Most people live busy lives and figuring out the best time to take your car into the auto body shop can prove difficult. You keep pushing it to the back burner because other more important things keep coming up. Luckily, you can do a couple of things to squeeze it into your schedule more easily. Let’s take a look at how we work around your busy schedule.
Start with a Phone Call
Many times, the thing that holds people back the most comes from them not realizing how little time the repair could take. They continue to put it off because they think it will take over a week to receive the repair. It depends on the repair, but auto body repairs usually take from two to five days. Minor auto body work requires one to two days of work. Give us a call over the phone, and we can give you an estimate of the time so that you can plan for it.
Just keep in mind that we can only give you an approximate amount of time on it and how long it takes to get it fixed. Knowing how long it would take will let you fit it into your schedule more easily. We can’t give a diagnosis over the phone, however, because we may miss crucial repairs that were hidden on the vehicle.
Maintenance Prevents Costly Future Problems
You want to make the repairs on your car as soon as possible because if you continue to drive a car with damages, it will worsen over time. This will lead to higher costs than the original repair. Think of it as maintenance and a way to save more time on your busy schedule.
How to Handle Not Having a Car
When your car goes in for repairs, it can interrupt your schedule. Even if you have your car repaired, you don’t want to take a day off work. We don’t recommend it either. Instead, you would leave the car in the shop with us and borrow a friend or family member’s car. You could even rent a car for those days if it will take a while. This ensures the minimum disruption to your day.
In general, we don’t recommend that people wait in the shop for us to finish the repairs. Auto body repairs do take longer than regular mechanic repairs in most cases, and it rarely will make sense for the customer to wait around like you would with an oil change or tire rotation.
Hire Someone Who Works with Your Schedule
You can Google, “auto body shop near me,” and you will come across many companies. At Elmer’s Auto Body, we will work with your busy schedule to try to get you in at the time that you need. Unlike some of the alternatives, we will work on your schedule and help you so that you experience as little of an inconvenience as possible. You don’t need to have this take up all your time to have the car repaired.
Why Do Auto Body Shop Repairs Take so Much Time?
Almost every customer will ask us, “How long is this going to take?” We need to look at your car to give you an exact estimate of time because of the potential for hidden damages that need repairs. Many variables enter the equation, which explains why it can take us so long.
Let’s take the example of a bumper repair. Sure, it might look simple, but when we start to disassemble the car and take a look at it, we learn how it had further damage than its original appearance. Most of the time with auto body repairs, we need to repair hidden damage that we didn’t see at first. It doesn’t become apparent until you start to take the car apart.
In this case, we might even have to order extra parts, which will take another one to two days. We need authorization from you as well as the insurance company before we start. Most of this happens electronically, which makes it reasonably fast, but it does make things more complicated. It opens the door for more things to go wrong.
To sum it up, the things that will impact the amount of time auto body work takes include:
- Parts availability
- Auto body repair time
- How complicated the repair is
- Insurance company’s approval
- Doing quality control on the auto body work
Every auto body shop should follow strict standards about what they will do for repairs. Following strict quality control standards ensure that the technicians catch a defect before it can lead to an accident on the road. Not all auto body shops follow these standards, but at Elmer’s Auto Body Shop, we do everything that we can to get your car back to you as quickly as possible with the quality control standards followed strictly.
We can’t promise that you won’t experience a delay, but you can trust that when it happens, we had a good reason for it. We did this to ensure that your car meets the highest standards of quality repairs.
Final Thoughts
At Elmer’s Auto Body, we have the experience to ensure that you receive the best repairs possible. We have served the South New Jersey region for over 70 years. As a family-owned and operated business, we seek to make our services easy, convenient, and fast. At the same time, we wish to provide exceptional services to our customers so that they can trust and depend on us. You can call us now at (856) 218-0202.