Nothing Lasts Forever
Over the past six-plus years I've owned a BMW, I've driven past them a hundred times. Almost hit them at least a half dozen times. It was only a matter of time. A week ago my luck ran out, and a deer decided to leap (at full speed mind you) into the left side of my beautiful BMW.
Long ago I came to the realization that my BMW was no longer perfect. It had its share of sandblasting from the morning commute, and then there was the ding on the rear put there by a careless monkey tire changer while I was pinching pennies on tires. However, after all this time, the sides of this car were PERFECT. All those years of using what I've semi-jokingly referred to as "BMW approved parking" (a parking space away from crappy cars, uphill of shopping carts, and out of earshot of minivans with lots of screaming kids), had paid off. Not a scratch or a ding on the sides of this car. Until now, that is.
Oh, S***
Within about 5 seconds of the strike, I had completely written off the car. Given the force of the impact, I thought the entire left side of the car was trashed, and convinced myself that I would be going to the dealer the following morning to put my deposit down on a new 330ci. I was only about 1000 feet from the end of my driveway when it happened, so I drove up to the house to get out and take a close look at things. I couldn't believe my eyes. I was only missing the left rear view mirror cover and for the life of me I couldn't find any damage. I went back to the scene and managed to find the mirror cover and popped it back on. Aside from a small chip in the plastic and a few broken attachment clips, it held remarkably well.
Of course, that was at 11PM at night. Lack of light can hide many sins, so it didn't really surprise me when, under the bright light of day the following morning the damage became evident. It included a couple of small dings on the top of the front quarter panel and near the rear of the driver's door, and a scratched / distressed rear rim. There were also a lot of fine scratches in the clear. After a full wash and wax, I managed to compound out most of the fine scratches, but the depressions in the metal were unmistakeable.
Pass on paintless dent removal
Since the damage wasn't that bad, and the car does have over 105K miles on it, I wasn't expecting perfection in any repair, so I considered going with a paintless dent removal service. My goal was to get the car back to normal as quickly as possible, so I made arrangements a couple days later with the same company that does my dealer's work to take a look at it.
To make a long story short, I wasn't favorably impressed with their assessment. As it turns out, the biggest dent on the car was too close to the rear reinforced edge of the door to be correctable, and several other dings were in long, but subtle lines (apparently where the deer's ribs slid as the car moved past). The chance of adding ripples to the metal rather than removing the dents made me rethink this option almost immediately.
Like a Good Neighbor...
I had earlier made a claim with my insurance company for the damage, not really thinking that I'd get anything out of them. However, as a matter of procedure, they said they'd send out an adjuster and he would make an assessment of the damage.
I made arrangements to meet the adjuster in the parking lot at work. I mentioned that I had obtained a quote for paintless dent removal for approximately $150, but related that the largest dent could not be repaired in that manner. He agreed with me and proceeded to take close snapshots of the damage. "Don't worry. We'll fix it the right way", he promised.
I walked with him around the car and pointed out the other damage, including a scratched/gouged rear left rim. I also told him that the one-touch up feature of the driver's window no longer worked reliably -- the window would stop in various positions. It was still possible to close the window by holding the button down, but, hey -- this is a BMW, not a Ford. I don't have to tolerate that!
When the adjuster caught his eye on the ding on the rear of the car I told him how it had been created earlier and that I had planned to have the body shop fix that on my nickel while they had the paint mixed. He said "oh, don't worry about that...that's really quite minor and the estimate will include enough extra padding in labor and materials to cover that". He then went back to his van and proceeded to work up a quote to repair the damage using, interestingly enough, the same software body shops use for their estimates.
By the close of our meeting, I'd learned that he'd provide enough money in the claim to effectively paint the entire side and nose of the car. Why paint that much, you ask? Well, they have to paint both the driver's door and a portion of the front quarter panel to fix the obvious damage, then blend it into the surrounding panels. The problem is that all the existing damage from road debris would make it difficult to blend the paint properly. If this had happened in the first six months of ownership, they probably could have painted the door and a small portion of the quarter panel and been done with it. Such is the price for repainting an older car. Done correctly, it's an all-or-nothing affair.
Choosing the Shop
Once I had an estimate in hand, I had to choose a shop. I'm somewhat fortunate in that my brother has repaired more of his cars than I can count (so he's been down this road before), and I know of two shops that could have done the work. In other words, I know people in the biz and how the biz works. The downside is that both of the shops were relatively far away and I really wanted to keep an eye on the shop's progress. I also didn't like the idea of body shop personnel doing things a trained BMW mechanic should do, like swap the damaged rim, spin the new one up on a road-force balancer, and troubleshoot the problematic driver's side window motor.
I had known for some time that there was a body shop behind my dealer. They weren't owned by the dealership, but did a lot of their repair work. I asked my mechanic about them and he didn't have anything bad to say. I checked the BBB for negative reports and found none, so in the interest of convenience I ultimately decided to give them the job. I knew at that point I could stop by on my way to work every day to check on the progress, take pictures for the site, and have my very own mechanic that I've come to know and trust take care of the critical mechanicals.
Another important criteria for the shop was that they used computerized color matching to achieve the best match. Years ago, color matching was very much a trial and error process, and all too often resulted in the need to paint the entire car to effectively circumvent the matching process. Today, modern body shops utilize computerized color matching and auto-mixing systems to achieve a color almost indistinguishable from the original.
The owner of the shop did caution me that there was something he couldn't match -- new clearcoat to 6-year-old clearcoat. Seen in good light, it would be relatively easy to distinguish the newly painted surfaces from the old. I accepted that as a matter of course, but discounted it somewhat due to the fact that I have taken very good care of my paint so I knew the original clear was in pretty good shape for its age. I also asked them to buff out the entire car to clean up minor imperfections and effectively repolish the old clearcoat.
After this discussion, the shop owner asked me to bring the car by the following Monday...a bit earlier than his original 2-week leadtime estimate.
Week One
I dropped the car off Monday morning as they requested and came to find out Tuesday morning that they had just started work that morning. That kind of irritated me for a few seconds because while my insurance company was reimbursing me $16 a day for the rental car, I elected to upgrade to something more than flea power (a 2005 Toyota Corolla) for $25+various fees per day. In other words, I was paying about $15 a day for the privilege of driving a piece of junk while my car sat idle.
Fortunately, once they got started, things happened pretty quickly. I arrived Wednesday morning to find they had completely disassembled the components that would be repaired or removed to facilitate repair of an adjacent area. I found they had also prepared and started to fill and sand some of the more obvious damage areas yesterday, and had just put some filler on the dings in the top of the left front quarter panel. As my father used to say...progress is our most important product!
