By Jeff Sanford
Toronto, Ontario — August 13, 2015 — The weekend is almost here. How about some fun, light reads for the end of the week? The following are items, notes and bits from the week that was in the collision repair industry.
– Collision repair centre employees looking for some online entertainment in their spare time could do a lot worse than to head over to popular website Reddit, or at least one of its pages. Reddit has pages for almost everything, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the site has a page chronicling some of the oddly damaged vehicles that show up in repair facilities. You can check it out at reddit.com/r/justrolledintotheshop. For example, some lucky tech got to work on a car that had asphalt dumped on it. You can see what they had to deal with in the photo at right.
– Need a good tip to pass along to customers? Here’s one: Don’t put your feet up on the dash. If you get into even a small accident the airbag deploys at over 300 miles per hour. If you have your feet on the dash the effects can be brutal. Check out this first person account of the fallout here.
– Volkswagen is now the world’s best selling car company. The German automaker beat out Toyota for the top spot for the very first time.
– Amy Laban, a Miss England semi-finalist in 2012, has modelled for Gap and has played women’s soccer in the UK. She also claimed to have whiplash after a 2012 crash. The problem was, however, investigators obtained photos of her taking part in a “gruelling fitness tests for the beauty pageant and participating in a skydive while she claimed to be injured.” The day after the crash Laban’s Twitter page showed her taking part in a charity skydive. Six weeks after the crash she posted a picture on Twitter showing her riding a Bucking Bronco rodeo bull machine. She was sentenced to some jail time for insurance fraud.
– Is Iran the new hot auto market? In the wake of Obama’s recent deal with the country, American companies are “evaluating business opportunities across key industries” (according to one media report). One of the biggest untapped markets is the car market. Iran’s educated middle-class population are buying up vehicles. The country saw 985,000 passenger vehicles sold in 2014. A new law has created a “vehicle scrappage” program to discard aged vehicles from its roads, so business is set to boom. European auto companies had dominated the Iranian market. That market lead evaporated when the 2012 round of economic sanctions forced them out. Chinese automobile manufacturers rapidly filled the void. The big brands in Iran now are Chery, Lifan and Changan. No wonder Obama wanted that deal.
– New Brunswick insurance rates have hit a 12-year high. Generous accident benefits and harsh winter weather have pushed up the number and size of insurance claims in the province.
– Want to see what happens when a car hits a house and loosens a natural gas line? Click here!
