Re: both cars hit by lighting
didn't know lightning could cause a car to be totalled ... a car was one of the safest places to be during a lightning storm and...
The metal body of the vehicle serves as a makeshift faraday cage. An electrical current will tend to follow the easy path through the skin rather than jump through the middle. This part is good for the occupants.
Modern cars can be thought of as rolling computers. They have electronic chips controlling pretty much everything. There is a fair chance that some current will find its way through some of those little copper wires that tie everything together.
This means that some little part that was designed to handle .1 amp on and off for ten years finds itself facing 10K amps for some fraction of a second. Normally this does not go well.
Sometimes you can follow the current path through a car by the trail of burned insulation and blackened circuit boards and random bits of flash melted metal here and there. other times you just get, say, a CANBUS error where the car insists that is it getting no signals from the brakes, or the restraint systems, or the tranny, or dog know what.
You can put an entire day into chasing through the guts of the car swapping out parts, and then find out that, nope, the problem is on the other end, and then you start on the next thing, and the next, and the next. After a while the labor and part start to add up. The problems may also be in the wiring harnesses. These can be replaced, but you have to take apart half the car to do so.
Of course, the current could go around through the skin and hop out to ground through the suspension or exhaust, leaving you with nothing more than a wild story and some freaky weld marks. Lightning is capricious, you just don't know.