All of the BITOG banter from "that frame isn't bent the tow hooks are straight" to "the shop is pulling a scam and doesn't even plan to work on the truck" and everything in between doesn't matter because Mike has said he doesn't want this truck back. Can't blame him. Went out for a weekend of camping with the truck he looked for for 2 years, he knows inside and out and maintains it to a high degree and it's proven reliable. Totally understandable in my mind he doesn't want a truck that's been almost totally disassembled and reassembled and painted by a shop of unknown ability other than apparently less than stellar reviews. No other shop will touch it for a reason.
If USAA forces the truck repaired by this shop the 4 month estimate might be 6 or 8 months if the UAW strike lasts very long and parts availability becomes a problem. When he gets the repaired truck back he has to find a suitable replacement and go through the trade-in game with a truck with a reported major accident.
Wish you the best
@ls1mike to be something close to being made whole at the end of this. Sucks.
Yeah, it all is lousy, it all sucks. You can’t monetize the level of care and upkeep you do, condition beyond a point, the lengths you went to in order to find a specific something, etc., unless you have stated value insurance. Instead one is trapped by the range of pricing guides and comparable sales to establish a value. The burden of proof of anything else is just too much for the most part.
So in other words, the insurance company, and at law, nobody cares.
That hurts for BITOG type folks who tend to be savvy on what they own, how they maintain and keep it.
Frankly though, the damage doesn’t look that bad. Unfortunately OP hasn’t been able to provide more detail, and seems unable to do the trip to look over the vehicle.
Until we see that we can’t really tell beyond face value, if tow hooks are bent, what the damage really is, etc. And most of us armchair body men won’t really know what’s the reality either.
The concept of a shop underbidding and then doing an addendum is interesting. My experience has been that there’s always a base estimate and then an addendum of anything else is found. But the idea of trapping an insurance company into it once the job is underway is foreign to me.
I suspect that most shops don’t want vehicles taking up space and tying up their folks on such an involved job, nor the higher likelihood of a callback. If they can push more lower cost jobs through faster, get more billable hours, and more profit by doing easier jobs, I suspect that’s the rationale. They can say all they want about the complexity or the issues they may face. Some of that may well be true. But I suspect there is a strong factoring in of profitability of more lower price jobs versus fewer big ticket jobs, and they turn away jobs accordingly.
