One of the themes of the overall collision repair industry that now often comes up at conferences is “we are all working together for the good of our mutual customer, the vehicle owner.” This theme can be described as disingenuous, insincere or even outside the rules. The disingenuous or insincere part is that everyone would […]
To date, the collision repair industry has largely avoided attracting the attention of regulators. The main reason for this lack of regulation is because the public has not needed the protection. For 50 years cars evolved in a manageable way, with this manageable evolution allowing skills and work habits to be used from one year […]
For many years, the collision repair industry had a reputation of having more than its share of scruffy, low-skilled and unscrupulous operators. The really bad ones looked the part and the consumer stood some chance of avoiding these based on appearance. Now there is a different owner of potential concern. These new players in the […]
It is the progressive operators who move the safety standards and integrity of industry forward, with a lot of effort and cost, and relatively little thanks. Perhaps not surprisingly these progressive operators are not the major national companies with hundreds of shops under their control. The active progressives may have several locations in one marker […]
The collision repair industry for many years had a reputation of having more than its share of scruffy, low skilled and unscrupulous operators. The bad ones looked the part, and the consumer stood some chance of avoiding these based on appearance. Now there is a different owner of potential concern. These new players in the […]
Many people in the repair industry still believe that the repair tech knows both the “How” and “What” of a repair. This belief should have ended around 2010, but discouragingly it is still prevalent in the industry in 2021. In facilities that still hold to this outdated model, the technician is assigned a repair and […]
I have written in the past about the tension between vehicle manufacturers (OEMs) and the other stakeholders in the collision repair industry. In March of 2017 I criticized the OEMs for their insistence on new OEM parts for all repairs Since that time, vehicle manufacturers seem to have doubled down on the policy with All […]
Until around early 2019 the collision repair industry did not have a very clear vision of Certification and worked on the assumption that Certified meant Qualified and that Uncertified meant Unqualified. The two quite different things of Qualification and Certification had been mixed into the same category. What is Qualification? Qualification is based on the […]
At a 2016 industry panel in Vancouver a representative of one of the large banner programs referred to ‘common sense’ when he said that electronic scanning a vehicle for a scratch on the door was not necessary. This person had limited technical background, but the moderator of the panel did not challenge the comment. The […]
In the collision repair industry, many participants are always paying close attention to the numbers that insurance companies use to rank repair facilities. The insurance companies who still drive the repair process must have numbers and data to see what is happening, and the repairers are constantly asking about these numbers and trying hard to […]