Why We Don’t Write Repair Plans in the Parking Lot
After an accident, one of the first questions people understandably ask is:
“How much is this going to cost?”
You look at the damage. Maybe the bumper is cracked. A headlight is broken. There’s a dent in a quarter panel.
It can seem pretty straightforward.
But modern vehicles are anything but straightforward.
At Best Body Shop, we don’t build a final repair plan by simply walking around your vehicle in a parking lot. Before we can truly understand what happened, the vehicle needs to be properly disassembled and inspected.
What You See Isn't Always What Was Damaged
In Episode 4 of the We Work For You Podcast, we shared a perfect example.
A Toyota came to us that appeared to need a bumper repair. From the outside, we initially thought we were looking at roughly a $2,500–$3,000 repair.
After disassembly and measurement?
The damage was around $22,000, including collapsed frame rails.
The vehicle had done exactly what it was engineered to do: absorb and redirect collision energy away from the occupants.
That's why looking at the outside of a vehicle only tells part of the story.
Modern vehicles can contain sensors, brackets, structural components, restraint systems and driver-assistance technology that need to be inspected, replaced or calibrated following a collision. Some of that damage may be impossible to see until the vehicle comes apart.
We Don't Decide How Your Vehicle Should Be Repaired
Neither should an insurance company.
The manufacturer already has.
Vehicle manufacturers spend enormous amounts of time and money engineering, developing and crash-testing their vehicles. Their engineers then publish repair procedures explaining how those vehicles should be inspected and repaired following a collision.
We pull those procedures for each individual repair rather than assuming the procedure is the same as the last similar vehicle we repaired.
Why?
Because procedures change.
And when we're talking about the systems designed to protect you and your family, we're not interested in guessing.
When an Insurance Company Said, "Delete It"
During the episode, we discussed a Corvette currently being repaired at Best Body Shop.
General Motors' procedures called for a steering-column inspection following the collision.
The insurance company questioned why it was necessary and instructed us to remove those lines from the repair plan.
We didn't need to argue.
We simply directed them to the manufacturer's documentation that had already been provided.
About 20 minutes later, the response came back:
Proceed.
That's why documentation matters.
Repair decisions shouldn't be based on opinions, assumptions or what someone would prefer to pay for. They should be based on the procedures written by the people who engineered the vehicle.
This Is About More Than Fixing a Car
Twenty or thirty years ago, the decisions involved in collision repair were very different.
Today's vehicles can have collision-avoidance systems, cameras, radar, sensors, restraint systems and other technology making decisions in fractions of a second.
When those systems aren't repaired or calibrated correctly, the consequences can extend far beyond whether a bumper looks good.
For Clay, that became personal.
His wife and children were later involved in a roughly 70-mph collision in a vehicle Best Body Shop had previously repaired. That previous repair had been completed according to Volvo's procedures despite disagreements with the insurer over portions of the repair.
His family walked away.
We'll never know what would have happened had those manufacturer procedures not been followed.
And that's exactly the point.
Period. End of Story.
After that accident, something Best Body Shop already believed became deeply personal:
We will never repair a vehicle outside of the manufacturer's guidelines. Period. End of story.
That's not about fighting insurance companies.
It's not about making repairs more complicated.
It's about remembering who we work for.
You.
Watch Episode 4 of the We Work For You Podcast to hear the full conversation and get a look behind the curtain at how a proper repair plan is actually built.