Got into a hit and run, insurance estimates at $4700 damages, body shop is $7600. I want to get it fixed. How does the repair process work?

[Sofa King]

Depending on insurance company, rates may not change (accident forgiveness)... one accident doesn't affect mine. YMMV.

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[roadpilot]

For 2+ years I ran the body shop of the largest Chevrolet dealer in Kansas City. Here it is many years later, and I still see prejudice with respect to body shops being in bed with insurance companies. The basis seems to be that they do a worse job of repairs and cost the customer more money. That simply is not true! The real issue lies (pun intended) with lousy insurance companies.

Yup. The key is: There are good insurance companies and there are bad insurance companies. Do your research when buying a policy - no different than when you spend your hard earned money on anything else.

 

[roadpilot]

Depending on insurance company, rates may not change (accident forgiveness)... one accident doesn't affect mine. YMMV.

Never had a single rate increase directly attributable to a claim other than the 2 at fault I mentioned above (wife and daughter). All others the other drivers were deemed at fault. Zero issues, no increases due to the claim.

 

[mostWnted]

Anytime a shop is a "preferred" or "approved" shop, the shop has crawled into bed with the insurance company to get work, and you are getting shafted in the process.

Here is an example, or maybe 2 depending on how much I want to type.

1) MAPFRE preferred shops get paid .3 hrs to sand and buff any painted or blended panel.
The industry standard is .3 per full paint hour. Max 2.5 hours per car.

Ford PU truck, 8 foot bed, say 7 hours paint time, that is 2.1 hours sand and buff, but the shop is in bed with MAPFRE so the flat rate tech gets 18 minutes and that includes masking jambs, washing, etc, so you are getting at best a denib and finesse to get any dust out of the paint and not a sand & buff to get a nice smooth defect free surface.

2) MetLife will not pay a shop to wash a car when it is repaired so you get it back dirty, or just enough of a wash job to get all the shop dust off it, and heaven forbid it the car was worked on with a door off and the interior got dirty

3) MAPFRE shops have to use whatever parts I write on the appraisal. If I write absolute crap bottom of the junk pile KSI/Astro sheet metal, and the shop wants Keystone which is still crap but way better than KSI/Astro, they are only getting paid for KSI/Astro parts, they can't come back to me for a PPI (parts price increase) because they use Keystone ( Probably because KSI won't sell to them because they have sent so many crap parts back as unacceptable quality)

THE INSURANCE COMPANY IS NOT YOUR FRIEND! THEY ARE GOING TO SCREW YOU EVERY CHANCE THEY GET.

Use a body shop of your choosing, not theirs

they haven’t appointed one, and I’d already found one that seems to do quality work so I’ll go ahead and get in touch with them this week.

 

[mostWnted]

Good point. My wife's car got shunted from behind, there was just a scuff on the plastic "bumper", but the impact beam was seriously crushed underneath which you couldn't see from behind . $11000 just to replace that beam.

This is what I’m afraid of. I could theoretically buy the parts and replace them myself, surely there are videos on youtube, but what about the parts that are damaged inside that I don’t have the skills for.

 

[mostWnted]

^ This.

Whoever told you to pay $8K out of pocket is clueless. That initial estimate will climb close to 5 figures by the time they are done with it.

They did say that this was just based on the exterior damages. It’ll go up once they take it apart.

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