By John Yoswick
Easily the most talked-about subject within the collision repair industry since last summer has been pre- and post-repair scanning of collision damaged vehicles. Here’s a sampling of what shops, insurers and the automakers have to say on the subject.
What the automakers say
The vehicle manufacturers really got the scanning conversation going starting last summer, as one-by-one, a half-dozen OEMs issue written position statements calling for pre- or post-repair scans (or both) on large swaths of their vehicles (see sidebar, “Get the position statements”).
Fiat Chrysler’s statement, for example, calls on repairers to do a diagnostic scan of all vehicles involved in an accident. The automaker’s bulletin notes, for example, that multistage airbags have three initiator squibs and that a scan is the only way to confirm that all three have fired. Without such a scan after an airbag deploys, the bulletin states, there is a “risk of improper handling or disposal of potentially live pyrotechnic or hazardous materials.” The automaker said such scans are needed even when collision damage appears minor to ensure vehicle safety or security systems are not affected.
But each of the automakers has taken its own approach to their position statements on scanning.
“What Honda did in its position statement is define a collision as any damage exceeding minor outer cosmetic panel distortion,” Chris Tobie of American Honda said. “Then you must do a pre-scan on that car because there’s a whole lot of parts that have wires going to them that even five years ago didn’t have wires going to them. So a pre-scan is mandatory. A post-scan is required even if it was only minor cosmetic outer panel distortion if you disconnected any wires [during repairs].”
Justin Miller, who coordinates the certified collision center program for Nissan and Infiniti, said his company’s position statements on vehicle scanning differ somewhat from some of the other automakers.
“We highly recommend pre-scanning the vehicle, but we do not make it mandatory,” Miller said. “I think there are some instances in collision repair where it wouldn’t be justified. I will tell you in conversations with engineering, they said it needs to be done. But I think if you apply that to the way the collision industry is right now on the ground, I think that might be a little pushy to ask a shop to do it every single time. So Nissan and Infiniti both take a position that pre-scanning is very important and highly recommended. We leave it at that.”
Miller said he wanted collision repairers to have “the autonomy to make a decision, a judgment call, on whether they think pre-scanning is appropriate.”
“Post-repair scanning, however, is 100 percent mandatory,” Miller said.
Miller said the more recently released Infiniti position statement indicates post-repair scanning is needed on all Infinitis built since the mid-1990s. He said the Nissan statement from this past summer doesn’t reference any particular age of vehicle, but the mid-1990s onward applies for Nissan vehicles as well.
“Some [insurers] mentioned that by saying ‘all vehicles’ we weren’t being clear enough,” Miller said. “I thought it was pretty clear.”
The automakers also emphasize that just ensuring there no are warning lights lit on the dashboard is not enough to eliminate the need for scanning. Tobie said even Honda’s entry-level 2017 Honda Fit can have as many as 510 diagnostic trouble codes (DTCs). Only a small fraction of those codes, he said, actually turn on a malfunction indicator light (MIL) on the dashboard.
“I don’t think most of the industry understands the magnitude of the number of DTCs in a car today,” Tobie said. “If you get to a fully-loaded Pilot or Odyssey, you are probably approaching 1,000 DTCs in that car. You can’t turn a light on for all of those codes. It’s simply not possible. We have to make this very clear: Indicators are for driver notification. They are not diagnostic tools. They never were intended for that.”
John Hughes of Fiat Chrysler concurred, saying one of his company’s vehicles that he reviewed had nearly 1,000 potential DTCs — yet only 13 MILs.
“The other interesting thing is you can end up with DTCs at very, very low speeds,” Hughes said. “We found in one instance it was just 2.5 mph. There were no visible issues on the outside of the vehicle. It just happened that someone had checked it, and there were codes set.”
What the insurers say
Perhaps not surprisingly, insurance companies have avoided making any blanket statements regarding pre- and post-repair scans. Speaking at an industry event last year, State Farm’s Russ Hoffbauer was cagey about his company’s willingness to pay for the procedures.
“It’s not whether it needs to be done. The debate right now is who pays for it,” Hoffbauer said. “Is it something payable under the insurance contract? Is it a diagnostic versus a repair process? Should it be bundled in and covered that way? I think that’s the confusion right now with it.”
Gerry Poirier, a strategy manager and technical advisor for Farmers Insurance, was among those calling for more information in the estimating systems from the automakers about which specific vehicles and parts require scans and recalibrations. If a mirror includes sensors, for example, the time to recalibrate those sensors should be included in the labor time for that mirror, Poirier suggested, or a footnote in the estimating system should note the need for recalibration.
“It’s that sort of specific information on each individual vehicle that will save time for all of us,” Poirier said.
