Hail is a parts problem
The Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex takes more damaging hail than almost any urban area in the United States. Most springs produce at least one storm that puts dents in roofs and bonnets across whole neighbourhoods.
The dents get claimed. What does not get looked at is everything made of clear plastic and everything made of thin aluminium fin.
Lamp lenses. Hail rarely shatters a modern polycarbonate headlight lens. It cracks it — sometimes so finely that nobody sees it in a car park. Water gets in, the reflector corrodes, the connector oxidises, and the unit fails properly a month later when nobody connects it to the storm.
Mirror housings and glass. Among the most commonly replaced parts after a storm. On a modern car the housing carries the indicator, the heating element, the puddle lamp and often a blind-spot module, which is why the cheapest listing is usually the wrong part.
Condenser and radiator fins. The thinnest aluminium on the car, sitting at the very front behind a grille that offers no protection from above. Hail flattens the fins, reducing the surface area available to reject heat.
Check the lenses, not just the panels
After any significant hail, two inspections take five minutes and save a great deal.
Turn the lights on in daylight and look at every lens from close up for fine cracks and for any sign of moisture inside. Then look through the grille at the condenser and the radiator for flattened or folded fins.
Both are cheap to find now and expensive to find later.
Toll roads and highway hours
The metroplex is enormous and much of the driving is at speed on toll roads and interstates rather than in stop-start traffic.
That produces the highway wear profile: brakes that last a long time, and hours at load accumulating on everything that rotates — wheel bearings, constant-velocity joints, tyres, drivetrain.
The two noises worth recognising are a hum that rises with road speed and ignores engine speed, which is a bearing, and a rhythmic click on full lock at low speed, which is an outer joint. Rotate the tyres front to back before condemning a bearing, because cupped tyres sound almost identical and the test costs nothing.
Brakes here often corrode before they wear, so a rotor with plenty of thickness left can still need replacing because the face is pitted.
A wide temperature range
North Texas runs from genuine summer heat to real ice storms. Batteries take the worst of both: summer runs the chemical clock that destroys them, and winter reveals the damage on the coldest morning.
Replace on age, before winter, rather than on failure in a car park. Four Texas summers is a full life for a battery.
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