Groundhog (or more likely a Raccoon) 0, Taycan -$17.8k (damage)

[Jonathan S.]

Or, why did the groundhog cross the interstate?
Duh, to cause ~$16k in damage to a Taycan!
(Well, okay, that wasn't its intention, but that sure is what happened.)

By popular demand (i.e., request by a single poster) I am splitting off my coolant leak from the no-heat thread and creating a new thread.

Here is the slightly expanded version of my 1,000-character write-up for the USAA on-line insurance claim form:

At ~8:30pm on Friday November 8, I was driving on Interstate 91 South in the right lane between Massachusetts exits 43 & 35 (i.e., from Greenfield to Deerfield).​

I saw a groundhog or a similar animal dart across the highway from the breakdown lane.​

(For those of you who don't have a groundhog in your backyard like we often do, think of a large cat, very low to the pavement)​

I hit the groundhog with what felt like the front end of the car.​

The impact was far less dramatic than bad pothole, bridge expansion joint, etc.​

​

I did not report this at the time since the car suffered no visible damage, and I therefore concluded that the only impact must have been with a front tire.​

I drove the car a few times after that with no problems or incidents.​

​

Then this past Wednesday morning, November 13, I received a cooling system error message upon leaving my house.​

I returned home immediately and booked an appointment for Wednesday November 17 with Hoffman Porsche in Hartford CT.​

While my car has been in my garage since then, significant coolant leaked onto the floor.​

I inspected the car more carefully, getting down on the garage floor with a flashlight, and still no damage was visible.​

​

I drove 51 miles to the dealer, mainly at interstate speeds, with the same error message -- still yellow, as opposed to do-not-drive red.​

Air temperatures were high 50sF rising to low 60sF.​

The battery temperature started off at 54F (as my attached garage retains some colder air from the nighttime) and eventually rose to either (can't remember now) 57F or the low 60sF.​

​

Service department says definitely caused by impact.​

So no warranty coverage from Porsche.​

(I never mentioned the groundhog hit though to them beforehand.)​

The repair estimate is $15,730.​

Plus shop fees and tax.​

Glass partially full:

• I'm on the hook for only the $500 deductible. (I'm not sure why I set it so low, as I usually select for higher deductibles.)
• My premium increase will be only ... actually, I have no idea what it will be. Car insurance in MA is a total mess, so who knows what will happen. (In graduate school, I had a regulatory economics course with a Harvard economist and future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, then an appellate judge. One class session was devoted entirely to MA car insurance, with special guests of the state Insurance Commissioner and the top two aides. As a likely future resident of MA, I really wanted to understand all this for personal reasons! I read all the assigned material in advance. I paid close attention to what all five of them said during the course of two hours. I then still had no idea how car insurance worked in MA!)
• The dealer offered a loaner, which I declined since I'd rather drive my own A6ar (especially w/ CC2 tires now that winter is about to kick in later this week).

Glass partially empty:

• Perhaps this is just extraordinary bad luck, but how can hitting such a trivially small critter at ~68mph in the CT Medium height setting (which is Lift for the sedan) take out the coolant system?
• Perhaps the dealership knows that this will all come down to negotiation with the insurance carrier so the ~$16k is just a starting point, but how can a repair be so expensive?
• TBD how long the repair will take (since it can't start until USAA and Hoffman Porsche fight it out).

Picture, well, as I previously wrote, no visible damage.
However, here is the coolant leak.
(Before I mopped it up with some stuff I bought almost two decades ago -- and have been saving every since, just in case! -- when I took my Subaru Legacy to Jiffy Lube for a change and they neglected to use the necessary crush gasket, as explained by everyone's favorite local Subaru guy at the time before he had to stop for health issues.)

You can see that it started near the left front (the messy duct-taped thing is a wheel stop) then flowed out toward the garage floor.
Impossible to tell how much leaked, since I was away from Wednesday morning to Saturday night, and the fluid flowed under the garage door and down into a small gap in the driveway.

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[Uknown]

Wow! That is similar to my quote for when I bent the subframe in a parking trying to bounce my Taycan off 2 concrete rises…

Did they give you a itemized estimate?

 

[Jonathan S.]

^ I didn't bother requesting an itemized or written estimate since anything much more than my deductible is for USAA and Hoffman Porsche to negotiate. (And by contrast, at least concrete rises are made of ... concrete. Whatever a groundhog is made of, it sure isn't concrete!)

 

[d00d]

I'm curious too about the seemingly high cost to repair, maybe they can take pictures?

A baby carriage, sans baby, was sitting on the middle line of Route 3 North in Plymouth.
The car ahead of me brushed it into my path and took out my bumper and a few grill slats.
Including fixing the scraped rim from a Chick-fil-A drive through, bumper PPF film, and ceramic coat on both only cost $3,133.

 

[violuma]

I'm not intending to suggest that this piece is particularly worthy of attention, and have not bothered to watch any of the embedded videos. That being said, the two still photos and the diagram underneath them purporting to talk about the Taycan look to me like there is a lot of coolant-related piping right in the neighborhood of your Groundhog Impact Zone.

https://www.theautopian.com/manufac...n-and-discover-yet-another-bowl-of-spaghetti/

 

[Jonathan S.]

