What the Industry Was Talking About Last Year
By John Joswick
The previous year could be described as “bumpy” in terms of politics, weather international relations — and the collision repair industry. Here’s our annual review of the past 12 months as reflected in some of the most important, interesting or entertaining quotes heard within the collision industry.
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“Our developing position at my company as we try to get our arms around this is: Do what makes sense. In that situation, the body shop did what made sense. There’s technology there. There was an accident. It made sense in that scenario to do what they did.”
— Chris Evans of State Farm, explaining his company’s policy regarding vehicle scanning, noting that he’d recently taken his own vehicle in for collision repair, and a scan was involved in part because one of the car’s adaptive headlights had to be replaced
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“I have this strong opinion that [the other] two-thirds are doing almost no training. Given that, we then are averaging, for technicians, less than four hours of training a year, as an industry.”
—Jeff Peevy, chairman of the Collision Industry Conference (CIC) “Education and Training Committee, saying the committee’s survey of more than 100 shops found that technicians, on average, are getting about 11.7 hours of training per year, a finding that Peevy believes is probably more representative of the “top one-third” of shops than the industry as a whole
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“It’s less than 20 percent [of shops] pulling repair procedures [for all repairs]. It’s unacceptable. There are no two accidents that are alike. We change repair procedures often. I understand the cost and the process and the payment issues [related to looking up OEM procedures]. But we’re talking about a safe repair. We have to work with the information providers to find better ways to make it easier, to provide the information to shops in a faster, more intuitive way.”
— General Motors’ John Eck citing the findings of a “Who Pays for What?” survey that found only 1-in-5 shops regularly research OEM procedures prior to repairs
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“I’ll come in, open up my procedures for that front door I was working on the day before, and start re-reading the OEM procedures and think, ‘What the hell just happened?’ They’ve changed overnight. They are constantly updating their information on these newer vehicles and newer technology. So current data is paramount in our industry right now.”
— Wayne Krause of Mitchell International, noting that while developing labor times based on OEM procedures, he’s seen those procedures sometimes change
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“How do we ensure that the welding is being done by that person [at the certified shop] who is trained in welding? A shop may be certified. That’s one thing. But making sure that the trained personnel are actually doing the welding or blueprinting or whatever is another.”
— GM’s Eck, saying his company is developing a shop certification program with more ongoing performance metrics, rather than just training and equipment requirements
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“If you’re not scanning the car, you don’t even know what the customer, the owner of that vehicle, knows. When you return it back to the customer, are they going to see something that you didn’t know because you didn’t check it before it left?”
— Lisa Brown of Collision Diagnostic Services, explaining that Ford, Hyundai and other automakers are providing smartphone apps that give vehicle owners access to vehicle diagnostic trouble code-triggered alerts
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“Having a person inside is the best thing you can possibly do. If there’s someone in there who really knows what you do and how you’re challenged, it matters. The other legislators count on that person for advice on legislation.”
— Scott Weiser, the lobbyist for the Iowa Collision Repair Association, saying one of the best ways to get repairer-supported state legislation passed is to get a shop representative elected into office
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“You’re spending thousands of dollars to buy the equipment that’s required to meet these [OEM shop] certifications. So I would encourage you as you’re selecting vendors to make sure they are capable of providing your current staff as well as your future staff the training on how to use that equipment. It’s one thing to have a squeeze-type resistance spot welder or a pulse MIG welder. But if no one in the shop knows how to use it, it’s a wasted investment. Most of the equipment I see that’s not being used in shops is because the technician who was trained on it left and nobody else knows how to use it.”
— Tom McGee of Spanesi Americas
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“We all have our top techs, the guys who we think are going to go down there and do it, only to find out they wanted to walk out of class because they didn’t want to hear that the way they were doing things was the wrong way. But I also had another guy who I thought was a lost cause, but who came back from Mercedes-Benz school with a new life as far as how he wanted to repair cars. I thought I might be wasting my money sending him, but he had a changed outlook.”
— James Carvino of RoJo Collision in Brooklyn, N.Y., discussing which technicians will best succeed with OEM training and testing
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“It’s different than a pricing matrix, but make no mistake about it: A lot of the OEM certification requirements are very similar to a DRP. “It’s different, but still, they want this, they want that. There’s no grey area.”
— Barry Dorn of Dorn’s Body & Paint in Mechanicsville, Va., saying OEM certification programs, like DRPs, place non-negotiable requirements on shops, such as what specific equipment is mandatory
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“For too many years, the shops that do step up and do follow the [OEM repair] procedures are vilified. They’re looked upon as being the bad boys and girls of the industry, the ones costing people too much money, the ones making life hard. We’re looked upon as villains when we’re trying to…do the right thing. That’s what’s got to stop.”
