OEMs are considering collision repair at the design stage. It’s about time.
In collision repair, nothing really starts or ends with the accident.
A vehicle arrives damaged. A technician repairs it. The car goes back on the road. Years later it may return for another repair, another owner, another life. Good repairs keep vehicles moving through that cycle.
That loop is something everyone in the collision repair business understands. What is interesting now is that the rest of the automotive industry is beginning to organize itself around that same idea. The newly fashionable term is circularity.
Circularity simply means keeping materials in use for as long as possible instead of treating vehicles as disposable products. Repair, reuse, remanufacturing and recycling become part of a continuous cycle.
More importantly, sustainability, it turns out, also means profitability.
Manufacturers are realizing that recovering materials, extending product life and reducing waste is not just good environmental policy. It protects supply chains, reduces dependence on volatile raw material markets and lowers long-term production costs.
This shift is starting to influence how vehicles are designed in the first place — and that is where the collision repair industry enters the conversation. Across Europe, automakers are rethinking how vehicles are engineered so materials can remain in circulation longer. Engineers are studying how vehicles come apart, how parts can be reused and how materials can be recovered without losing their value. The industry often refers to this as design for disassembly, but the practical implication is straightforward: vehicles are being designed with their entire life cycle in mind.
And that includes repair.
BMW in Europe recently took a major step in that direction. BMW is building a closed-loop recycling system for end-of-life vehicles. The focus is not simply dismantling vehicles but recovering high-quality materials and parts.
BMW contributes expertise from its Recycling and Dismantling Centre, where engineers study how vehicles can be taken apart and how parts and materials can be recovered efficiently.
Stellantis is moving in a similar direction. Through its European SUSTAINera program, the company is expanding the use of remanufactured parts, recycled materials and extended vehicle life strategies. Stellantis has also established circular economy hubs where vehicles are dismantled, usable components are recovered and materials are prepared to re-enter the manufacturing supply chain.
Electric vehicles add another dimension to the discussion. Battery packs contain valuable minerals such as lithium, nickel and cobalt. Those materials cannot simply be discarded when a vehicle reaches the end of its life. Manufacturers are developing systems to refurbish battery packs, repurpose them for energy storage and eventually recycle them to recover those minerals for future batteries.
All of this forces manufacturers to think differently about vehicles. Instead of designing only for assembly at the factory, engineers are beginning to consider what happens years later — when that same vehicle is repaired, dismantled or recycled.
For collision repair facilities, this shift could bring practical benefits. When vehicles are designed with disassembly, reuse and material recovery in mind, components can become easier to access, remove and reinstall. That kind of thinking has the potential to reduce complexity and improve repair cycle times.
And frankly, it is about time.
Repairers have long worked on vehicles designed primarily for assembly efficiency, not for repair. If circularity pushes manufacturers to think more carefully about how vehicles are repaired and how materials are preserved, that shift could benefit both the environment and the repair process itself.
In this issue of Collision Repair, our Counting Carbon feature looks at how this thinking is already beginning to reach the repair side of the industry. Insurers and manufacturers are starting to measure the carbon impact of repair decisions, including the difference between repairing a component and replacing it with a newly manufactured part.
Those discussions are still developing, but they point to something larger. Collision repair facilities extend the life of vehicles every day. Every properly executed repair preserves materials that have already been manufactured, transported and installed. Vehicles stay on the road longer and valuable resources remain in use.
Circularity simply gives that reality a name. For decades, the collision repair industry has been keeping vehicles in that circle. Now manufacturers are beginning to design vehicles around the same principle. When they do, repair will not just be part of the process after a crash.
It will be part of the plan from the very beginning — and that recognition could change the conversation about repair in ways this industry has been waiting for a long time to see.