^ That would certainly explain the extent of the damage. Which also means that any major impact that causes damage to the left front of the car so as to combine the Groundhog Impact Zone Scenario + Babyless Baby Carriage Scenario could easily start approaching the Insurance Total Zone.

 

[violuma]

any major impact that causes damage to the left front of the car so as to combine the Groundhog Impact Zone Scenario + Babyless Baby Carriage Scenario could easily start approaching the Insurance Total Zone.

My takeaway is that if you have the choice of hitting something that would fit under the front undercarriage (like a groundhog) or something that wouldn't (like a babyless pram), aim at the taller thing and let the bumper take the impact.

 

[Jonathan S.]

My takeaway is that if you have the choice of hitting something that would fit under the front undercarriage (like a groundhog) or something that wouldn't (like a babyless pram), aim at the taller thing and let the bumper take the impact.

Love the pram reference!
This is inspiring me for a remake of the classic scene but with a groundhog:

 

[Flying ace]

sorry about your bad luck! Not sure which is worse, this or a cracked glass roof at $12k!

 

[Leawood CT]

Sorry to hear about your Groundhog attack. We have them here in Kansas too and they seem quite large and heavy looking to me. I have often thought when seeing them that it would suck to hit one. On an unrelated note, I am guessing you were angry when you put down that duct tape (You! Will! F'ing! Stay! In! Place!).

 

[figure1a]

Would love to see the final bill on what had to be replaced. Maybe that whole spaghetti coolant pipe assembly is only replaced as a full unit and you can't just do individual parts?

 

[Jonathan S.]

sorry about your bad luck! Not sure which is worse, this or a cracked glass roof at $12k!

I vote for this -- or should I say, my money is on this?
Seriously though, a $12k cracked glass roof is definitely ... Bad.
But, at least the car is still drivable with a cracked glass roof, the vulnerability is obvious, and the flaw is not somehow inherent to a core aspect of the EV drivetrain design.

This, by contrast, the coolant leak will render the car undrivable (at least eventually, and probably more quickly so in hot weather?), the vulnerability is a total shocker, and it's a core element of the EV drivetrain design -- as well as running contrary to the usual pro-EV propaganda of fewer moving parts and lesser mechanical complexity.

Sorry to hear about your Groundhog attack. We have them here in Kansas too and they seem quite large and heavy looking to me. I have often thought when seeing them that it would suck to hit one. On an unrelated note, I am guessing you were angry when you put down that duct tape (You! Will! F'ing! Stay! In! Place!).

Yes, hardly the elegant fixation technique there!

However, in fairness to myself, when I first put it down in 2022 for my A6ar, I used only a modest amount of duct tape to supplement the OEM double-stick tape plus some of my own double-stick tape.
Stayed put perfectly!
But then when I got the Taycan, had to shift it over a bit.

And the placement has to be precise in order the solve the optimization problem of enough space between the rear end and the garage door, enough space in front of the front end to allow the person door to open to the outside, enough room on the right for the car door to clear the short banister on the steps leading into the house, and enough room on the left for the car door to clear my wife's i4 (which she parks all over the place, hah!).

So enough instead of trying for a clean fixation, I just went nuts with some cheap duct tape -- works great, even contaminated now with coolant!

Would love to see the final bill on what had to be replaced. Maybe that whole spaghetti coolant pipe assembly is only replaced as a full unit and you can't just do individual parts?

I sure hope so!
Specifically b/c ...

... on the phone today for my official recording of the insurance claim ("Was anyone hurt?" "No -- well, the groundhog presumably ..."), I realized that my thinking of the reimbursement process was all muddled.

In fairness to myself, I was thinking back to some relatively minor car body damage claims, when we went with the official USAA-approved body shop chain, so any estimation details were between those two entities.
But of course USAA has nothing like that for mechanical.
Instead I'm essentially in the position of posters here who have wanted the body shop affiliated with the Porsche dealership to do the work, and the insurance carrier refused to pay for the labor increment.

USAA has a "certain amount" of $X it is willing to pay by region for labor.
And no way does a Porsche dealership's $Y rate fit under that cap.
(Granted, I have no idea as to even the approximate values for $X and $Y, but I am quite confident that $Y >>>> $X!)
So if the repair estimate is mainly the cost of buying some big coolant component, with a relatively small labor cost, the USAA reimbursement might not fall all that short of the dealership estimate, and I also might have a better chance of interesting my local Porsche specialist in doing the work.
(His most intriguing project I've seen in progress was an especially high-end 911 whose drivetrain was almost entirely severed by some nasty road debris. He had parts ordered from many sources throughout the country and Europe. Lots of welding too! So maybe he can take this on as a project over the course of some weeks...)

 

[Jasper4S]

Glad you’re fine. And glad it is not totalled. Hope you have your car back soon. GL!

 

[whitex]

Maybe that whole spaghetti coolant pipe assembly is only replaced as a full unit and you can't just do individual parts?

The initial 2020 spaghetti of pipe design was replaced by a single manifold the following year.

The new coolant manifold looks like this:

 

[mikezhang31]

ouch, i am so sorry for this experience

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