If you’ve recently been in an accident, you may be trying to decide the best auto body shop for you. I’ll give you my best advice when choosing an auto body shop in Loomis, CA.
Avoid Shopping by Price
When it comes to the safety of you and your family, shopping by price isn’t the right way to find an auto body shop. Cheap might even be a sign that you have found a shop that isn’t qualified to repair your car.
Today’s cars have become very complicated and repairing them correctly takes a lot of continued education, equipment and access to factory repair procedures. None of this is cheap or easy. If you get the feeling you’re at a shop that doesn’t have the training and equipment to restore your late model car to factory specifications, you are probably right. The days of the neighborhood mechanic doing your auto body repair are long gone. Vehicles are just too sophisticated for that any more.
Most cars are no longer built with a full frame under them. They are built as unibody vehicles. This means that the frame structure is built into the car itself. The way the engineers can do this is, by building the car with different strength materials, collapsing points and several other techniques to get your car to collapse and absorb the inertia of an accident. Because of the importance of the collapsing sequence to save your life, it is critical that the shop follow the precise factory repair procedures.
A lot of shops do not even understand the importance of restoring cars to factory specifications. If you find yourself in one of these shops, you should not let them repair more than a superficial scratch. You may even question their ability to do even that correctly.
Restoring Factory Computer Specifications
If you are driving a late model car, it is most certainly loaded with computers to assist with all kinds of things. The average car today has 25-50 central processing units (CPU’s). These CPU’s assist with decisions on braking, help your car shift, help you monitor blind spots, make you more comfortable in your car and a lot more.
When you are in an accident, all auto manufacturers recommend or often even require, to maintain your warranty, that you to have the computers scanned and reset. This process changes by manufacturer and requires a lot of training and equipment that most of the local small shops just don’t have.
The scanning is why I say that a small shop may not even be qualified to repair a simple bumper scratch any more. Simply being in an accident, is likely to have set off a code. But certainly, disconnecting electronics when removing things like the bumper and lights, to give access for painting, will require a computer scan and reset. If they have anything at all, many of these small auto body shops use aftermarket tools or don’t scan at all. This will leave you with non-operational features and/or accident codes stored in your computer.
If you are having trouble choosing the best auto body shop in Loomis, and you’re in Northern California stop by any of the Collision Pros locations in Auburn, Chico, Red Bluff, Paradise, Woodland or Loomis CA. All Collision Pros have plenty training and the latest in equipment to restore the value and safety of your car.
