Certified Body Shop and Direct Repair Program Should not Co-Exist
When you’re involved in a car accident, you want your vehicle to be repaired correctly. So a manufacturer’s certified body shop is a good first place to start looking for a repairer. But not so fast… If the body shop you choose is also in partnership with your insurance company, you may discover a colossal conflict of interest. That’s what happened with a guest who brought his late model Hyundai Tucson to an OEM certified body shop. What he got back “after the repair” was a classic case of an insurance Direct Repair Program (DRP) nightmare.
The car was rear-ended on the driver’s side bumper. To look at the original photos of the damage, it is easy to imagine that it was just a simple bumper job. However, it’s not the job of a body shop (or insurance company) to “imagine”. It is their job to investigate, and properly repair the vehicle.
You would think that the certified body shop would follow the OEM procedures and use OEM parts in every repair. After all, that’s what the whole certification process is all about, right? But unfortunately, this body shop ALSO has a DRP partnership with the insurance company. And the insurance company is the one paying for the repairs. They are also the party who decides how many repairs get steered into that body shop. And so, the dirty little secret of the collision industry is this: the INSURANCE COMPANY holds all the cards and makes all the decisions for their partner body shops. And the shop has to play along in order to continue their partnership.
Instead of replacing the damaged bumper reinforcement with a new, OEM certified part.. the certified body shop was told by the insurer to use a salvaged part from the junkyard. And that part was not only salvaged. It was damaged. As in, it was cracked. It had multiple cracks in the metal. It will never protect the occupants of that car the way it was designed to again. But, in order to save money for the insurer and speed up the turnaround time, the certified body shop did what their insurance masters told them to do. They put an unsafe bumper reinforcement on the vehicle, and delivered an unsafe vehicle to the owner.
This story was illustrated and detailed in an episode of our weekly video series, “The Airing of GRIEVEances”, and may be found here on YouTube.
It is our opinion that a certified body shop has no business establishing a DRP partnership with any insurance company. For the very reasons outlined in this article, it is clear that there is a definitive conflict of interest. And when push comes to shove – most shop owners choose to follow the money and they serve the hand that feeds them. The results, as you can see, can be devastating.
For more information on what a Direct Repair Program partnership is, and why we will never have one here at Nylund’s, we encourage you to check out StopDRP.com and many of our videos that can be found here. You may also find value in this statement put out by OEM1Stop.com. And of course, you may always contact us directly. We are here to serve you.