We were on the first day of a family summer trip, driving the Model YL down to Kyushu. It ended with an unplanned windshield chip repair before the day was out.
I had just finished charging at the Yamaguchi Supercharger, heading for the Kanmon Bridge that links Honshu to Kyushu. I was keeping a long gap to the car ahead, not going fast. Then came that dry crack of something hitting the glass.
A star-shaped chip near the top of the windshield. I measured it later: roughly 17 mm.
You can leave a gap, you can keep your speed down, and it still happens. That part is luck.
We had over 700 km to cover that day, with four more days of driving to follow. If the crack spread while we drove, the trip would get expensive. So the short version: I had windshield chip repair done that same evening in Usa, Oita. Thirty minutes of work, ¥9,000 (approx. $60).
Finding windshield chip repair at 17:30
We reached the hotel just after 17:30. Not a promising hour to find someone, but I searched on the way in.
Two tools did the job. Kurashi no Market, a Japanese marketplace where mobile tradespeople list fixed prices, which gives you the going rate immediately. Then Google Maps, which surfaces the small local workshops that never appear on marketplaces. Even in a town the size of Usa, several came up.
I messaged one of them. The reply came straight back: they could take me from just after 18:00.
That single message took a lot of weight off. When you are stuck away from home, “we can do it now” is a wonderful thing to read.
I dropped the family at the hotel, then drove straight over.
Down a very narrow road
The navigation kept turning onto smaller roads.
The kind of width where you wonder what happens if something comes the other way. Just as I started doubting the route, the workshop appeared.
A chip they could have refused
The first thing was an inspection.
At 17 mm this was near the upper limit for what repair resin can handle, with the crack already branching. They would have been within their rights to turn it down.
The explanation was thorough: it will not go back to new, a mark will probably remain, do you still want it done. Compared with replacing the glass, a visible mark was an easy trade. I said yes.
Thirty minutes of work
A bridge tool goes onto the glass over the chip.
Resin is then injected through what looks like a syringe.
After it soaks in, a film goes over the top so the resin can cure.
The dark shape under the film is the impact point. Seen up close, the branching was worse than I had realised.
The main crack filled, the edges still show
The long crack took the resin well, so it is barely visible now.
At the outer edges the resin did not travel all the way, leaving a whitish trace. Exactly what I was told would happen.
That is cosmetic, though. The point of the exercise was to stop it spreading, which it did. Good enough for me.
Replacing the glass would have been ¥160,000 to ¥170,000
This cost ¥9,000 (approx. $60). For a walk-in job in the evening, in an unfamiliar town, I thought that was more than fair.
If a chip is too far gone to repair, you are replacing the windshield. Searching around for Model Y numbers in Japan, owners quote ¥160,000 to ¥170,000 (roughly $1,070 to $1,140).
Knowing that ceiling may be the most useful thing I got out of the day.
Stone chips cannot really be avoided, so what matters is knowing the worst case. With that number in mind, I am still comfortable skipping comprehensive cover on this car. Paying that premium every year, against a windshield I might replace once every several years, does not add up for me.
On my previous car I ended up having a batch of accumulated paint chips repaired in one go. As long as you keep driving, stone chips are part of the deal.
What I would do next time
- The chip appeared in the afternoon, repaired before the day was over
- Under an hour including the round trip from the hotel, no impact on the rest of the trip
- A 17 mm chip for ¥9,000, 30 minutes of work
- The main crack filled in, faint marks left at the edges
Between a service marketplace, Google Maps, most towns will have someone doing windshield chip repair at short notice. Now that I know the routine, the next chip anywhere in the country gets handled the same day.
Preferably there is no next chip. For now I keep catching my eye on that faint mark, though I expect to stop noticing it soon enough. If you want the rest of this trip, the drive home covered 602 km on one charge, while the charging stops are in my Supercharger charging curve article, with longer-run numbers in two months, 10,000 km in the Model YL. Tesla lists what its glass covers on the Tesla support site.
This article is also available in Japanese.
