A Newbie's Guide to Collision Repair

We are getting back on the road as the lockdown is gradually eased up, and the timing is right to share a few things I have learned in the last 17 months as an estimator for an auto body shop. It’s been very challenging and also very interesting to me since I pivoted into this industry from a completely different background. Ten main points:

1.) Your car is hiding things from you. 

I’ve never bought a car new, because I don’t like depreciation. Chances are, you may have bought your car “pre-owned” as well. Take a look at the front or back of your car. That bumper sure looks good, doesn’t it? Nothing wrong with it at all… until you have to take it off because of an accident, and discover a backyard hack job from years earlier. Poorly applied seam seal, rattle-can paint (if there’s any at all), rust from shoddy welds, and improvised repairs of parts that should have been replaced. Screws holding retainers to your quarter panel. Bondo slathered on like frosting on a cake. Missing or damaged absorbers. Bent impact bars. You name it, it could be lurking under your seemingly trustworthy painted plastic guardian.

But that’s not possible, you say. It has a clean Carfax! Of course it does. Because the accident your car was in was never reported. I have learned never to trust online reports like Carfax, and go instead on what my gut tells me when I look at a car. Such as: that paint doesn’t match. Or, this gap doesn’t look right. Little details like these are portals into your car’s secret past, and they make the difference between a trouble-free, trustworthy car, and a sketchy jalopy destined for a buy-here pay-here lot.

This is why I say to never, ever allow the person responsible for damaging your car to have it repaired without filing a claim. The guy who rear-ended you was so nice, wasn’t he? “Hey, we don’t have to report this to insurance. I got a friend who can take care of this.” That repair is done by an amateur, paid for under the table, promptly covered up, and no one is the wiser. And then when that damage is later re-discovered, your insurance provider won’t pay to fix it all over again. File the claim now so you don’t victimize yourself later.

2.) Get dirty to find the truth.

Being an estimator means living in the gutter. That collapsed rail end isn’t going to find itself. I have to get under the car and take a look around. The hidden damage is the truth, and the truth will set an estimator free. Or at the very least, it will cut down on cycle time because I won’t be waiting as long for parts. I have to find out what’s really going on before the car even comes into the shop for repairs, and let someone pick the dry leaves from my back later.

3.) Professional repairs are expensive.

I am convinced that the average person thinks any damage on a car should be fixed for about two hundred bucks. Nothing could be more laughable. It takes considerable resources to do a proper collision repair: skilled labor informed by years of experience, a little filler, and a lot of paint materials. These things are expensive to acquire, and what’s left is expensive to dispose of in an environmentally conscious fashion. So, what seems like a little bumper bender could easily top three grand on the final invoice. This is another reason to go through insurance: let someone else get stuck with the bill so you are not tempted to do it on the cheap. As with everything, you get what you pay for.

4.) You treat your car like a trash can.

I admit, I am sometimes guilty of this too. If you spend a lot of time on the road, it’s easy to just throw your drive-thru bag in the back seat and worry about it later. But for Chrysler’s sake, don’t let it get out of control. Remember that, every now and then, someone other than you might need to use your car. That pile of empty energy drink cans probably doesn’t belong in your passenger footwell. Sticky shift levers, crumbs in the cracks, ancient French fries hardened into yellow harpoons under the seats. Roaches left from last week’s hotboxing. Don’t do this to your form of transportation. You’re driving a car, not Carbage.

5.) Stop running on empty. 

Fixing your car means moving your car. And this doesn’t just mean around the shop. Sublet work may mean that your car has to be driven somewhere else to get a recalibration or alignment done. A diagnostic scan often means the engine has to be running, and that can take anywhere from two minutes to over an hour. More than once I have had a car at the shop that literally ran out of gas while we worked on it. Sometimes we even take the hit and just pay for some gas out of pocket so that we can finish the job. Don’t make repair more difficult than it has to be just because you don’t feel like filling up.

6.) Insurance fraud looks bad on you. 

It’s common for people to try to add damage that obviously isn’t related to their insurance claim. What’s the harm in pretending these two scrapes happened at the same time? I understand—you were too busy to file the claim, or maybe that old dent wouldn’t have been covered because you only have liability insurance. But an estimator can sniff this out from the very beginning. Accidents leave certain “tells” that add up and create a consistent visual story of what happened. Adding a little white lie to the story is much more obvious than you think it is. If the estimator is skeptical, it’s not out of disrespect. It’s because s/he is the first protection against insurance fraud, and auto body shops wither and die if they lose the trust of the insurance providers. Do everyone a favor, and be real up front about the collision.

