If you drive an expensive car and you're involved in an accident, you will surely be worried about the next steps. You know that body parts can be costly, and somebody will have to decide whether to repair or replace them, but what will happen in your case? Who decides what to do and what questions will they ask along the way?

Cost Efficiency

Estimators will ask the most pressing question first: is it cost-effective to repair this car? Obviously, each vehicle depreciates given time, and the age of the car will make a significant difference. However, if that is not applicable in your case, what's the next step?

Repair or Replace

If you have had a fairly sizeable accident, many individual parts will likely have been damaged. Some of these may be beyond repair and require replacement, but in others, some parts will need to be repaired and others replaced. Nevertheless, all repaired components have to align perfectly with undamaged parts of the vehicle or brand-new replacement panels. An estimator will take this into account as they look at the big picture and decide which parts can be or should be repaired versus those that will need replacing.

Cost of Labour

Timing will also come into this conundrum. It is possible to repair a part in some cases, but it is likely to take a great deal of time to perfect the work. Here, the price of labour will be important as it may be more cost-effective to replace in this situation.

Specialist Materials

Some luxury cars feature "space-age" materials or panels that are very difficult to manipulate using conventional body shop techniques. Carbon fibre is very light and very strong but is also on the expensive side. Further, specialist techniques are often required to fix a carbon fibre panel or to blend a new panel with a repaired one. This will be another factor to consider as the experts decide how to proceed.

More Information

If you want detailed information about your particular case or have questions to ask the experts, reach out to the panel beaters at the repair shop, who will work with insurance estimators as they gather the permission necessary to go ahead. However, they'll be able to tell you what parts you will need to repair, which ones will probably be replaced and how it will all come together in the end. They can also tell you how long the whole process is likely to take. Look for a shop that works on your brand of vehicle like one that offers BMW repairs specifically.