How to Spot a Scam Auto Body Shop

rev up your engines, today I'm gonna show you how to spot a scam body shop before you get towed into one and it's too late, okay it happens to everyone eventually you get in an accident, then you have to have your car towed to a body shop, the last thing you want is to be in an accident be knocked around and then the tow truck guy comes and you let him decide where to tow it, you want to know a good body shop beforehand, then write it down and put it in your glove box so you'll have it at hand o

r put it on your phone, because by law at least here in the United States you get in a wreck, you have the right to pick wehatever body shop you want to fix your car, nobody can force you to go to one place, but you have to understand, when the tow truck guys come, they generally get big kickbacks if they got a nice big wreck and they tow it to the body shop that they're affiliated with, they will get five hundred a thousand maybe even more money for bringing that vehicle to that body shop, so y

ou want to have one ready that you trust to say, no tow it here and if you don't know one, you still have the right to have it towed to your house, all the insurance companies will tow it to your house then later they can tow it to a body shop, don't worry about that you just want to send it to a good job and not just somebody who's being paid to ship your car off because they get kickbacks, so how do you find out if a body shop is a scam body shop or a really good one well you got to do a littl

e research here, unless you live in Houston Texas then you can just ask me, who I use, I don't take any kickbacks I've sent many many customers to body shops and never took a dime back from their repairs, I just want my customers to get their cars fixed correctly, I don't do bodywork so it's no skin off of my nose, and speaking of equipment you got to make sure that the body shop you pick has a good paint booth, paint boots are giant areas that are completely sealed, so there's no dust they cont

rol the humidity for painting, it's very important for getting body work done right, you don't want to have somebody paint in your car that doesn't have a very good paint booth, try spray-painting something outside, you're gonna see gets on it, hair everything, you got to have a place that has a good paint booth and you have to have professional guys working there who know how to blend paint and match it to the color of your car, because take a look at this, you can easily tell this bumper has b

een repainted it's a completely different shade than the top of the car that wasn't painted, I mean look at that, you can see here's the one that's been repainted, it's completely a lighter color here it was not blended correctly, the paint doesn't even match, so your visitor bodyshop say hey show me a car where you painted part as a car, see if it matches and if it doesn't they're not any good at blending paint, go someplace else and speaking of painting bumpers, check this out this bumper was

painted by a guy who didn't even know what kind of paint to put on the car, realize that these plastic bumpers are exactly that, they are plastic it requires a special kind of paint with a special bonding agent in order for it to stick, if you use regular car paint that you put on the hood and put it on the bumper, guess what, it flakes off like this car did, whoever painted this bumper they had no notion about how to paint plastic bumpers, they shouldn't be in the body business and another big

thing to check is the body shop area itself, if like these cars all sitting all over the place they got tons of them looks like they're busy, go back in a few weeks the same cars are sitting there, that's just a scam that guys use, I used to work for a guy like that years ago, he had all these junk cars and it would sucker people to come in and he wasn't fixing any of those cars, you see all their stickers are out of date, some of them don't have license plates on them, don't go to a place like

that cuz odds are, they're gonna take forever to fix your car and may not even do a good job, because realize one thing body shop work, it comes and it goes it's not a continuous thing, cars they break down all the time it's pretty continuous cars you're always breaking you got to fix them, but car wrecks they occur kind of randomly, so a lot of times these guys don't have much business at all so if they're one of those guys that aren't that honest, they'll take your car in and say, oh it'll be

ready in three days, another car comes in they're gonna make more money, they drop yours and then they just work on the car they're making more money, I've seen guys have cars and body shops for months for this reason, ask around, other people who they use and anybody who says that guy took forever to fix my car, don't go there, you find a guy like me I don't do bodywork, I do mechanical work but my whole thing was, if people got here by 8:00 in the morning by 5:00 in the afternoon most of the w

ork I did on most of the cars were finished, I wanted to do stuff that we're in and out fast my customers were happy, they told people about me, I never spent a nickel advertising because all my customers told everyone about me, and of course you want a place that's been in business a lot, but here's the kicker, you gotta do a little bit of research because I had a guy he was a great body man, but as he got older, he made a son take over the shop and his son had no interest in doing bodywork on

cars really, so it's time went on, I used the guy for a decade and a half, but then when a son took over I sent customers there they could bring the car over to me and I'd look at them and you could see scratches from the sandpaper that they didn't make smooth and paint it over so it had permanent scratches in it, you got to make sure that the person who's running to place cares about what his shop puts out and here's where the Internet can really help you out a lot, because of people have crapp

y bodywork done and it doesn't look right, they're gonna complain on the Internet, so if you do a research on the guy and you see, there's complaints all over the place about this guy then you'd think, I'm not gonna go there I'm gonna go somewhere else and although I'm always trying to save people money here, don't go too cheap with bodywork you see those ads when I was a kid it used to be we'll paint any car for you know 59.95 now it's like 200 or 300 dollars, you're not gonna get a very good p

aint job of your car for that kind of money these days, I had my old Celica done like five years ago at one of those places and you can see the paint's flat, it just doesn't hold up, to do a good paint job costs a lot of money to paint the entire car and speaking of a good shop a good shop handles all insurance claims, you don't do anything, if they say we want some money up front, you go someplace else, the good ones they all use insurance companies where they call it up, they handle all the pa

perwork if there's a problem they call up the insurance company and say, look we just pulled off the bumper and found out that there's more damage underneath, then they can send a guy to look to make sure that's the truth, you don't have to get involved in the actual repair, and like anything you pretty much have to feel out the shop, as people in Texas have always said, you don't want a guy who's all hat and no cattle, or when I was younger in New York, hey you don't want the guy who's got the

motorcycle jacket, but he doesn't have the motorcycle, there's plenty of good body shops out there, you just have to find them, but since people are always getting in wrecks, hey that's your friends, see cars that were wrecks that they had fixed, look at it closely and look at it in the Sun when the sun's shining, because the human eye we can see millions of different varieties of colors, you can see hey wow that was fixed really well or hey that doesn't match at all or there's paint that's bubb

led up or you look at the fender the guy replaced and parts of the gaps or half an inch and other parts are an inch and a half gap, you know that place does lousy work and don't go there and when you do find a good body shop hey, pass the word of mouth around go on the internet tell people, tell your friends about it, because if you find a good body shop, you tell other people about it, they're going to continue to do good work, especially when they say, hey Joe sent me, they don't want Joe to g

et mad because if he's telling a bunch of people how good they are and he does lousy work, they know they're gonna lose business and if they don't have to spend me advertising money like I never spent, that's more money in their pocket and less money out of yours that's paying for the body shop and the advertising, so take a tip for me and find a good body shop before you get in a wreck, because it's often too late then and you'll be stuck towed to some place where everybody's getting kickbacks

from everybody else and the work is relatively shoddy, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!