Clint Marlow of Allstate Insurance agreed that vehicle age and features have to play a role in what vehicles need to be scanned. He said the average age of vehicles his company insures is about nine years.
“It doesn’t pass that initial logical test [that all vehicles need to be scanned],” Marlow said. “I think we need to work together to understand more about when it needs to be done, in what cases and on what cars.”
A Collision Industry Conference (CIC) committee that includes repairers, insurers, automakers and scan tool providers has been holding conference calls on the scanning topic. Committee chairman Jack Rozint said the group continues to identify as many questions as answers.
“On the last [conference] call, the issue came up: What happens when you do a pre-repair scan and you uncover something that’s not related to the loss?” Rozint said. “It could be something serious, related to a safety system or some critical functions of the vehicle. You talk to the vehicle owner about it, saying that it’s not related to the accident, but it needs to be fixed. But the consumer says, ‘I barely have the money for my deductible. I just need you to fix the collision damage.’ What do you do as a repairer? That’s a tricky question.”
Another scenario Rozint raised: What if a diagnostic trouble code isn’t found in a pre-repair scan but only in the post-repair scan?
“Did I create that from the repair, or is that related to the loss?” Rozint asked rhetorically.
He said there are committee members who say every repaired vehicle needs to be scanned, while others believe such decisions need to be made more on a vehicle-by-vehicle basis.
“There are people on the calls who have said, ‘If it’s true you need to scan every vehicle 1996 or newer, and we haven’t scanned 90 percent of the vehicles we’ve repaired [over the last 18 years], have we been repairing cars incorrectly since 1996,” Rozint said. “That’s two ends of the spectrum, and I know the answer may be somewhere in the middle, but there is a very valid discussion about when is a scan necessary, and I think we need to do more work on that.”
“It’s not that this body is going to set those guidelines,” committee member Fred Iantorno said. “It’s just that there’s a need in the marketplace for that.”
Rozint noted that in-house scanning by collision repair shops could have the least impact on cycle time and repair costs, yet shops report more difficulty in getting paid for in-house scans than those that are sublet to dealerships or outside vendors.
The costs related to scanning are real, Rozint noted. Buying OEM scan tools for just the Top 10 nameplates would cost a shop more than $100,000, he said, with $30,000 in annual software updates. These fees don’t include any of the training expenses that would be necessary. Aftermarket tools are available for about $5,000, he said, but generally don’t cover all vehicle functions.
The alternative to in-house scanning poses challenges as well. Outsourcing the work to dealerships is generally the most expensive option, both in terms of actual costs and cycle time delays, Rozint said. He also pointed out that dealer networks don’t have the capacity to handle all the collision-related scanning that will be needed.
Mobile technicians offer scanning although generally only in urban areas, Rozint said. Remote scanning, where off-site technicians scan vehicles hooked up at shops via the internet, may be “a great solution, but it’s not inexpensive,” Rozint said.
Former CIC Chairman Roger Wright, now an industry consultant working with shops and insurers, noted that a $200 scan charge would add seven percent to the average claim of $2,800.
“For some of the top insurers, that could be up to $500,000 or $600,000 a day in additional severity,” Wright said. “The repairers can’t eat seven percent, and an insurer would have to get rate increases across the board to do the same thing. But I think we can work it out. We had the same thing back in the 1980s when we had to have four-point anchoring and three-dimensional measuring systems. We got through that.”
What the shops say
We’ll give shops the last word on the scanning topic. Certainly scanning is becoming more common on shop estimates and invoices. About 750 shops responded to a survey last July (just as the first of the automaker statements were being issued). Only about one-in-three of the shops (35.6 percent) said that performing a “health scan” of vehicle control modules was something they had never charged for (so almost two-thirds of shops had), and that was down more than 10 percentage points from the same survey in 2015 when 46.3 percent of shops said they’d never charged for it.
The shops also now are more likely to get paid for the work. The survey asked how commonly the top eight largest insurers pay the scans when the shop bills for them. About 41 percent of shops said the insurers paid for the health scan “always” or “most of the time.” The percentage of shops that said insurers “never pay” for these operations when they are required dropped approximately 4 percent.
Fiat Chrysler’s Hughes and other OEMs representatives acknowledged that the scanning issue is generating some friction in the industry between shops and insurers, but said they see the industry moving toward consensus on the importance of scanning in returning a vehicle to road-worthiness.
“It seems like we’re always years behind the service end of the business,” Hughes said. “This is a new idea for this industry versus service technicians who have been doing this for years. The bottom line is we’re going to catch up. We’ll get there. It’s just a matter of working through the little bumps we have now.” •
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.
