We see ads everyday from Insurance companies discounting your car insurance and offering reduced rates. Oftentimes, this appears to be the only selling feature they can offer. From cartoon characters to animals offering to save you money by changing companies, they almost always lack the coverage you will need with the reduced cost. The company lures you in based on the price, but what they don’t tell you is those discounts come at a cost to you.
The insurance company’s main priority is to save money in the even of an accident. They do this by strong-arming shops about what they are willing to or refuse to pay for. Another way they cut costs is no longer using a field adjuster. They now promote using the convenience of your phone to take photos of the damage which has eliminated the field adjuster for many insurance carriers.
To the consumer, this process of photo estimating on the surface seems quick and easy. You take a few photos of the damage, upload them, and a few days later, you have a check. The problem with photo estimating is that it can only capture what the photos display which is only the surface damage. There is no way of knowing if the car has additional damages beneath the exterior. Let us warn you, most of the time there is, even on minor fender benders.
Collision repair shops dislike photo estimates and eventually, the body shop customers do too when they learn that there is more damage hiding under the panels, and the car is going to take longer to fix than the insurance company photo estimating system predicted.
A recent DEKRA presentation revealed how a minor fender bender into a trailer hitch resulted in more extensive damage to a vehicle than was visible from the exterior.
During the Society of Collision Repair Specialists (SCRS), a talk by DEKRA Services Managing Director Christian Ruecker, the discussion raised serious questions about the value of photo estimating and parking lot damage assessments conducted by a repairer, consumer or insurer.
Ruecker called disassembly the “most crucial” part of the process. This is when a repair shop takes apart the surrounding damaged area of your car to fully investigate all potential damage.
DEKRA is a leading global safety testing and inspection firm that also manages more than 120,000 auto body repair claims annually from their facility in Germany. In their crash test facility, DEKRA ran a 2009 Mercedes C200 CDI T-Model at 6.1 mph into a trailer hitch mounted on an unbraked 2,932-pound barrier on wheels. The purpose was to simulate a very minor “bumper” bender or even being back into in a parking lot by a pickup truck.
On the outside of the car, the damages appeared to be purely cosmetic, and if you could live with the eyesore, you might not want to be inconvenienced with getting your car fixed, and choose to send a photo estimate in, and cash the insurance check instead.
What you may not know is the photo estimate couldn’t see all the damage behind the bumper cover. And the appearance of only minor damage to the outside masked some significant and structural damage behind the cover. This could seriously jeopardize you and your passengers’ safety.
What was damaged?
The affected areas that you could see included the dented license plate, a scratch on the grille, an indent in the bumper, and incorrect gaps between the hood and a headlight.
Once a partial disassembly was performed by removing the bumper cover, it revealed a large dent into the bumper reinforcement. The collision also deformed the power steering cooling tube, tore the air conditioning condenser, and damaged the radiator.
Not only were the bumper brackets pulled, demanding reinforcement, but one of the brackets also pulled the lower rail inward, indicating frame damage. What appeared to be a simple and very minor cosmetic repair is now a structural repair since the frame rail was compromised, and the vehicle is now unsafe to drive.
Using a fairly industry standard rate of $50 an hour for labor, the cost is more like $5,000 to repair this damage at most shops across the country. However, if we were to tell the customer that this is easily a $5,000 repair when the photo estimate from the insurance company says it is just under their deductible we often get accused of trying to overcharge the insurance company when in reality it is the insurance company who is trying to underpay you for the loss.
This is why it is so important for us to do even a partial tear down to determine the extent of damages beyond what we can see from the outside. It is also essential for us to do this so that we can give you the proper documentation you need to get the real value of your claim. It is the legal responsibility for the insurance company to reimburse you for the full amount that it takes to return your vehicle to the pre-loss condition.
Here at Cherry Hill Collision, we take your safety seriously. If you would like to schedule an estimate or get the estimate process started, contact us!
