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Minor hail damage - what to do?


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So, I unfortunately got caught in a severe storm yesterday down here in Williamsburg, VA (my username is out of date) - in fact there was a tornado warning and I had to ride out the storm in a Barnes & Noble, while my car unfortunately rode it out in the parking lot. No tornado, fortunately, but it was a heck of a storm and unfortunately the car suffered some hail damage. I honestly don't know if it's even repairable and on a 5 year old car with 70k miles I'm not inclined to repair it if it's gonna be a huge (and expensive) hassle.

 

I'd best describe it as being the most minimal type of dings you could imagine - just looking at the car you probably wouldn't notice it but in the light at the right angle you can see 'em. So, I'm wondering if I should just let it go or look into the possibility of repairing maybe at least the worst dings. To give you an idea of the worst, here's a shot of the roof. The driver's side also got pelted and has those annoying dimples that show up in certain light. But generally, you don't see it. The aluminum hood emerged unscathed - apparently it takes more abuse than the roof! (The trunk lid also came away unscathed.) Any advice?

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$200 comprehensive deductible I believe. But if there's no way to do it without tearing out the headliner, then it's not worth it imo. I thought they could do PDR without getting in from behind, sort of how those DIY kits pull it from the outside, but reading up on it I guess not. Anyway, probably just best to live with it - so far when I try to show people they're like "what damage? I can't see anything."

 

Interesting that the aluminum hood came away undamaged. Also, does Subaru use even thinner sheetmetal than average for today's ultra-fragile cars? I felt like other cars in the same lot came away with less evidence of having been through that hail storm.

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Taking out the headliner is no big deal. If it's a legit body shop, they will have no issues taking it out and putting it back in w/o doing any damage. Usually they will just drop it and leave it in the car. They have to stand outside the car and watch the dent being worked out anyway.

 

I live in Kansas and deal with hail dents every spring and summer. If I get lucky I only get PDR done once a year. From all the places that do PDR around here, it is a talent to have. There are good PDR places and bad ones too. If you do decide to take it to a shop that does PDR, do your homework. Find out who does good work and read the reviews or ask around. One idea is to call a quality auto dealer, like a Porsche dealership, and ask them who they use.

 

I do know there are other ways of getting very small dents out of metal w/o PDR, one of them is dry ice. I believe they heat up the metal a bit and then put a piece of dry ice on the dent. It shrinks up so quick that it pops the dents out. They use that method on areas where PDR cannot get to if the dent is small enough.

 

So, if it were me, it wouldn't hurt to find out who does good PDR work around your area and ask them about how much it'll cost to get fixed. Just get an estimate and weigh out your options. $200 is a small deductible but, your dents are minor and it might be around $200-$500 to get it fixed.

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^^^ That. Definitely get an estimate. If you can avoid the insurance claim then that is a good thing. It will raise your rates and could wind up on carfax someday when you are trying to sell the car. PDR is a fairly high profit margin business. If they know you are trying to keep it under your deductible then they will probably work with you. Most of those could be pulled without even getting under the headliner most likely, so it may not cost as much as if it were on a door.

_________________________________________

“Cleanliness becomes more important as godliness becomes more unlikely.”

O C D E T A I L S . C O M

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As far as I know, comprehensive will not raise your premium unless the insurance company finds out you are deliberately finding out ways you are having mother nature damage your car in one form or another or you are damaging it and trying to claim a comprehensive claim. Then you will probably have to worry about them dropping you or insurance fraud. Hail damage and engine damage from water (hydro locked) is fairly common around here, I've never heard anyone say their comprehensive claim made their premium go up.

 

you are right about the high profit margin, they work with you on your deductible. I've never had to pay out of pocket for PDR and I have a $500 deductible.

 

It doesn't matter where the dent is, whether it's on a door or roof, a dent is a dent. The way the insurance company, and body shops, come up with the estimate is the size of the dent and how many. Say you have a bunch of minor dents and a couple dents that are a little bit bigger. The insurance company finds the biggest dent and counts how many dents are on the panel. They will take the size of the biggest dent and say all dents are that size on the panel and this is how much it will cost to fix. They have a size chart they go off of, it makes the estimate very easy to do. That's another reason why there is a high profit margin in PDR.

 

Most insurance companies will also estimate the damage to be a bit higher than it will actually be to fix, another reason they can work with your deductible.

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If PDR is such a profitable business, maybe that's part of why automakers have no incentive to improve upon the crappy ultra-thin sheetmetal that's used on today's fragile cars. I just saw that Subaru ad with the hot air balloons where the announcer says something like, "nature can surprise you, that's why we got a Subaru" and all I could think was Subarus are as fragile as every other car out there!

