When your car needs a repair job done, be it after a collision or simply to repair an ugly dent, you know it is not going to be an easy task, unless you are within the warranty period or has a shop known to you that is truly reliable.
This is because any repair job that your car needs to be done needs an auto body shop that will give you a reasonable estimate with a guarantee of transparency with the invoice and bill payment. To ensure you pay only for what you want, most people needs to shop around and finalize on one shop only after collecting several estimates. But if you are a car owner and have gone through many such repair job sessions, you might be knowing by now, that it is not surprising to find contrasting estimates from different shops. Yes, it is a known fact around the world that the estimates given by different body shops do differ, and there are variety of reasons, and we are here to let you explain these reasons.
Reasons Behind the Difference
There are various factors that play a role in the price discrepancies you get from various auto body repair shops. These include:
Quality of the Parts to be Replaced
When your car parts need to be changed, it is the auto body shop who selects the parts for your car. While some parts are easily visible, there are parts that are difficult to see only by popping the hood. So you might not know what quality of parts the shop is using, unless you pressurize them to show you before they use them. So, the price will vary, between the shops who by default will use OEM parts and those who might have used aftermarket parts. That is why the estimate given for the OEM parts will be much higher than the shop who wants to lure you with a lesser estimate because they won’t guarantee you high quality parts as replacements.
Variety of Materials to be Used:
The steps involved in a repair process might differ from shop to shop. Components like nuts, screws, bolts, paint, etc. that are bought by the shop from different vendors might differ in their prices, and this difference will get automatically reflected in your bill.
Service Charges:
Service charges differ from shop to shop depending upon their infrastructure, establishment cost etc.
Quality of Work:
While some auto body shops will appoint highly experienced and professionally skilled mechanics, others might run the show with a mediocre team. The effect can be seen both in the quality of work and from there, in the bill amount. Especially when the shops are dealing with collision repair, the job will need professional expertise, and the ones who are tied up with training schools to train up their mechanics will automatically charge more for the quality of work they would ensure.
But that doesn’t indicate or ascertain that an expensive bill will ensure an effective repair work. So make sure to gather a bit of information on the shops you count upon and then select the one that has the record of highest customer satisfaction ratings.