Guides, with the sample size attached

The guides

• How a collision estimate is actually built

  An estimate is four decisions repeated down a page: what is damaged, whether it is repaired or replaced, what the part costs, and what an hour of labor is worth. Three of those four are things this corpus has measured.

  • 8,995 from 232 parsed carrier estimates
  • $51 to $60 across 9 carriers, 92 documents
  • 83% of 1,012 adjuster decisions across 20 panels

• What a damage photograph can and cannot establish

  A photo estimate is not a worse estimate. It is an estimate written from a narrower evidence base, and the useful question is which lines that evidence actually reaches. The corpus answers that panel by panel.

  • 98% 143 decisions across 4 components
  • 77% replaced 73 decisions

• Making the repair-or-replace call, and writing it so it holds

  This page is about the decision and the paperwork, not the data. The measured table lives on the measured page and the product page explains what the estimator does with it. What follows is how an estimator should reason about the call, and what it costs when the call goes the wrong way.

  • $525 median carrier-paid bumper cover, 107 settled lines
  • 55% replaced 11 decisions

• OEM, aftermarket and recycled, as the documents label them

  Every guide on this subject explains the difference between an OEM part and an aftermarket one. Almost none of them says how often carriers actually specified each. This one does, on settled part lines, with the caveat that the two estimating systems involved do not use the same words.

  • 138 of 1,933 30 makes, 8 carriers above the reporting threshold
  • 8,568 8 makes: Audi, BMW, Ferrari, Ford, GM, Mercedes-Benz, Mopar, Porsche

• Documenting a supplement so it reads as evidence

  A supplement is a second document, not a second opinion. It succeeds on the same terms the first estimate did: specific lines, sourced parts, and a reason attached to each one. The corpus is unusually clear about which column is worth arguing.

  • $1,333.27 added to an original allowance of $7,668.92
  • $56.00 identical across 59 Progressive documents

How these are written

Anyone can write that you should consider OEM against aftermarket, or that a rocker is a harder call than a grille. The only thing worth publishing is what the documents actually say, so every substantive claim on these pages is read out of the measured corpus at build time and carries the sample size it rests on.

• A figure is never published without its sample size beside it. A rate built on the published minimum of 6 observations is a hint, and the page says so rather than rounding it into a finding.
• Thresholds are stated and the exclusions are named. Panels priced on fewer than 12 settled lines and carriers with fewer than 50 are listed as excluded, not quietly dropped.
• Coverage is lopsided and each page says where. 30 makes appear in the settled-parts index: the deepest carries 353 settled part lines and the thinnest carries 1, which rules out most per-make conclusions before anybody writes one.
• Where a claim is general industry practice rather than something measured here, it is labelled as general industry practice.
• Every figure is aggregate. No VIN, claim number, customer name or individual claim line appears anywhere on this site.