Watch Out For That Fourth Step

These days, most decent repairers can do a good job of producing positive answers. Well-satisfied vehicle owners will generally stay with their insurers after a claim, and will even subsequently recommend the shop to friends and family. However, there may be a fourth issue rapidly emerging in consumer consciousness that could trump the original three: Did the shop restore the safety of the policyholder's car? New car ads, newspaper articles, and especially the internet increasingly focus on how the modern car protects its passengers. By now everyone has seen at least one scary crash dummy video. Vehicle owners with a collision claim have had a crash, and it's fresh in their mind. When they start asking questions about post-repair crashworthiness, shops and insurers should be ready with some reassuring answers.

Ten years ago, exotic structural designs were mostly found only in high-end luxury European vehicle makes. But now sophisticated materials and complex designs have become commonplace in many of the market's most popularly priced vehicles. For example, take a look at the unibody specs for a Ford Fiesta or Focus, a Chevrolet Malibu, a Honda Civic, or a Nissan Altima. You will find — in these and many others — some magnificently ingenious engineering in the structural designs, accomplished with the use of specialized dual-phase (DP) steels, ultra high strength (UHSS) steels, custom compounded aluminums, and even some magnesium.

The Cause for Complexity

What is the reason for all of this complexity? Safety and fuel economy are both dominant in consumer and regulatory consciousness, but their separate objectives are in natural engineering conflict.

The safer you make the car, the harder it is to make it light, and vice versa. Thus, vehicle manufacturers have had to develop highly sophisticated engineering designs, particularly for frame and unibody structural components:

In a front-end hit, everything forward of the passengers must collapse in a precisely predictable way that absorbs, dissipates, and diverts almost all of the crash energy before it gets to the cabin, while the same forces trigger airbag deployments with timing tolerances in milliseconds. The cabin itself, however, must do the exact opposite, rigidly resisting collapse in six axes of possible impact — front, back, left, right, up, and down. Yet, unprecedented levels of both competitive and regulatory fuel consumption demand the use of ever-lighter materials, with the physics of tensile and compressive values doing the work instead of mass and weight.

The OEMs have done a superb job of design and manufacture. As a result, where collision repairers have to put these cars back together again, there are formidable new technical challenges. To restore the car's originally designed crashworthiness, the repairer must use specialized methods and techniques dictated by these materials. Many of them are actually counterintuitive to traditional repair experience:

? Even though that Chevy Malibu's b pillar looks just like the ones we've seen for years, to restore its side impact strength, the car must be repaired in a way that's totally different from "the way we've always done it."

? Use the wrong material installing a windshield, and although it looks perfect, it has lost its role as a structural component of cabin stiffness and airbag deflection.

? A familiar structural part may look and feel just like the ones the technician has worked on many times before. In this year's model, however, the same component is made of dual-phase (DP) steel. If the technician heats it "the way we've always done it," then he will invisibly weaken the part beyond its design tolerance.

? To work on the new generation of aluminum components without an aluminum "clean room" will produce contamination and corrosion that can gradually compromises structural integrity.

? Surprisingly few inferior welds in the wrong places upfront can change air bag timing enough to make the difference between a black eye and a fatality. Yet many of the new metals will only form an adequate bond with "intelligent" welding equipment, requiring power not typically available in many shops.

There are hundreds of such concerns. New complex designs continue to pour out of the OEMs on a continual basis. Collision repair is no longer an art; it is (re)manufacturing science. No one knows how many repairers have invested in the necessary upgrades to restore vehicles' crashworthiness, but even an optimistic guess is a little sobering. A shop perfectly capable of a repair considered adequate 10 years ago needs to invest plenty of time and money in new equipment and quality SOPs to meet that standard today. For the new materials and designs, technicians need to become newly credentialed in straightening, applying corrosion resistance, and, above all, welding. Proud senior technicians often have to be gently coached away from old habits and techniques.

Tens of thousands of shops — some of them specifically recommended by the consumer's insurer — will repair about 11 million crashed cars this year and then put them back on the road. It's not getting easier: Even in the recession we are adding, coincidentally, another 11 million or so new cars to the American fleet annually, virtually all with new designs.

Still, there are glimmers of good news. Manufacturers have to be concerned with how their cars are going to be repaired; with CPO programs and so many cars on lease they are going to get most of them back to sell a second time. Many OEMs are in aggressive programs to get dealer body shops up to the required levels. Earlier this year, a major German manufacturer decided not only that it doesn't want certain models to be welded outside the factory, but also that an alternative non-welding technique be employed for the field.

In the U.K., shops and insurers have begun to establish a rather different model, whereby definitive standards directly denote the shop's readiness to do a fully compliant repair. As I called around the U.S. making inquiries, I was encouraged to find in most markets a small but growing subset of repairers who seem to be either well along the way to the new levels of precision and compliance or, astonishingly, are already there. Interestingly, they seem to come in all sizes and types, and share no common affiliation.

Typically repairers have invested aggressively in "intelligent" welding equipment, repair methods information services from the OEMs and Alldata, custom-configurable frame benches, and the latest ICAR courses on the exotic metals. Some have begun to use VeriFacts, a third-party repair quality auditor-coach, to independently document, track, and quantify their safe repair compliances, with unannounced inspection visits. Also common among them is upgrading the shop's electrical supply to bring adequate power to the generation welders.

What these repairers seem to have most in common is a determination to separate themselves from competitors, and to educate vehicle owners accordingly. Thanks to a cantankerous media and the plaintiff's bar, our America consumer is a cranky connoisseur of hazards: asbestos, unreliable infant car seats, insecticides, lead in baby toys, and so on. When the policyholder sinks his or her teeth into the idea of a safely repaired car, the world may start to change for those who don't have good answers.