. And, as mentioned, integrated fenders were much less exposed to damage.

Go to Volkswagen headquarters in Wolfsburg, call them all idiots for dropping the separate fenders, which is apparently a remedy to all problems...

See pic.



This is the rear quarterpanel of a Fiat 600. No need to cut anything, that's how it would come from factory as a spare part. It's not that larger than a bolt-on panel of the Beetle.

We're literally trying to turn decades of automotive design evolution upside down here, only to justify a quirky game choice that has no parallel in real life whatsoever. But this is Beamverse, right? So anything is possible, even the most absurd things. Grasping at straws, in a nutshell.

 

all your points are 100% valid, and impressively backed up with references and all sort of supporting data. Its just, this is a game and doesn't need to follow any set guidelines. grasping at straws, you got that right lol its very interesting to me to see the game develop and all, and to be frank it doesnt phase me one bit if there is a historical error regarding vehicle design or something to that effect. The whole picture is what you need to look at, and if the car is lore-friendly and the map is well done, things like this really dont warrant such an in depth discussion or debate. If someone on the forums, for example, WAS making a 1953 Beetle or FIAT 600, then thats where you can start pointing these things out. But to be honest, the spotlight on all the hard work thats been put into this car is being outshined by this thread, for this car particularly, with all this back and fourth. If this was a real car, then all the buggering makes sense. It isnt a real car though, and as such the creators of it can follow whatever rules they see fit as far as I'm concerned. But as I stated before, your observations and criticism are at least well thought out, backed up, and presented in an orderly fashion, its just really not worth all the typing and brain power. I just cane wait for it and Italy to be released. Looks very promising.
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and as a side note, regarding the panel replacement, it is cheaper to replace removable items such as fenders, bumper covers, trunk lid, hood, bumper absorbers and reinforcements, rad supports and (in most cases) doors. These are referred to as "crash parts" within the industry. That is because to replace a removable part within a few hours and getting it ready for paint is MUCH cheaper and more cost effective than having the extra man hours repairing said part and THEN getting it into paint. Most of the time, it's the insurance companies that request OEM parts (when available) be purchased and replaced instead of metal working. Labor rates in the US for bodywork is something between 150 and 250 per hour,l depending on the shop. Having a guy banging out a fender or trying to fix a bumper cover for 13 hours is A LOT of money for either the customer or the insurance company to pay out. Buying a replacement fender (most fenders are in the 25 - 75 dollar range for aftermarket brands and 100 - 300 for OEM parts in most standard cars). Quarter panels, although able to be cut out and re-welded into place, that's where your argument makes sense. It is wise to fix that part of a car, because it's a bigger area, more flexibility, and cutting and welding a new one requires a TON of hours to get the car aligned properly and having the parts all fit together as it should from factory. At that point, its cheaper to pay the man hours on repairing something like that rather than buying a rear clip of a car from a scrapyard, etc. ( I was in the crash parts business for 6 years, in showroom sales for 5 years and now im in Parts/service within a dealership)

 

I've been saying this all along: the only reason why the Piccolina might have a separate mesh for the overfender is strictly a game design choice, because it would allow a simpler management of fender flares for the Abarth-like model, instead of having duplicate Unibody parts. It makes sense in game development terms, even if it's kinda unrealistic. Fine with me.

Depends on damage severity. Fenders, and any other "crash parts" (they are called "expendable parts" in Italian, because they take one for the team instead of the chassis underneath) are usually replaced when much beyond repair - like, after a crash, not in case of a fender bender, see link above. In that case, having a quarterpanel in two parts would actually be more expensive to fix, because you'd have to replace two parts instead of one, with the added costs of subpart finish and assembly.

 

well, all I know is a fender for my 2012 mazda3 cost 34 dollars...heck of a lot cheaper to replace and paint it after the little dent I got in it (with scratches) than it was to refinish and paint...also keep in mind, a lot of new cars, and old classics, have swoopy, rounded, sharp creased character lines which are a PITA to get to line up after repairing sheet metal versus just buying new (cheaper) and just popping it on and painting it.

 

How much is a bit of body filler, really? How long would it take to beat the panel back to its former shape end touch it up with plaster? Finish and paint take pretty much the same time (replacement parts are never provided with paint, unless you buy used parts from a scrapyard), and more often than not repair can be done without even removing the part, so assembly times are cut to a minimum. Also, when it comes to fenders, part replacement usually implies repaint of a good chunk of the car side for proper paint blending.

I've been in a dozen fender-benders in the past few years alone, and never were my panels replaced.

 

body filler is frowned upon, especially in insurance jobs, because of paint/filler thickness. On receiving a car, buyers generally run a paint meter across the sheet metal of the car, so they can measure the paint thickness to ensure the car was never "worked on"...not to mention the poor paint finish as a result of having crappy body filler. On a quarter panel, maybe body filler...on a fender, no point. more time, more materials, a lot more cost, that a cash-customer or insurance adjuster is not going to accept on a scope of work estimate.

i have a picture of my mazda that was also rear-ended by a 2013 Tahoe a few years ago...the damage doesnt look bad, but the quartpanel was kinked and bent a bit out of shape. They got the exterior of the sheet metal back in shape without any body filler, but they actually cut out the tail light "cup" and welded in a new one instead of trying to get that mess of shapes and creases back to OEM specs.
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This was the rear ender...they straightened the quarter panel but cut out the whole area the tail light is attached to (tail light "cup"). Total job cost thru insurance? $7,800 bucks lol

 

Well my insurance had my car sent to a reknowned body shop where the quarter panel was fixed with body filler. It's the preferred fixing method for small damage here - and it was much more so at the time of the Piccolina, when repairing bodywork of a damaged car, any way, was often too costly. Raw parts alone would be so expensive that replacement is rarely performed unless part can't be repaired at all or used parts can be installed instead. The possibility to track bodywork fixes is actually seen as a good thing in insurance jobs, because a replaced fender might hide the consequences of quick and unprofessional work, while filler is easily detectable.

