3DPrinting

Yes actually. It is a great hot fix for car stuff. With my auto body shop, I always carried a few feet of tie wire and a Leatherman because I often dealt with damaged fresh auction cars that I just needed to get to the shop in one piece.

I worked for some good and some sketchy used car dealers. There were many repairs where the absolute cheapest minimum fixes were required. These were often Buy-Here Pay-Here car lots where the cost is kept low, the cars are not great, and the loans are predatory, but they will finance absolutely anyone. I won't get into the really bad parts, but these places suck and are a product of the exploitive Republican South in the USA, and target minority communities. Most of their cars get repossessed many times over, and while these are supposed to be auctioned to levey the recovered cost against the loan, there are major loopholes. Like the law is not worded in a way that excludes the previous auction price paid by the owner. It also allows for deductions of costs related to preparing the vehicle for auction and transport... Lots of sleazy stuff happening there.

Anyways... I got the same cars to work on over and over for years from one of those dealers. I often used tie wire to fix trim parts and stuff. It holds better than many actual fasteners.

In fact, when I did pit for a dirt track sprint car, nearly every fastener on the race car has a hole drilled into the bolt shaft above the nut with a bit of this same tie wire pushed through and twisted. Lots of aviation stuff has the same. Cotter pins are a thing. Like your vehicle's tie rods have a cotter pinned castle nut, which is basically the same thing but a pin that is less prone to corrosion in the long term. Still, tie wire will last years and 50k-100k miles even in bad weather and conditions.

When I repair stuff like a plastic bumper cover that is torn or in pieces, I often used tie wire to stitch align the pieces exactly where I want them. Then I plastic weld repair the back side by embedding the stitched cross part of the wire in a special way. The wire becomes part of the reinforcing structure. Then I clip the wires where they went through from the back, remove the front part of each stitch, and cosmetically repair the crack and stitching holes in the plastic.