The owner of a Rivian electric truck took it to an "authorized" repair shop to get a fist-sized dent in the driver's side rear quarter panel fixed. Guess how much the estimate to fix the dent was?

How about almost as much as a band-new EV costs?

Not quite the $50k the typical EV sells for. But just shy of it. $41,000 – to repair a dent. You can ponder what it would cost to repair worse than that. But why does it cost that much to repair a dent?

It doesn't.

What costs is replacing most of the truck's body to repair the dent. According to the man who performed unauthorized – but much cheaper – dent repair (the owner trucked the electric truck to another state to avoid having to spend $41,000 for the "authorized" repair) the Rivian EV is designed as a one-piece (or mostly one-piece) shell that is repaired by being replaced.

And replacing means removing, essentially, everything.

The carapace must come off, which includes the glass and weatherstripping. Then a new carapace must be installed, along with the glass and weatherstripping, everything refinished to match. As you can imagine, this gets into money.

$41,000 to be precise.

Lucky for the Rivian's owner, he was able to find a shop that pulled the dent for a lot less than that. Unluckily – for all of us – the authorized cost of repairing EVs is going to cost us, even if we do not own an EV.