Watch: This Hero is Saving a “Totaled” R8 from the Scrap Heap

The temptation of a salvage car auctions can and should be compared to the sirens on the rocks. We all think we’ll be able to avoid tragedy, but as this video points out, there’s almost always a good reason cars are written off.

YouTube’s Samcrac finds out why he was able to buy a 2010 Audi R8 for less than half of its retail value, and it turns out to be a pretty common problem.

The early R8s, apparently, were prone to cracking right near the shock towers. The aluminum frame’s compactness means that the whole front end of the car, from the dash forward, has to be blown apart and aluminum welded back in.

Theoretically, it’s not enormously complicated, but given the importance of lining up the frame correctly and sticking it all back together properly, it remains a difficult and prohibitively expensive job for insurance companies.

But if you’ve got time and a likely large budget, you could still fix it. And that’s exactly what Samcrac plans to do in this series of videos and it’s something he apparently has a lot of experience doing. Still, though, it took him the better part of an afternoon to just replace the battery, so it won’t be easy.

But that’s why we invented YouTube, to watch other people ruin their lives for a seemingly good idea so that you don’t have to.

The post Watch: This Hero is Saving a “Totaled” R8 from the Scrap Heap appeared first on VWVortex.

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