A man in a gray company hoodie walks through the lot, the paint area and the front office of his collision repair shop in a TikTok from the shop’s account, asking each worker the same question. The on screen text reads “What’s a car you would never buy?” and the caption adds “Do you agree??” The clip is under a minute, it is shot handheld, and every answer is captioned word by word.

He does not slow down to debate any answer. He walks up, asks, gets a reply and moves on, and each time a small black graphic of a Tesla with a red X pops up beside him. The shop floor, the yard and the office desks all appear in the background, so the video plays as an informal poll of the people who spend their days looking at wrecked cars.

The answers are lopsided. Several workers say Tesla right away. One worker says Hyundai instead. In the office, a woman at a desk says Tesla too, and then narrows it, saying the Cybertruck specifically. None of them explains why in the video, so the reasons stay a mystery, and the clip does not show any employee talking about repairs, parts or insurance.

Then the owner answers his own question. “Oh, you already know I would never buy a Tesla,” he says, and tells a story from the night before. He went to pick up a friend, and two cars behind him was a Tesla. She walked out of the house and headed toward it, saying she thought it was him. “I was so insulted,” he says, and then, “Of all the cars, that’s the last car I would be in.” The video ends on that line.

That is the whole piece, and it is worth saying clearly what it is. It is a handful of people who work around collision damage giving gut opinions on camera, with no repair orders, no photos of damage and no numbers. It cannot say that any one car is worse to own, only that these people dislike it, and a joke about being mistaken for a Tesla owner is part of the fun.

For something firmer, there is a public data set on insurance claims. The Highway Loss Data Institute, which is supported by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and gets its loss data from insurers, published a collision report in April 2023 on 2020 to 2022 model year vehicles. It indexes every result to an average of 100. For overall collision losses, it lists the Tesla Model 3 at 158 to 160, the Model Y at 165 to 169, the Model S at 241 and the Model X at 234. Claim frequency for the Tesla models runs between 118 and 133, and the Model S and Model X have the highest severity, at 196 and 176.

The same report shows the pattern is not only about Tesla. Several Hyundai models also come in above average on overall collision losses, including the Elantra at 152 and the Sonata at 145, which is relevant because one worker named Hyundai. The Elantra N is listed at 224. The Kia Telluride, on the other hand, is listed below average. The report does not mention the Cybertruck.

There are limits to what those numbers show. They measure collision insurance losses, which come from how often cars are in claims and how much each claim costs, and they are standardized for factors like driver age, location and deductible. They do not say how reliable a car is, how it drives, or whether the owner would regret buying it. A high loss index can come from expensive parts, from a car that is hard to repair or from how it is used, and the report does not sort those out for each model.

So the shop’s informal vote and the insurance data point in a similar direction for the Teslas, but they get there in different ways, and neither one settles the question. What the video gives viewers is an easy way to start an argument in the comments, and a rare look at what a repair shop’s crew says when the boss walks over and asks.