When they considered the most pressing issues facing the collision repair industry, members of the Collision Industry Conference (CIC) Industry Relations Committee decided on trust as the first topic to focus on this year.
“It’s a driving force in a lot of the challenges we face,” said Committee Co-Chair Jim Keller, president of 1Collision Group, during the CIC virtual meeting via Zoom, Jan. 20. At the forefront of the trust issue, he said, is the repair and calibration of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS.) The goal of the first meeting, he said, was not to be a “deep dive,” but instead an overview of more to come.
Committee Co-Chair Jonathan Chase, director of Claims Process & Centralized Services at National General Insurance, said the collision repair industry, in some ways, has “become a victim of its own success.”
“We’ve become so adaptable to handling new things in the industry, whether it’s new models of cars or other technologies, that we’ve tried to approach ADAS – which is an invisible product – like we had with something more objective, like dents,” he said. “Yet we’ve been struggling with ADAS for five or ten years, and we just can’t seem to crack the nut on it.”
Committee members would like all segments of the industry, including consumers, repairers and insurers, to participate in future meetings, Keller said, and OEM representatives, in particular, are in need.
“Jonathan and I had a discussion the other day about how every insurance company pays for things differently,” Keller said. “They pay different times, different amounts and have a different claims strategy toward what they pay for. And every shop charges differently. To ever agree on all that, first of all, is not our mission. We’re trying to understand all sides so that we have a better sense of trust to try and find some alignment on things.”
Sam Zamir, general manager of Los Angeles collision repair shop Collision Consultants, spoke on ADAS challenges from a collision repairer’s perspective. At the same time insurers may not trust an ADAS calibration is needed, he said, shops may have difficulty trusting the accuracy of a procedure done by a sublet provider, whether it’s a mobile company, the dealership, or an independent shop.
“How do you trust that those people are doing it right?
How do we know that the ground is level?”
Zamir noted his shop recently had to discontinue using one dealership after its service department ignored the requirement for the vehicle to be calibrated with a full fuel tank.
“And when I confronted them about it, they kind of brushed it off as if it’s not even important,” he said.
Both shops and insurers can determine a calibration was done properly by thorough communication, documentation and photos of the process, Zamir suggested, although he’s still encountered friction.
“I’ve had an experience with an insurer where we’ve done the calibration, submitted the invoice and then the insurer had a trust issue with whether or not the calibration was actually performed or needed. The shop’s concern is, ‘If I’m going to do the work, I want to make sure i get paid for it.’”
Chase said because the work is “invisible,” it differs from “traditional collision repair, where you see the before and after product and have no doubt it was performed,” which can lead an adjuster to question whether a calibration is needed. He said he hoped to gain more clarity from OEMs on when scans or calibrations are needed, even when an OEM procedure shows they are “required.”
“What if someone hits a trash can backing down their driveway, and it just scuffs the bumper and the repair will stay in an area where there’s no sensor? It’s hard for my staff to intuit ‘Why do I need to scan that?’ Do we need to inspect [all ADAS components]? and how do we document it and what do we need to look at? I think we’re going to have to work with OEMs and information providers to get on the same page to understand how you define a collision in the spectrum of all accidents.”
Zamir said he’s found that good communication and documentation goes a long way to reduce friction, both before and after the calibration procedure.
“That puts everybody at ease that not only was the work done, but the work was done properly. And here’s the justification for what was charged.”
Documentation can be as basic as a copy of a paid invoice and a screenshot or printout of a successful blind-spot monitor system calibration can confirm the calibration was successfully completed, Zamir said.
“I’m hopeful we can ease some of the burden here by getting that to be a standard practice of figuring out what documentation should be shared,” Chase said.
He proposed looking to other industries, such as plumbing [presumably because it offers video inspections of pipes] for examples of how they solved similar concerns of what he called a “credence good.”
“That’s a service where the consumer doesn’t automatically intuit the need for it, and it’s in the sense of, ‘How much do I need, what does quality look like, and how much should it cost?’”
Attendee Bobby Schnell, AirPro Diagnostics technician training specialist, pointed out that from 14 percent to 18 percent of vehicles scanned have not set a diagnostic trouble code (DTC), yet they require a calibration for systems such as radar. The radar sensor will point up or down with different vehicle loading, he explained, so if its up/down value has changed because of a collision, it will not trigger a DTC, even though it needs to be recalibrated. Viewing live data on a scan tool is the only way to determine this, he said.
Janet Chaney, owner of Cave Creek Business Development, represented the voice of the consumer in the meeting. ADAS has created complex technical processes and challenges not only for insurers and repairers, she said, but also for what is required to educate consumers about how their safety requires repairs to be done properly.
“We need to talk to our customer about that at the beginning of the repair so they understand some of the challenges that we’re going through in the shop. I believe it is our moral obligation to do that. We are in the business of repairing cars and taking care of our customers.”