7.) Insurance providers are holding all the cards.

It used to be that unscrupulous auto body shops could get away with some questionable practices, and the insurance providers would just have to live with the consequences. This is simply no longer the case. Advances in technology have given a heavy advantage to the insurers, and the shops are now in an adapt-or-die environment. 

Repair facilities of all sizes, whether they are large chains or just local shops, use shared software platforms to record their estimates, upload photos of damage, select parts, and keep track of their work to ensure compliance with state and federal law. Estimates are graded individually by the insurers’ computer programs, and then the shops receive reports quarterly or monthly on their performance. If I order parts that are too expensive, or if my repair times are not competitive, or if I am not fastidious about how I choose to record a sublet job, then my score suffers, and I get less business from that insurance provider. The shops are pitted against each other as de facto extensions of the insurance companies, so that even locations in the same chain will compete for better scores and more business. 

All of this means that if there is something you don’t like about an auto body shop, remember that it exists only to please the insurance provider. Because the shop really has no other choice.

8.) Total Loss is totally common.

Related to my point above about the cost of repairs being higher than you’d expect: it’s much easier to total a car than I realized before I started doing this job. So much so, that I am immediately suspicious of any car more than about 10 years old coming in for an estimate. A Toyota Prius holds its value much better than any Korean or American car, and better than many old European luxury vehicles, so all of this is relative. But chances are, the older your car, the more likely it is to just get wiped out by the insurance provider in the event of a major accident.

People who know me know how attached I get to cars. So when I have to deliver the news that the cost of repairs exceeds the value of the car, I’m not happy about it. But it’s also not my decision, and you can’t really blame an insurance company for choosing to cut you a check rather than pay an exorbitant amount to repair a depreciated asset. 

9.) The gecko is not your friend.

Particularly in recent years, the big players in car insurance have cranked up the advertising, often favoring crowd-pleasing humor to sell their boring product. But don’t let this fool you. With rare exceptions, that endearing commercial conceals the reality of a massive corporation whose goal is, essentially, to screw the consumer.

One of my coworkers wrote an estimate that included the replacement of a cab corner on a pickup truck. Not an easy or quick job, but he did manage to find a factory part for a very competitive price, cheaper in fact than the recycled (read: cut off another truck in a junkyard) part. Sounds like a win-win, right? Keeps the cost down while using the best part available. The adjuster then called him and told him to use the recycled part anyway, likely because she was being incentivized by her superiors to use more recycled parts for repairs. Of course the goal for the insurance company is to save money on the repair, but because recycled parts are perceived to be more cost effective than OEM, insurance companies strive to use as many of those parts as possible, and reward their adjusters accordingly.

A large chunk of my time as an estimator is wasted in the effort to justify using the parts I know will allow for the best possible repair. I have to prove that a recycled part is not available, or take photos of the damaged aftermarket part so that I can justify going OEM (original equipment manufacturer) instead, or compare a price difference against the number of rental days that would be saved by not waiting for that slower-to-arrive part. If you are wondering why the repair for your car is taking longer than you would expect, it may in part be caused by this wasted time.

My advice is to go with a provider that offers an OEM endorsement. This means that the only parts used in the repair of your car would be new parts coming from the manufacturer. Faster repair, better parts. It may only cost $20 a year for your car, but it’s probably the single best thing you could have in your policy in the event of a collision.

10.) They don’t make 'em like they used to.

New cars are safer now than they have ever been, and by a wide margin. The use of high-strength steel, airbags, ABS, and numerous innovations such as traction control and blind spot detection means that accidents are becoming more rare, and when they do happen, they are less likely to cause injury and death. This is largely a response to the way we drive: abundant distractions and declining standards for driver education mean that we are, on average, only getting worse at operating vehicles. The cars are becoming safer because the drivers are becoming more dangerous. 

Yet we shouldn’t rely on these new technologies so much that we relinquish responsibility as drivers. Driverless technology is still in its infancy, and if anything can be proven so far, it’s that programming a car to drive as well as a good human driver is much harder than anyone thought it would be. Some of us analogue anoraks will still clutch the steering wheel until we can’t any more. But no matter your comfort level with these advances, if you get back on the road with defensive driving in mind, the rest of us will greatly appreciate it.