I can see now the damage to my car's panel was more extensive than the OP's. The main problem is the length of the tear and extent of deformation which makes it harder to get the entire tear back in alignment for welding. Why can't they align and weld in increments? Not sure. Why couldn't they fix just the top, visible part of the tear and just fill the rest with sealant? Well, that's mostly what I had done.
I contacted 8 shops, all of which said the quarter panel needed replacement but none of which gave me a good reason why. Finally, I contacted
[email protected]. They never responded, but I found a different email through one of the repair shops and got a response there. They say
[email protected] is the central email to contact so keep trying if you don't get a response.
Anyway, Tesla sent my pics to some shops and John (general manager) at Service King of Pasadena was willing to give the repair a shot. We set an appointment and I brought the car in. At first, one of the techs came out to look at it and said he didn't realize the panel was torn all the way to the bottom, despite the pics I sent. He felt it couldn't be repaired. Argh. I waited to talk to John and he said he also didn't realize the extent of the tear (I called it a "4-5 inch tear" when I sent the emails so I don't know why it was so confusing). However, since I'd taken an hour to drive down there he said he'd do his best to find a way to do something with it.
Here's a pic they took with the trim removed:
The next day, John said he'd talked with his team and thrown around about 10 possible repairs but none of them were feasible. He had hoped they could access the back of the panel by removing seats and interior trim but it wasn't possible. It's interesting they didn't already know that - I guess most owners just let them replace the quarter panel. It still makes me think that shops are simply afraid to deal with aluminum repairs because they don't have much experience and if they make a mistake, as John described it, they could be out a ton of money for replacing a huge section. On the other hand, John also said they could patch aluminum if they accidentally burned through it, and Tesla-approved aluminum welding tools make burning through unlikely, so... I still don't get it. With those quick-weld hooks and some screw holes to get hooks into, lack of access can't be the only problem.
The other part of the problem is that the wheel housing and rocker panel were also bent. The rocker panel is a structural part and Tesla forbids pulling it back into shape in most situations because pulling it can weaken it. In my case, the damage might have been small enough to pull back into shape but not without taking off the quarter panel to investigate, and then it becomes an expensive repair.
So, instead of doing a full, warrantied repair, he offered to do a "rough pull" to get it roughly back into shape, then seal it against water intrusion with structural sealer. He said he'd do that for free, which I could hardly believe, but I agreed. BTW, John was really helpful and friendly throughout the process, even offering to come in on labor-day weekend so I could pick up the car, but I felt too guilty to take him up on that.
Here's the final repair:
Okay, it looks like a little scar. I almost want to put a bandaid over it for kicks. You can see some added dents where they used a hook fed in through the screw holes to pull the metal out. They also sealed everything, painted exposed aluminum, and cleaned up the black skirt trim.
In general, I'm thrilled to have it to this point with no money spent. There's no warranty but he believes the repair will last. I even offered to pay him something for it but he declined. The car was also washed much better than Tesla service centers wash it, including wheels shined and everything inside vacuumed. Why are they so nice?
My only question is, if they could get it to that point, why not offer to have the top of the tear welded and everything smoothed out properly? Obviously I'd have to pay for the extra work but I can't imagine it being more than a few hours. John said you need to have aluminum body panels precisely aligned to weld them. In this case, the two sides of the panel at the top of the tear are still slightly overlapped, and fixing that might be quite difficult with poor access to the back. I feel like maybe they could cut the tear with a very slender saw (something like a Dremel cutting wheel), then weld that. Or just weld it the way it is, grind smooth, and use Bondo to even it out. The engineer in me really wants to know what's possible, but I don't want to keep pestering John with questions.
One thing I'm pretty sure is possible is to smooth out the dents from the hook pulling. I found a
video showing how.
Finally, here's the curb that did all the damage. Check out all the blackened stones from tires scraping.