Damn sorry to hear and yes the insurance companies are getting lazier
I had a night collision with a fairly small deer a little before Christmas (a rude gift). I saw it suddenly coming onto the road; slammed the brakes but was not able to slow down enough to avoid it. The road was not obviously icy, but I think I did skid a bit. It hit squarely in the front center. This was coming out of a small town with reduced speed limit, and I was speeding up to get back to highway speed on the two-lane. I'm guessing I was going somewhere around 40 mph at the point of impact.
Cost? A hair over $6,000 when all was said and done. The photos show pretty much all of the exterior damage (I didn't take any from farther back.) It needed a new bumper/covers, impact bar, grilles, ambient temp sensor, radiator and support, shutters, intercooler, one and headlamp.
This incident taught me NOT to submit a photo claim in the insurance company's app or otherwise. YMMV, but I am convinced this will almost always result in an unrealistically low up-front approved cost, then you end up leaving your vehicle sitting at the dealer and eventually undergoing a teardown until they can prepare a supplement request. The body shop also expressed frustration with this process and the fact that many major insurers are pushing it.
I ended up talking to my State Farm agent, and she got corporate to make an exception allowing the body shop to order all parts up front based on their OWN visual estimate, even though there usually is no "takeback" of a photo estimate. Considering I had already been waiting for awhile before that for a backordered grill to come in, I wanted to reduce the risk of another wait for something on backorder after the teardown happened. Thankfully, the grill was the only real wait. For whatever reasons, the whole repair did end up taking two weeks, though.
One hiccup was a used or aftermarket headlight that had a nonfunctional "eyebrow" DRL. After that happened, as the last part of the repair, SF agreed to a new OEM light (yay).
Silver lining: My radiators had a ton of crushed fins for some unknown reason. So at least I have that new. The main radiator was bent in really good after the collision. The back of it got to 1/4-1/8" of the front center of the cooling fan. But the radiator did not leak and remained effective at cooling, thankfully (winter may have helped). So vehicle was drivable until all of the ordered parts came in.
I like to think I've always been pretty attentive at watching for deer, and it would've been pretty hard to avoid this one - but after this reminder of the tremendous hassle of a wait and the deductible, I like to think that now I might get even better at it! (knock on wood)
Sponsored
