Over the course of three days during SEMA in Las Vegas last fall, I heard the moving interview with the Texas couple injured in a car that had been repaired with adhesive rather than welds; I moderated a panel of automakers discussing their welding requirements; and I may have saved the lives of five people by showing a shop how they had completely inadequately welded the uniside of a late-model Toyota Sienna.

The Sienna was repaired by a Chevrolet dealership shop near Las Vegas for a woman just prior to her husband taking a job with Microsoft. So shortly after picking up the repaired car, she and her husband and three kids drove it from Nevada up to Washington. When they arrived, she took it to a dealership there, because she had a warning light on the dash, and she’d noticed her seatbelt didn’t seem to be retracting correctly.

That dealer could tell the seatbelt wasn’t quite bolted-in correctly and saw the door wasn’t quite aligned, so they sent it to their preferred body shop. That shop took one look at the car and called my company. One of our inspectors took a look at it, and quickly realized there were problems.

I called the dealership that repaired the vehicle, and asked the manager to send me the paperwork for the job. They had replaced the rocker, the B-pillar and the quarter panel. But the first thing I noticed was that none of the Toyota safety checks, like resetting the occupant weight sensor, were listed on the invoice. The manager of the shop insisted they had done them, but I was skeptical. Would a Chevy dealership sublet that work to a Toyota dealership and not bill for that?

I told him there was some serious issues with the welding, and he said he wanted a chance to look at the car with me. He wasn’t defensive, but he said they were an I-CAR Gold Class shop, certified by some automakers (though not Toyota) and do good work. So I told him he could come to Seattle to see the vehicle, or if he could get the car to Las Vegas by the next week when I would be there for SEMA, we could go over it together. So he had it transported back to Nevada.

The morning I got to the dealership, we opened up the door and removed the weather strips to show him the welds. They were small and had kind of a triangular shape to them. One of them was even cracked. And when you looked at the back, you could tell they had used a single-sided weld – not the squeeze-type called for by Toyota – to attach the entire uniside of the car.

They had excellent welding equipment. But when we opened up the welder, the spool of wire had no label. I suspect they didn't use the type of welding wire Toyota calls for. And when I asked the technician where the arms were for the welder, he told me, “We don’t use those. It’s one-sided welding because it’s a smart welder.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

I couldn’t tell exactly where they had sectioned the vehicle, so the manager pulled up the photos from the job file. Those showed that not only was it sectioned incorrectly, but also that the technician used a cut-off wheel to remove every single weld on the inside, destroying the base metal. This would require a major re-repair to make the vehicle safe again.

The dealership bought that car. Thank goodness the woman who owned it had noticed the minor problems before she and her family were in another accident in that vehicle. They could have easily been killed.

I tell this story because right now this industry is talking a lot about documentation systems for repair. I’ve talked about the “bulletproof file” for years, making sure it accurately reflects what you did to the vehicle and why. But, folks, if you’re going to document everything you do to a vehicle – and I think you should – you also better make sure that it shows you are doing it correctly. This shop’s own documentation showed that they didn’t, putting a family at risk.