Platform
How the damage assessment actually works
No brains, no neural glow, no claim that the model understands cars. Here is the actual sequence and where each step can be wrong.
Step one: identify the vehicle
The VIN decodes to year, make, model and where possible the submodel. The shop history is checked first because it carries the submodel that the public database usually leaves blank, and the submodel is what decides which bumper cover the car actually has.
Step two: read the damage
A vision model reads the photographs and proposes affected panels and operations. This is the step most likely to be wrong, and it is wrong in a specific way: given any image it will try to describe damage. That failure has been seen and fixed here before, and it is why the estimate is a draft.
Step three: ground it against settled work
Proposed parts are checked against the comp index built from carrier-settled documents: 1,510 comparison lines drawn from 3,117 carrier-paid part rows. Where a make has thin coverage the grounding is weaker, and the coverage is genuinely lopsided by make. That is published rather than hidden.
Step four: reprice at the right rate
The same hours and parts are priced across several labor rate profiles, because a repair written at a shop retail rate and the same repair written at a carrier rate are different numbers for the same work. Getting this wrong is not theoretical: an earlier version applied retail rates to insurance work and ran about 29 percent over what the carrier settled.
What is still missing
Parts are grounded in OEM part information and carrier-settled comp lines, and that is what the estimate stands on. A marketplace price lookup does run, but it runs after the estimate has been validated, it fills a price only where the model produced none, it requires at least two new-condition listings that agree, and a carrier comp overrides it wherever one exists. The vision model never sees it. A second marketplace catalogue source is written but is not configured in production, so it contributes nothing today. Live marketplace validation is under development and is not presented as the grounding behind an estimate. Paint supplies and sales tax are not yet in the repricing path either. All of it is stated here because a page describing a pipeline should describe the holes in it.
Before you ask
Which model does it use?
Vision and text models from commercial providers, with the estimating logic, the comp grounding and the repricing built here. The model is a component, not the product.
Does it learn from my estimates?
Your estimates are not published, sold, or used as examples. A shop that buys this does not have its work turned into someone else’s training set.
What happens when it is wrong?
You correct the line. Every line is editable, and the correction is the point: a partly right first write you can edit beats a blank screen.
Run it on damage you have already written
Accounts are created by hand, usually within a business day. Bring your own photographs and a repair order you have already closed, so you can see how close it lands before you decide. No card, no trial timer.