NAVIGATING THE HAIL REPAIR AND CLAIMS PROCESS
Story by SARAH PERKINS
Canadian weather continues to grow more extreme in the wake of global climate shifts. Summer storms are increasingly becoming the new normal. From the rise in flooding to hail events, both the environment and vehicles are left to weather the damage. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), “hailstorms and other natural disasters are increasing in frequency and severity. With today’s extreme weather events, insured catastrophic losses in Canada now routinely exceed two billion dollars annually.” Notably, the hailstorm that took place on June 13, 2020 in Calgary, Alberta resulted in approximately 70,000 insurance claims and over $1.3 billion in insured damages alone.
With questions of weather patterns on the rise, Collision Repair magazine reached out to industry experts, Tony DeSantis, Manager, Strategic Opportunities and Quality Control, Dented Paintless Repairs Inc. and Bing Wong, Managing Director, Canadian Hail Repair and United Hail Repair, to gain insight into the hail claims process, its technologies, as well as how the current state of the environment contributes to the cost of claims and the timeline of repairs.
When speaking to Tony DeSantis, he noted that “not all hail repairs are expensive” because “the advent and adoption of paintless dent repair (PDR) has allowed for significant savings in repair costs, reduced parts usage and short cycle times when the damage is light.”
DeSantis continued that, “PDR pricing is directly correlated with the severity of the damage. As a result, it is not unheard of for complete PDR hail repair costs to be as low as $1,000 if the damage is minimal. However, more significant hail damage can be expensive to repair due to several factors. Hail damage often affects one entire side and all the top panels of a vehicle, and if the damage is severe, the repair costs can escalate quickly. For example, if you had to replace a roof on a newer Ford F-150 via the traditional conventional repair, you would be looking at 25 plus hours of labour at a cost of more than $4,000. If the PDR process can be used, the costs are often less with a much quicker cycle time.”
“Additionally, technological advancements in vehicles contribute to increased repair costs. These advancements necessitate additional education and repair steps such as ADAS calibrations.”
However, DeSantis said, “the skill level of PDR technicians has increased significantly over the past 20 years, allowing for more complex and difficult repairs to be completed. Furthermore, vehicle part delays and scarcity, capacity concerns, all exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have forced PDR technicians to enhance their skills further. These delays have required insurers, bodyshops and PDR technicians to collaborate more closely to repair panels that might have been historically replaced.”
Finally, DeSantis highlighted how “panel composition has increased repair costs. Many OEMs are using many different metals, some of which require more time, more tooling and more skill to repair, such as aluminum.” “Ultimately, PDR also helps reduce the overall carbon footprint of the repair and maintains the vehicle’s original parts and paint. An analysis commissioned by Dented showed that the PDR process on an ‘average sized car’ with hail damage resulted in 39 times less carbon emissions than a conventional repair.” As a result of these variables, for DeSantis, “hail repair and the claims process varies a bit from insurer to insurer on how they prefer to handle the process and is often dictated by the size of the storm and overall severity of the damage.”
“For the most part, in a CAT scenario, a key component in the process is getting the bulk of the vehicles estimated as quickly as possible. This is a critical piece in that it must be done accurately to minimize any potential supplements afterwards. In addition to ensuring the vehicle is clean and proper lighting is used, a skilled PDR estimator will be able to determine which panels can be repaired via PDR versus traditional methods. In addition, the PDR estimator will identify any cracked paint, damaged mouldings or other parts that need to be replaced.”
“Dented strongly believes in VALE PDR Certification for technicians. It provides for an unbiased assessment of a technician’s capabilities and sets a standard for who should be qualified to be able to repair a vehicle.” When asked about the current state of hail claims research and technology, DeSantis commented that “it is difficult to quantify and determine how effective some of the procedures currently used are in either reducing or eliminating potential hail events.”
“Within Alberta, cloud seeding is a common practice, with the intention of reducing the overall size of hail. There is a lot of new research being conducted by Western University and the Northern Hail Project, whose objective is to ultimately manage the risk and damage associated by catastrophic hail events to all aspects of the economy.
