“Oh no you guys, stop fighting. We couldn’t bear to see you get hurt. Please stop. Etcetera, etcetera.”
That’s no doubt what many people were saying in mock horror this week as the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia got into a very public spat with the province’s auto body repair shops. It’s like watching your favourite horsefly get into a fight with a beloved dung beetle. Who to cheer for in this epic struggle of evil vs. evil?
Just kidding, car folks! Just kidding. We appreciate all you do to fix our dents and dings, or take our money every month just in case we run over a jogger.
The spat started when the union representing ICBC workers alleged that some auto body shops have been charging more than they should, and that ICBC doesn’t have enough staff to check up on the estimates. The auto repair guys responded by calling the accusations “simply not true,” arguing that ICBC’s software system has built-in safeguards that won’t allow auto body shops to estimate beyond certain prices for parts and labour on any claim over $1,500. Then they gave the insurance adjustors a giant wedgie.
My interest was piqued by that little $1,500 factoid. A couple of months back a friend of mine nicked my bumper backing out of a driveway. It was so minor I was happy to just let it be, but they were very kind about it and insisted that I get it checked out at a couple of auto body shops.
I figured the mechanics would have a good laugh and then take 30 seconds to fix the tiny ding with a tube of shoe polish and a damp chamois.
Nope. Both places took a quick look at the scratch and came up with the exact same estimate: $ALL,YOU,GOT. Actually they both said almost exactly the same, right around $1,500, which was remarkably consistent of them. It was also quite a bit more than $ALL,I,GOT. I guess there’s been a bump in the price of chamoiseses.
The estimates did seem a tad high given the very small visible damage to my car. Who knows though, right? They’re the experts. Maybe their highly trained X-ray eyes saw all kinds of internal problems that I couldn’t detect. Maybe today’s auto parts are so specialized that even seemingly simple fixes add up quickly when you have to pay $500 for each new lightbulb. Maybe the technicians have such high-tech chairs these days that it costs $1,200 just to get out of them.
Anyway, I didn’t pay it, opting instead to just go on living my life. Of course, a couple of weeks later I took my car in for a routine service at my regular shop and ended up with a bill even higher than the chamois count, all because of a faulty “ball joint” or something-or-other that needed to be fixed immediately to prevent my tire from falling off, sending my whole family careening off a cliff on the Upper Levels Highway, crashing my little Nissan into some unsuspecting West Vancouver home and demolishing the auxiliary ballroom.
Anyway, I’ll be interested to see what comes of this fight between the insurance guys and auto repair guys. Is someone gouging us? Like, for real? We all know the usual drill: no doubt the vast majority of folks in the auto repair business are doing good, honest work. But the vast majority of folks in the general population have no idea what is going on in there anyway, so we just have to go along with whatever the car experts say. When we pay the bills for our new muffler holsters or gasket flutes, we’re left to just walk away yammering like Donald Trump trying to figure out what just happened.
“Honey, what is this bill for $2,300 for?”
“I don’t know. I’ve heard my wheels weren’t tracking right. Some people say. Most people don’t realize. I do. And these wheels, they weren’t straight. Believe me – I like ’em straight. They cost a fortune. It wasn’t my call. But we got new tires. The best tires. Fabulous tires. They’re my favourite kind of tires: WHITEwalls.”
Seriously, we just don’t know. In high school I took a small-engine repair class. All I remember is we had this ring of little tabs of various widths that we would have to slide into tiny gaps to make sure that they were just the right size. Damned if I can remember what we were measuring though. Spark plugs? Drive shafts? Rim jobs? I don’t know. I just remember that it was very important to get those gaps just right. If it was supposed to be 5/8th of a millimetre, and you somehow screwed it all up and made it 9/16th, your lawn mower would immediately explode, killing dozens of awkward teenage boys.
What I’m saying is, I wouldn’t know a crooked repair job even if it kicked me right in the ball joints. And I know there are many others like me, so it’s kind of nice to realize that there may be some folks fighting over how incredibly fair they are being to their customers.
Keep up the fighting, guys! Let’s get to the bottom of this. Just make sure that you don’t nick up any of your cars in the battle – that stuff is crazy expensive to fix.
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