>>>>and once in Wellingborough when someone bashed into the car in a car park while we were shopping.
>>
>>At which point they no doubt observed the latest 11th Commandment "Thou shalt not be caught." People are wonderful.
>>
>>I crashed a hire car on ice in that cold snap earlier this year. Glad to have insurance, I can tell you- everything to do with cars seems ridiculously expensive and people expect to replace entire wings rather than mending a scrape.
>
>this trend is heavily lobbied by car makers, from integrating fenders into the car itself to aiming for design "patents" for replacement parts.

One of my best professors in college, who was highly placed in the government, published a study highly critical of auto industry replacement part prices. He then became available to academia. He wrote that if you bought a car with replacement prices it would cost you $200,000. And those were 1970s prices.