‘As a service advisor, I would HATE to explain this to the customer.’
A six-second clip of a Land Rover Discovery lying on its side on a workshop floor has been watched more than 1.4 million times.
The only thing anyone in the shop offers by way of explanation is jokes. Nobody in the video says how the SUV got there, which left more than a thousand commenters to fill in the blanks, make jokes, and argue about who should end up paying for it.
6speed_jay (@6speed_jay), whose small channel is given over to his mechanical work, posted the clip with a caption consisting only of two shrugging emojis and a laughing face.
The camera looks across the shop from the back, where the Land Rover Discovery rests on its flank with laughter audible off-screen. A voice delivers the assessment: “OK, that’s, that’s not supposed to—I know what’s wrong with it; ain’t got no gas.”
The video never explains what happened. Commenters who said they work in the trade offered their own surmises. LeighC rattled off some failure modes: a vehicle “put on wrong, not on jacking points correctly, armlocks not engaged causes the car to swing when high enough,” or, at the grimmer end, “concrete collapse, ramp pulls out the ground.”
A service advisor posting as GreenLantern2814 deadpanned, “Advisor here. I try not to diag anything cause I’m not a tech anymore. But and however, it ain’t supposed to be like that.”
Another commenter, Just another Florida boy, spotted how much worse the afternoon could have gone, pointing out a second car still up on a lift nearby.
One assumption many commenters made was that the Discovery is totaled, but some industry insiders disputed that. A commenter posting as lanamay030698 described the standard drill when this happens: Shops notify the customer, get the vehicle collected, and carry insurance for it.
“It looks worse than it is,” they wrote. “It’s not totalled. It gets repaired. Dealer pays deductible and rental.”
Whether a car is written off is determined by money lost rather than on how bad a video looks. The California Department of Insurance defines a total loss as damage severe enough that a vehicle “cannot be rebuilt or repaired to its condition prior to the loss,” or where repair would be “cost prohibitive to repair or rebuild in comparison to the value of the property prior to the loss.” A car on its side with unbroken glass, which several commenters noticed, may fail that test and simply get fixed.
Even a clean repair can depress a car’s value, which is something owners may not discover until later. Research published in the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ Journal of Insurance Regulation sets out what the industry calls inherent diminished value, where “because of public perception,” a vehicle “is worth less due to having a claim registered against it.” The paper notes that on third-party claims, insurers “should be prepared to pay diminished value losses in many states.”
Commenters wondered who should pay in situations like this. MamaRose asked how an insurer would even categorize this.
GnarleySin’s answer was that an owner might file it on their own comprehensive coverage, but “the insurance will absolutely go for the shop’s insurance. It becomes their responsibility when it goes into their care.”
Others argued for skipping personal insurance and asking the shop to pay.
Viewers cited examples from their own experience. Dats Dee said a shop tore the door off their truck during an oil change and “cut a check.”
A commenter posting as thatmean_mom said a tire shop employee “flew out of the bay so fast he hit four cars in the lot,” and the shop’s insurer covered the repairs.
If a shop does not make good, the Federal Trade Commission’s auto repair guidance points consumers to their state attorney general or local consumer protection agency and notes that small claims court is an option where “you don’t need an attorney.”
Motor1 reached out to 6speed_jay via TikTok direct message. We’ll be sure to update this if he responds.
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