CHARLOTTE (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — There’s never a good time to crash your car, but if it happens right now, it may be a while before you get on the road.
“You’re going into every repair blind now and so it’s really hard to manage and hard to process workflow and things like that,” said Kyle Bradshaw, president of the Carolina’s Collision Association.
Collision repair shops are backed up and there are two main reasons why according to Bradshaw, who is also the director of fixed operations at K and M Collisions.
“The supply chain is broke,” adds Bradshaw. “We’re experiencing a large amount of parts delays across all manufacturers and then added to that a lot of carriers have severely cut staff.”
Shops say it’s taking close to a month for an adjuster to start the claims process, and once the work starts, there could be a delay in getting the parts, some up to six months.
“It’s not anything isolated to North Carolina, but when you couple those two things together, you have a recipe for disaster.”
It doesn’t matter how small or large the damage is on a vehicle. Those working at collision repair shops say on average people will not get their car back for at least 40 days.
This means shops must go by that adage, honesty is the best policy. Because right now they hope things will get better, but they don’t know when.
“Times are unprecedented,” said Bradshaw. “There’s a lot of things that go on in the collision repair process that are just outside of the control of the repair and understanding some of these parts, it literally could be four to six months.”