— Shop owner Dorn
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“That opportunity to just buy a car back should not exist. There should be a way to make the customer whole, and then remove that vehicle from the entire system, so it doesn’t become a future person’s problem.”
— Tom Ronak of Akzo Nobel, saying there’s too little perceived downside for shops cutting corners when they get out of the problem when caught by simply buying the vehicle, which may put future owners of that vehicle at-risk if the shop resells it
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“I think you guys will be okay for a long time to come.”
— Researcher Corey Harper from Carnegie Mellon University saying studies show that while technology will reduce the number of accidents, the technology itself will raise the average claim when accident do occur
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“If that technician keeps coming up to the shop owner and saying, ‘Hey, I’m being told I’m supposed to do this on this vehicle, and we don’t have this tool,’ or ‘I don’t have this knowledge,’ that owner is going to find a way to get that knowledge or that tool for that technician. And if the insurance industry recognizes the information provider as an authority figure on what needs to be done on the car — we’ve seen it when they’ve identified structural and non-structural — then both sides have agreed in principle that the information providers are trying to help us work together. But on this whole scanning issue, body shops are left to fight this battle on their own against the insurance community. The insurance community wants to do the right thing… We need more data, and it needs to be in the hands of the estimator when he’s writing the sheet.”
— Bruce Bares of the Certified Collision Group, arguing that OEM procedures should be embedded in the estimate as related line items are added
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“If an autobody repair shop believes that an unsafe vehicle is being put on the roads, they have every reason to raise their hands and tell the auto insurer and the policyholder that they’re unwilling to do it.”
— Michael Barry of the Insurance Information Institute, speaking to a TV news reporter in Utah after a shop there showed the reporter differences between an OEM part and the non-OEM version an insurer was demanding the shop use
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“I tell people a lot of times, you know, we have a lot of folks on the insurance side that are unpaid salesmen for you folks. Which we don’t mind doing, obviously because it’s a benefit to us.”
— A representative of a Top 10 auto insurer speaking at a gathering of the non-OEM parts industry
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“Think about snow. Think about how well roads are marked in your area. Also think about the above-40 mph requirement; many of you may be located in a large metropolitan area or downtown, and between traffic and roads and speed limits, how long does it take you to get the vehicle to a location where driving at 40 mph or above is safe?”
— Kaleb Silver of Hunter Engineering on the test drives at nearly highway speeds on roads with clear lane markings that can be required to recalibrate some vehicle safety systems
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“Moreover, the guide does not recognize that insurers and consumers share the same goals following an accident — ensuring the consumer’s well-being and the prompt and proper repair of the damaged vehicle. Nor does the guide note the important role insurers play in protecting consumers from being taken advantage of when estimates include excessive charges or operations that are not necessary to properly repair a vehicle.”
— Joe Woods of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI), criticizing the 8-page “Consumer Guide to Insurance and Auto Body Repair” issued last spring by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood
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“So Google and Facebook are free to use, because the value of the data generated from those free-to-use systems is what generates the revenue for the companies. I’m curious if technology companies in the collision space down the road are going to start looking at platform shifts that incentivize use of free services in order to collect and generate data that then becomes more of the revenue-generator. Obviously, data collection has been big in our industry for a long time, but I think there’s a lot of power-grabs going on with it right now. And I think that could change the way people approach it going forward. I don’t know if it will. I’m certainly not predicting that it will, but it’s a curiosity of mine as far as where things will go.”
— Society of Collision Repair Specialists Executive Director Aaron Schulenburg, noting that technology outside the collision repair industry is often made available free to the user because of the data that can be collected by the provider of the technology
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“By the end of the first quarter of this year we’d scanned 3,000 cars. We do between 1,200 and 1,400 cars a month at our seven shops with 200 employees. We’ve written off nearly $70,000 in unpaid scans. Of those, a high percentage of them had something wrong with the vehicle. The reason I spent $70,000 is because I’ve got 200 families I protect. As a result of doing that for the last few years, and writing off dollar after dollar, I am now being paid by every insurance company that we ask for a scan. We are currently scanning about 90 percent of our vehicles. Not all need it, but we don’t know which ones don’t. I’m cutting my liability down by 90 percent and I’m just hoping the 10 percent doesn’t bite me.”
— Jim Guthrie, owner of Car Crafters in New Mexico •
John Yoswick, a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore., who has been writing about the automotive industry since 1988, is also the editor of the weekly CRASH Network bulletin (www.CrashNetwork.com). He can be contacted by email at john@CrashNetwork.com.
