There was a notable case where road debris hit fitting on a 2 psi coolant line in a Tesla and the owner was told they would have to pay $16,000 for a new battery pack to deal with damage to a flange on the line out of pocket because no insurer would pay to replace a $16,000 battery for want of a 5 dollar piece of plastic.

The solution was a slightly more expensive $15 piece of metal and $700 in labor.

If you look at how new appliances are made with difficult to replace electronics which ought to be trivially replaceable for cheap if you weren't getting bent over by the manufacturer you might begin to notice a pattern.

Manufacturers are saving their pennies at the expense of hardware that fails outside of warranty and makes them $100 bills for their trouble of doing a bad job in the first place.

Their is little reason to build to last when bad work pays dividends in the long run.

The Tesla story for those who didn't catch it originally.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/41493/teslas-16000-quote-for-a...

Depends on the car. There’s an infamous bolt on the transmission of 6 speed 2nd gen Miata’s. If you remove that bolt accidentally instead of the fill plug near it when replacing your transmission fluid, you will need a transmission rebuild/replacement. Likewise I would imagine if you shear off the crank bolt on a car while removing the crank pulley to do replace a water pump or a seal, you’re probably in for a heck of a tear down, and depending on how bad it is to get it removed, maybe a bottom end rebuild to replace damaged parts.

Heck we still live in a world where some cars with interference engines use timing belts instead of chains. Repair that 20 belt wrong and you will indeed need a whole engine, and that assumes your got to it before it broke and ruined your engine for you.