WEATHER WATCHERS
WEATHER WATCHERSOntario-based researchers are hoping to take a dent out of the hail claims process by using climate technology to better understand forecast and weather warnings.
According to CBC News, Julian Brimelow, executive director of the Northern Hail Project–which is based out of London, Ont.–aims to establish a hail pad network in Canada’s hail alley which extends from just south of Caroline, Alberta to just north of Cochrane, Alberta.
The hail pad network is a static network made up of 40 sensor pads, and complemented by 20 sensors in and around Calgary, that are sensitive to hail impacts. For Brimelow, the goal of this technology is to better understand the number of storms occurring as well as their size, and then to use this technology to better advise the public and the industry so that vehicle damage and future claims can be avoided, or at the very least, lessened.
“The reality is,” DeSantis continued, “these events continue to occur and they do cause damage. We are seeing increased measures put in place to help mitigate potential losses. As technology continues to evolve, we see alerts being sent to consumers advising them of potential damaging hail, suggesting they take appropriate precautions.”
“As weather patterns are changing, we are also seeing more storms within regions that traditionally haven’t seen that much hail before. For example, Ontario is traditionally not a very hail intense province, however, in 2023, there were at least five separate larger storms that caused damage.”
With the increase in bigger storms, when asked how long the hail repair process takes, DeSantis concluded that “there are so many factors that need to be considered on how long a storm may take to process hundreds of claims. Do the repairs require parts replacements which are typically hoods and roofs, and if so, what is the parts availability? We have seen in larger CATS that parts availability can quickly become an issue. There is also bodyshop capacity, as these repairs are often larger and take longer, creating a delay. In these instances, it is not unheard of to have repairs completed more than one year after the initial storm. Although, PDR can help with timelines.”
Bing Wong, managing director at Canadian Hail Repair and United Hail Repair, explained that their preferred process is also one that allows hail damage files to be sent to the body shops for processing.
“At the bodyshop,” Wong noted, “we can determine what the best repair process is for each vehicle and build a proper repair plan for approved repairs. When the volume of claims is too large for the bodyshops in the market to handle, we will set up CAT centres or drive-in appraisal centres to help see customers more quickly.”
For Wong, despite potential changes in national weather conditions and shifts in automotive technology, Canadian Hail Repair “is not yet convinced that scanning technologies provide a clear and consistent net benefit in speed or cost for insurers.” Wong further commented that his group of companies have worked extensively with scanning companies and while “these technologies certainly will be a part of the future hail claims processing, today, they still require a considerable amount of human participation.”
The group also “does not see Canada as having large enough hail events year over year to require investment to maintain, deliver and set up the systems as well as keeping the technology up to date in a market that is so dynamic globally.”
Compared with areas such as the United States, where Wong’s hail company operates as United Hail Repair, he believes that “hail damage events are largely cyclical and regional and we still do not see wide spread use of scanning technology even in markets like Texas and Colorado that each receive more hail every year than all of Canada”.
Unlike Desantis, for Wong, “we have found that hail is a relatively minor problem in Canada with many other global markets experiencing relatively many more hail events and far greater claims volumes.”
However, despite these beliefs, for Wong, when hail events do occur domestically, the costs associated with claims can routinely be expensive “because large hailstones can damage almost all of the panels of a vehicle in a brief moment, whereas, in a typical minor car accident, maybe only two or three panels are damaged on average.”
Additionally, Wong further commented that “hail can also cause fairly extreme damage to roof panels, roof rails and rear quarter panels that are difficult or impossible to replace on a vehicle.”
To help mitigate costs while also ensuring efficient repairs, Canadian Hail Repair “believes that using PDR can bring significant reductions in claims costs.” This is specifically because “savings are realized by reducing total losses” and because “PDR can prevent the need to replace and refinish many exterior panels.”
For Wong, “PDR can turn the irreparable into easily repairable in many cases,” with his team “saving hoods, decklids, roof panels and even doors from requiring replacement and refinishing.”
With this all being said, Wong was clear to stress that ultimately, “repair costs will always be a concern for insurers when there are suddenly thousands of extra claims to process in any given market.”