Interesting read, in Italian, but pics are self-explainatory. Professional restoration - not just repair - of a Fiat 500. Panel beating and plaster filler are being used, despite spares being cheap and widely available:

https://www.fiat500nelmondo.it/il-restauro-della-fiat-500-la-carrozzeria/



Anyway, link provided in one of my previous posts contradicts you: high-end, professional body shop, claiming that repair is cheaper than replacing... they probably know what they are saying, don't you think? And still, this is today, not the '50s, in the '50s damaged parts would have been beaten back to shape and nobody would replace them. And... we're really discussing something that has nothing to do with a fictional car. Can we please move on and admit that just the rear fender being separate (while the front isn't!) is a very unusual and kinda unlikely solution... if it's even separate at all?

 

I just want to get this out of my system but, why are unibodies in BeamNG "awkward" so to speak?

 

I think that the front fender is separate because there are creases going vertically down from the area where the hood meets the bumper area. There is also a crease at the base of the A-pillar. I believe that both the front and rear fenders are removeable pieces. It would make more sense on a car with a long production run because the panels can easily be changed with updated ones without the need to change the stamping for the rest of the unibody.

 

No modern body shop will, precisely because modern integrated panels are difficult to replace. At that point, you're making repairs to the main body of the vehicle anyway, so why add in the extra cost of a new panel?

But in a vehicle where only a few bolts are holding on a panel, it becomes easier to remove the panel. Even today, damaged front fenders will be removed from a vehicle, repaired on a workbench where they have better access to all angles of it, and then returned to the vehicle.

The Piccolina would likely be cheaper to produce with integrated rear fenders, but you may be onto something with the noting of protruding fenders.

For whatever reason, the Piccolina has a very wide suspension track compared to the width of the passenger cabin (Aerodynamics? Maybe they wanted the handling benefits of wider track without increasing the amount of material needed to produce the main body), producing rather bulbous, stylized fenders that protrude well beyond the rest of the car. They're at risk whether or not they're a separate panel, so to keep ownership and maintenance costs down (a major concern with all economy cars), the design choice to spend a little more on production might be made.

Or it could have been a holdover from the last ten years of AB production - having been founded in 1948, they may have taken a Citroen-like approach to their first car and designed something with protruding front and rear fenders. When the time came for the Piccolina, a particularly conservative member of the engineering team may have insisted on separate panels.

I can picture an argument very similar to this whole thing playing out in an Italian boardroom circa 1955 as the Autobello executives examine the two options - and I'd like to think that the argument got so bad that somebody went off and founded their own car company just out of spite.

I guess final say really belongs to @Falkrum , who I believe is one of the developers primarily responsible for the design of the Piccolina.

I never said it was a remedy to any problem. Both integrated and separate body panels have their good and bad points. But I do want to point out that separate panels are a better solution for cars with protruding fenders. Wolfsburg knows this, as all Golfs have integrated panels, while the mechanically similar Beetle (both the 1997 and 2011 generations) use separate rear panels.

The old panel still needs to be cut away, and a new one welded in. In a lesser crash, you're correct - it's more effective to simply pound, fill, and buff. Same as the separate panel. But once you've gotten to the point where the damage is so severe a panel replacement is necessary, then that's where the difference appears.

It's perhaps not the most Italian design choice, but the other two big European "People's cars" (Beetle & 2cv) did use separate rear panels right up until the end of their very long production runs.

I'm willing to admit that it would be odd... but the front does appear to be a separate panel as well. It's not as protruding as the rear panel, but it does appear to be separate from the filler panel behind the front bumper, and separated from the A-pillar down where it meets the hood:


In any case, I don't think there's much point to either of us arguing any further. I'm willing to drop the argument until we actually have hands on the little Italian.

 

Of course the whole front fender panel is separate from the rest and removable, but it's not in two pieces like the rear quarterpanel, which is constituted by a panel and something that looks like an overfender around the wheel wells. It's a weird hybrid solution that has no corrispondence in anything ever produced: fenders were either protruding "separate" (pretty common in the '40s, see the VW Beetle) or flush and "integrated" (like in the more modern FIAT 600). "Integrated" here doesn't mean the whole bodywork is one piece, it just means the actual wheelarch is one with the fender panel.

Separate:



Integrated:


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Absolutely not, that's an integrated wheelarch - much like modern cars and the Fiat 600 itself:



If it was separate like the rear one, the bulge around the wheelarch would be yet another panel, which is not the case here.

 

Uhm, wut? 2 of the last 3 major updates have been on tuesdays. I don't think that updates being released on fridays is a strict rule.

 

Errybuddyshuddup

it's not a BEETLE

it's not a FIAT 600

it's definitely not a SUBARU

it is a FUCKING AUTOBELLO

Get over it

 

Ah... I'd been assuming that you meant "integrated" as in "one-piece bodywork welded straight to the unibody". Now that I understand what you were really trying to say, you make a great deal more sense.