Body shop lead times
As we mentioned in the last post, body shops are not really in the auto hail damage repair business, they are in the collision repair business. They have simply found a way to interject themselves in the process and piggy back on the efforts of real auto hail repair companies. They do this by hiring foreign workers and paying them pennies on the dollar for their labor, resulting in sub-standard work and loss of tax dollars for the US economy.
The body shop doesn’t care, they got their percentage…insurance doesn’t care, they’re not paying to have it repaired again if it’s not a quality repair…you made the decision what shop to go to and now you may be stuck with lows, waves, and mashed up dents all over your pride and joy.
Let’s back the bus up a second though and focus on the topic of this post, which is lead times.
Since the collision business never stops for body shops, it’s obvious that a massive influx of hail damaged cars will cause a bottleneck. Couple that with the fact that conventional repairs take nearly twice as long in a best case scenario, and you will start to understand why six month to a year lead times become the norm during hail season.
One step further, there are only so many body shops to service an area. Much like rental cars, there is only so much capacity that body shops have for an area of town. After the hail storm this year in Denver, body shops were so backed up customers and hail repair companies were having to take vehicles to western Nebraska for conventional repairs!
Why insurance companies encourage people to head to body shops is beyond me, well it’s the money, but the system is backwards. Given that body shops aren’t really in the hail repair business, wouldn’t it make more sense to go straight to an auto hail repair company when your car gets some hail damage?
Worse, if it hails again while you are waiting to get into a body shop, you will be hit with the dreaded double deductible and your car will most likely be totaled.
You can avoid all this by simply choosing a professional auto hail damage repair company like All Star PDR from the start.