 

I wish the technology would evolve to some sort of plastic/composite material for car exteriors. I definitely miss the plastic door panels and quarter panels on my old Saturn SL2!

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They are making panels thinner because it makes the cars lighter and it's cheaper to produce. Subarus panels are still thicker than some other cars out there. My wife's '01 civic gets hail damage VERY easily. I've owned 2 saturns (94 SC2 and 97 SL2) and owned a 98 Z28 and 01 Camaro SS. My saturns roof would get hail damage bad but my camaros were nm'ing better. The only panels on my camaros that were metal was the rear quarter panels. It took baseball size hail to dent those panels.

 

I have noticed that the LGT roof is flimsy compared to the rest of the car. I just did a complete detail on my LGT with an orbital buffer and it flexed quite a bit way much more than the other panels but flexed less than other cars I've detailed.

 

The LGT is a very well built car but the newer the car, the more panels will get flimsier.

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You can't compare a 25 or 30k car to a 15k car though. The Legacy SHOULD have thicker sheet metal than a Civic. Considering they market these cars to tuners, autoxers, and rally enthusiasts, you'd think they would make them all but bulletproof. But no... They use the flimsiest material the NTSB will allow I guess. I don't know if the NTSB is involved at all, but surely someone out there regulates the materials cars are made of. Sure they test crash them and give them safety ratings, but if the frame is the only thing built to take an impact, then what's the point? I want to know how my car will hold up to three kids in my garage. I want to know it can survive the average that mother nature can throw at it, which includes the occasional hail storm. I'm not talking about golf ball hail here, but it should be able to survive at least a few stones. Screw the crash test ratings. I want the 'real world survival' ratings.

 

This is why I won't buy a new car ever again. I want to see this car after two years of use to see how well it holds up. If I could have seen my '05 two years in the future and realized the paint on my wife's fingernails is stronger than the paint on my car, then I wouldn't have bought it. I would have bought an '03 330xi that I know had better paint and I would have been just as happy.

_________________________________________

“Cleanliness becomes more important as godliness becomes more unlikely.”

O C D E T A I L S . C O M

OCDETAILS BLOG

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This is why I won't buy a new car ever again. I want to see this car after two years of use to see how well it holds up. If I could have seen my '05 two years in the future and realized the paint on my wife's fingernails is stronger than the paint on my car, then I wouldn't have bought it. I would have bought an '03 330xi that I know had better paint and I would have been just as happy.

 

I swore off new cars after my Saturn got beat up on crappy rural Pennsylvania roads. I put 220,000 miles on that car, but I hit a deer with it and it wasn't worth fixing the front end damage to get it to pass inspection (along with numerous other issues). So I ended up selling that car for parts and I picked up a used 2000 Saturn SL2 for not much more than I would've spent fixing up my '97. I owned that car for a year until a tree fell and crushed it, and that's when I gave in and got the Subaru. I was sorry to give up the dent resistant plastic body panels - I hate door and fender dings.

 

Unfortunately, several years' worth of strategically parking my car to avoid annoying door dings was undone by just a couple minutes of hail. Maybe the universe is telling me to be less materialistic! :)

 

If GM had allowed Saturn to evolve as a stand-alone subsidiary as originally intended instead of turning it into a redundant GM-clone distributor (essentially the US division of Opel in its later years), I would've kept buying those rugged plastic cars from Spring Hill, TN! Spring Hill was originally supposed to build a midsize car back in the late 90's, but GM canceled that in favor of the unimpressive Opel Vectra based L Series that was assembled in Wilmington, DE. That car did retain the plastic panels for the doors and front fenders, while the rear quarter panels were steel. But the car was a kludge and didn't have the reliability of the Spring Hill products. That was really the beginning of the end for the great Saturn experiment.

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  • 3 weeks later...
So, $700 is the PDR estimate. Which means I'm out the $200 comp deductible if I get it done, but I probably will. Any problems with the headliner or door panels for those who've had PDR done before?
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I don't really understand why you are so worried about them dropping the headliner or taking off the door panels. This is my first Subaru and I've taken about every panel off except for the headliner. I have had absolutely no issues taking it off or putting it back on, they are very well designed, compared to my domestic vehicle I've owned.

 

Unless the shop does a hack job, there is nothing to worry about. Do your homework and find out who does good PDR around there.

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^ What he said. These guys do this stuff all the time. Go watch some shows on Velocity or Discovery or TLC (or whatever channels have the tuner/restoration shows) and you'll see that these guys do it all the time and it goes back in looking brand new.
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