That’s right, you work in insurance, don’t you, Flutterby? Any advice for us in this situation?
Not in insurance. I’m just a lowly shipping clerk currently working on my accounting diploma.
I don’t really have advice, but IMO considering the way things are here and seeing that the car is still driveable the body shop should’ve given you an idea of when they would be able to get to it and allowed you to bring it in at that time. That way you would’ve had a vehicle to drive and wouldn’t now be paying for the car (or paying less, or heck maybe nothing at all since the loaner might’ve been available). This would also mean they wouldn’t have who knows how many cars crammed into the shop/lot waiting to be seen.
But that would of course mean they have an idea of how much work they had, when they could get to it, and have a list of some kind so they would know who was next and make sure no one was jumping line.
I sympathize, everything is running rough right now, you see it in so many places especially in any sort of service industry.
My dad did scheduling for his auto body shop for 40 years with nothing more complex than a calendar and a pencil. Having a car sit for 3 weeks is just incompetance. Especially with a car that can be driven, there’s no reason to ask them to bring the car in when you don’t have time to work on it.
It’s been sitting in a body shop for over a month? Why didn’t you call them and pester them to get your car repaired? Yes, you had a rental which was conveniently paid for by your insurance company, but every dime you spend is reflecting more and more negatively on your file. Even if it wasn’t your fault, it’s still a claim and could count against you as far as insurability and how much your premiums will cost.
It’s something for the small claims court system and I would think you’ld lose. It’s not inapropriate charges on the card. You should have insisted on a loaner car being giving to you as soon as one was available, and not let this go on past the time it was covered by your insurance unless you were ready to pay the rental.
I don’t disagree with you there, it should be reasonably easy to do. Even with the amount of work and the vagaries of employees currently.
Holy crap girl - why is your insurance so high?
I note that it comes as no suprise to any of us in Calgary that your car has been there for a month. I’ve got a few body shops among my clients, all of them are currently booked about 5 month into the future. However, it is curious that YOU were not informed of this by the body shop in advance. They certainly should have made you aware of the fact beforehand. I think you have a case in that respect, but unless you’ve also made an honest attempt to resolve it with them as I mentioned, I think you’re SOL.
Does anything bad about customer service surprise us now? Anyone who’s been shopping, out to eat, or anything like that here has some sort of story to tell. I’m more surprised when someone is surprised at the bad service… (not that I don’t complain about it myself mind you, just I’m not surprised about it).
Well, that’s $2000 Canadian, so like $22.50 in real money.
Acc to the OP, she dropped the car off at a mutually agreed upon date.
“He brought it to them on the day they told him to in mid-December…”
No excuses for not having work done on it in a month. None at all. And I don’t understand featherlou’s reluctance to follow up.
Wait, I calculated it wrong; it’s more like $1500 per year per car. Which is still not taken into account when we make one piddly claim in 20 years of driving. But the auto insurance industry ass-reaming is a subject for another thread.
Sorry, Flutterby - I’m getting you confused with a different Calgary Doper.
PunditLisa, we’ve been calling the body shop and insurance company almost daily since about January 9. We aren’t doing anything else until we actually get the car back in our possession, simply because we’re afraid of what such an unprofessional body shop might do with our car if we start procedings before then (i.e. not release it to us with flimsy excuses; in other words, kind of what they’re doing now).
In hindsight, we should have taken the rental back the day the insurance was used up. I don’t think it occurred to either of us that we would be left holding the bag for a rental car when it so obviously was the body shop’s fault that we were getting charged for it. Also, when the body shop bothered to return our calls, they were always telling us that the car would be ready very soon. You know how it goes. We’ve never been hosed in this particular way before, and I’m afraid we haven’t handled it optimally.
You need to shop around. My insurance on a 2007 Volvo S40 is only $1,200 per year and I haven’t had insurance for three years (thus making me higher risk). I’m with Meloche Monex, in case you’re interested.
I think my husband will indeed be interested after this mess is all settled.
featherlou, I am an insurance claims professional <snerk, too> in the US and you’ve been given a lot of good advice in this thread.
Unfortunately, your beef is not with the rental company here. Both you and the body shop share in the responsibility, though. The body shop was wrong for asking you to bring your car in on a particular date and then sit on it for over a month. Your car was driveable so there was absolutely no reason for you to be in a rental until they were ready to work on your car. A general rule of thumb is that you are entitled to one day of rental for every 6 hours of repair time on the estimate (plus weekends if applicable) so you can calculate what you (or your insurance company) should have been charged had the shop done the work as you intended.
You also have some responsibility here which I believe you’ve already acknowledged. You can’t sit on your laurels waiting for someone else to take care of you. When you dropped off the car, a logical question would have been “When will it be done?” Depending on the answer from the body shop, you should have then continued to follow up with the shop, daily if necessary, until the repairs were complete.
If you can document your agreement with the shop, you may have a successful case in Small Claims Court (or whatever the Canadian equivalent may be) but against the shop, not the insurance company or the rental company. I believe a judge would consider that it’s not reasonable for a consumer to anticipate that it will take this long to get a car fixed, especially since it was driveable in the first place.
Lastly, the insurance company refusing to return your calls is unacceptable. Everyone has a superior so keep calling up the chain of command until you can get someone to talk to you. They have no reason to get involved in this other than the fact that they referred you to the shop in the first place. At the very least, they will want to know of the poor service you received so that they can remove that shop from their “preferred shop” list.
Best of luck to you and let us know how this gets resolved.
This last is all very good advice. But if your Insurance company told you to go to that Shop, then your Ins co bears a portion of the blame.
I can’t see how this could be true unless they forced them to go to that shop. From what I gathered, they simply recommended it.
Call your insurance company. I don’t know what insurance company you have, but I have AAA. (yes, I realize that is Auto Association of America, but they probably have AAC or something). Anyhow, they have “preferred” repair shops which are required to perform to certain standards. Talk to your agent and find out what the standards are for your repair shop. Find out if your insurance company, who does FAR more business with the body shop than you do, would be willing to “negotiate” for you a little bit. The body shop will see the wisdom of keeping their preferred status, if they have one.
If they don’t, just make sure you put all your body shop charges on your credit card, and then dispute THOSE charges. Tie it up as long as possible, perhaps the body shop will settle up with you that way.
As I understand, the issue is that the cost of the actual repair is being paid for by the insurance co. directly, so it would not be charged to featherlou’s card. I could be wrong.
The Canadian version is CAA, actually, and this body shop is listed as one recommended by the CAA and the Better Business Bureau. Trust me, both of those bodies will be receiving letters from us regarding the conduct of this body shop.
And yes, we were given a time to completion when we dropped the car off - eight working days. That was mid-December, then we got into all the Christmas holidays and such, so we started calling the body shop in January. That’s also when the body shop didn’t return our calls, and when they did, they told us things like, “There’s only one guy here who knows the status of all of our cars, and he isn’t in this week.” Honestly, I don’t know what more we could have done at the time, except returned the rental car when the insurance portion was used up, and we only see that in hindsight because we kept thinking that every day would be the day that we’d get the car back.
Actually, I think this thread is over. I originally started it to get some advice on disputing the VISA charge, got that advice, and we’re moving on from there.
Mods, could you close this thread please?