Post repair,Lease Return and Pre-purchase Inspections.
Checking your Lease Car
the way the lease company does it.
Note: any damage you find including stone
chips, blemishes, marks and stains, as well
as more obvious damage. You will then
need to refer to your Fair Wear & Tear
Standard guide to find out if it is acceptable
or not.
Lease companies follow a checking system.
Their inspection usually has about twice as many
checks as A regular body shop. They are looking for anything that falls outside of the fair wear and tear standard.
Any scratch, no matter how big, will fail if it has
gone through to the base coat of paint. Any
scratch larger than one inch (25mm) will fail.
Dents will fail if they are over 10mm, but smaller
dents will also fail if the paintwork is cracked or
chipped through the basecoat. A panel with three
or more dents will fail, regardless of how big the
dents are. Most lease companies check your car twice or even three times, so they don't miss anything. This is why you need to check your car the same way they do. First you need to park your car, with lots of room around it. You need to take up two parking spaces, at least. The car needs to be clean, dry and the lighting needs to be good, so try to do it on a clear bright day.
Previous body work repairs
Lots of people are being charged-back for unacceptable repairs at the moment - so don't get caught out. You may think if you have had a repair done at an approved body shop or crash repair centre, that you will be okay, but it is your responsibility to ensure it has been done properly. The lease inspector will not know if you've had it done by an approved company or on the cheap – they only know if the repair is to an acceptable standard. A Body shop having an insurance company's seal of approval is no guarantee that they will always turn out good quality work – often it is just a sign that they are willing to work within an insurance company's pricing guidelines! So you need to check the color differences, rough areas, pimples, sanding-down marks under the paint work, masking lines, runs, blemishes misaligned panels and rust. If you can't see any problems, then feel for them.
If you have any doubts, you can bring the car to us and we will check this for you for free.
Thorough Inspection:
Don’t think for a moment that I do just a walk-around inspection when I perform a post-repair inspection. I pull splash shields and interior-and-trunk trim panels to see what the repairs look like. There are many DRP shops in California that have been forced by the department of insurance to buy vehicles back because of unsafe repairs, and the usual culprit is the uncaring attitude allowed into the shop.
In cases like these where hack jobs were performed, I would first call the shop and explain what I found so the shop could correct the problem. But the shop usually tries to talk their way out of the problem or perform lame corrective repairs. That’s when I decid to let their insurance masters handle the situation by demanding buy-backs.