I had a bit of a mishap today with another car, a 1991 Ford Mustang (backed into the other guy’s front fender; I was trying to back into a space, he drove up right behind me). There was no damage to my car since mine has a black rubber bumper in back, but his front bumper (made of composite?) had a number of deep scratches in the paint. Rather than going through insurance for this, we talked about my just covering the cost of fixing the scratches.
Another friend of mine has suggested now that it may not be possible to just fix the paint because of the bumper material, and that the entire bumper might need to be replaced. This prospect obviously makes me pretty unhappy, since I’m sure replacing the bumper would be rather more costly.
Anyone have any ideas about how much either a repaint or replacement might cost? I’d like to brace myself for bad news before I talk to the guy this evening.
I wouldn’t assume you have to pay for it. Anyway an auto paint store can give you the matching paint & you can put it in a sprayer bottle they should also have. That should cost about $20 for a pint. Sometimes it’s more. I can’t really tell if without looking at it.
Bumpers are relatively inexpensive. I just replaced mine for $95. My son and I did it ourselves, but I can’t imagine a body shop charging more than an hour’s labor for it, so say another $80.
The last time I got rear-ended, the bumper “cover” of my '93 Ford Taurus was badly gouged and cost just under $600 to be replaced and painted.
Keep in mind this is what the body shop charged the other driver’s insurance company, and this was at a Ford dealer’s body shop in the San Francisco area.
My ex’s bumper was slid into by someone who couldn’t handle their car in the snow. It left little cracks in the paint on the plastic bumper. When he took it in, the guys said that it didn’t look too bad at the moment, but that moisture gets into the cracks and causes all the paint to peel off the plastic.
Cost to replace the bumper - around $700. His insurance didn’t go up at all.
“Acceptable” repairs when an insurance company is involved means nothing less than restoring the car to pre-loss condition. If the bumper cover is untextured, then the scratches can probably be rubbed/sanded out and the cover repainted. If there is any kind of texture on the cover, then the scratches can’t be removed without losing part of the texture (believe it or not, there seems to be no reliable way to copy the texture onto the repaired spot, although I thought Ronco took care of this in the 70s) and the cover needs to be replaced. The cover itself is not too expensive, $90-$500 depnding on the car. But painting and installing the replacement usually costs as much again as the part.
lovelee the reason the insurance rates didn’t go up most likely has to do with what is called a “surcharge threshhold.” Collision & property damage claims below the threshhold, often $1,000, do not trigger the surcharge. Damages of $1,001, $10,001 or even $50,000 carry an identical surcharge. Makes little sense to me, but that is generally the truth. Honestly.
