It is very important if you are injured in a motor vehicle accident, or if you simply have property damage after a collision, that you get your automobile repaired at a “registered shop”. A registered shop is merely an autobody shop or other repair facility that is licensed to do insurance repair work. Not all repair facilities are registered shops, even though they may be licensed to do motor vehicle repairs inMassachusetts. What distinguishes a registered shop from any other is that it has a licensed motor vehicle damage appraiser.
When your car is damaged, the insurance company must send a licensed motor vehicle damage appraiser to appraise the damage to your vehicle and write an estimate. By law, that licensed appraiser can only negotiate the appraisal with another licensed appraiser. As a result, if a body shop does not have its own licensed appraiser, it cannot negotiate the repair with the insurance appraiser, and thus cannot get a supplement. In other words, the non-registered shop has to repair the vehicle for the price set by the insurance company appraiser no matter how much bondo it has to use. Its only alternative is either to take a loss on the repair or to charge the customer out-of-pocket.
Knowing that many repair facilities cannot get a supplement and also knowing that many times people choose not to do the repair or to do the repair themselves, the insurance company will always lowball the first appraisal. As a result, that initial estimate that you will receive from your insurance company or from the other insurance company after an accident will always be for less than the true cost of repairing the car. If the body shop does do the repair for the price of a first estimate, the car is not being properly repaired. That will be an issue for you when you try to trade the car in. The dealer will notice the improper repair and deduct that from the value of the trade-in.
In personal injury claims, the fact that the initial appraisal is too low becomes an even bigger problem. Invariably, when the car has been repaired at a nonregistered shop or not repaired at all, so that the first appraisal is the last appraisal, the insurance adjuster will argue ‘how could the person be so badly hurt when there was so little damage to the vehicle.’ When the adjuster says these things, the adjuster knows two things for a fact. The first thing is that their entire argument is based on a lie. They know the appraisal was lowballed and they know that there is more damage to the car. Unfortunately, the other thing they know is how hard it is to prove that it is a lie. The car was repaired for the price on the appraisal.
For years the insurance companies did not play this game. Property damage was in one file, and the injury was another file. Different adjusters were handling them and they did not talk to each other. Now they do. As a result, for years I, and most other motor vehicle accident lawyers, did not worry about the property damage side of the claim. If the client was happy with the repair, I was happy with the repair. Now, it is an important issue. It is because it has become such an important issue that I have actually taken a class in motor vehicle damage appraisal, the same class that licensed appraisers take in order to get their license. I did this specifically so that I can be a knowledgeable participant in the negotiation process and also know when things have been left off the insurance company appraisal, so I can work to get them added on. If need be, I can effectively cross-examine the insurance appraiser.
The other reason that this is important, is because with the modern design of automobiles, so-called “unibody construction” or “unitized” frames”, it is very easy for an insurance appraiser to lowball the first estimate. Let me tell a story from my automobile damage appraisal class.
We worked off of paper crash estimate guides. The crash estimate guides are written from the front of the vehicle to the back. Therefore, we appraised a lot of front bumpers, but no back bumpers. In both cases, on a unitized frame, the only part of the bumper that you see is the bumper cover or “fascia”. If you go to your car, and you tap on your bumper with your hand, you will feel that the bumper cover is simply a piece of plastic. It is not part of the safety system of your car. It is a decoration. Underneath the bumper cover is something called the “bumper absorber”. It is sometimes called the “5 mile bumper.” You cannot see it by standing in front of the car and looking at it. You can see it if you crawl underneath the car and look up. All the bumper absorber is, however, is a block of Styrofoam. In most front or rear end collisions, the bumper absorbers are destroyed. However, this rarely gets written up because just standing in front of the car and looking at it does not show the damage. In a direct bumper hit, the plastic bumper cover gives way and the bumper absorber gives way and both get pushed in. However, once the pressure is removed, the Styrofoam re-expands pushing the plastic bumper cover back in place, and the bumper often looks good as new. Maybe there is a scratch on it. The bumper is specifically designed to hide the damage. Behind the bumper absorber is the reinforcement bar or “rebar “. This is a hunk of structural steel bracketed to the body of the car. This is what one might think of as being a bumper. These commonly get bent in accidents involving contact with the bumper, but rarely get written up in the first appraisal. Because it is structural steel, it is very rarely repaired and almost always has to be replaced when it is damaged in an accident. It is very common in rear enders that the first estimate will be in the neighborhood of $300 to repair and refinish the bumper cover, but that after the supplement there is over $1200 of damage because the rebar and bumper absorber are being replaced and various brackets on the rebar have to be replaced as well.
On the last day of my auto damage appraisal school class my teacher asked if anybody had any questions. I of course raised my hand and pointed out that my bread and butter hit is to the rear bumper and that we did not talk about the rear bumper. I asked if there is anything that makes a rear bumper different from a front bumper. He answered that no there really is not. If anything a hit to the rear is much easier to appraise then a hit to the front because you do not have all the mechanical issues or crumple zones that you have in the front. In fact, he went so far as to declare that the rear end hit is the easiest appraisal that there is. At that point I said to him that that surprised me because, in my experience with rear end hits, the supplement is almost always larger than the initial appraisal. He thought about that for a while and told me he had no explanation for why that should be. After a while he said that the only thing he could think of is that when the appraisers are appraising the vehicles for the insurance companies that they are not getting underneath the cars and looking up to see the damage to the bumper absorber and to the rebar. Then he said, “come to think of it” when he went to work for the insurance company he was not trained to do that. He simply did that because he used to work in a body shop. I was biting my tongue because I did not want to say to this man who I happen to like very much that not only are they not trained to go underneath and look up, but that they are actually trained not to.
And that ultimately is the point. I told the story about the bumper, I could have talked about how unitized frames hide their damage. The point is, when appraising a unibody vehicles the damage is never obvious. It is always hidden somewhere. The people in a registered body shop know where to look for the damage and will look there and will force the insurance company to look there so that the body shop gets more money. When the insurance appraiser is simply coming to look at the car in your driveway, the insurance appraiser will also know where to look, but will choose not to look there. The appraiser can only appraise what the appraiser saw. By not looking, the appraiser gets to write a very low appraisal which will save the insurance company money. This practice violates your legal right to a full and complete repair of your vehicle to its preaccident condition. It creates this false but nevertheless effective argument that you could not have been hurt as badly as there was relatively little damage to the car.
An experienced motor vehicle accident lawyer can help you to solve all of the problems by simply helping you to find a good registered shop.