Page 4 - Australasian paint & Panel Sep-Oct 2021

Editorial
4
PAINT&PANEL
SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2021
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Sam Street (02) 9213 8334 samstreet@yaffa.com.au
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LOOKING THE PART
W
ELL, YET ANOTHER EDITORIAL
written in lockdown but at least I can do my job from home. Most of the repairers I’ve been in touch with have been remarkably stalwart and have managed to stay open and productive as far as possible in very difficult times. At least at the time of writing there is a plan for those of us in lockdown to be able to drive further
than the shops.
This issue we have an OEM feature
and you won’t be surprised to see one or two mentions about the importance of using genuine parts.
And what do they mean by genuine parts? Those parts that have been pur- chased through the dealer network that have been created specifically for cars that have been sold in Australia to the Australian market. So bringing in a Subaru or Mercedes-Benz part from Asia or elsewhere in the world where specs, especially safety requirements (there’s no ANCAP ratings or equiva- lent in the vast majority of the the world) just isn’t going to cut it.
Now I know that some insurers ar- gue vehemently against this and com- plain vociferously about the price of OEM parts and how they are leading to total losses because it simply isn’t eco- nomical to fix the car. I think there might be a solution to that, one I men- tioned in my last editorial – put the in- surance premiums up so that the car can be repaired. They know how much a car costs to repair so why can’t the insurance premium be worked out specifically for each model and variant by all those super clever AI bots they have all invested in, so that they are economical to repair?
told their repairers that they’ll be tak- ing a 5% ‘discount’ when a repairer uses an OEM part (and giving a minus- cule increase in labour).
Is this to discourage their repairers from using OEM parts? And given that the only place you can pinch a skerrick of fat in the collision repair process is on parts, how is this a sustainable ini- tiative? For heavy hit vehicle repairers it makes absolutely no sense whatso- ever. You can easily have a parts bill of $20,000 on even a relatively humble car – and then you have to give Sun- corp $1000 of that? It like asking a builder to construct a sturdy garden wall but saying that you’ll pay them 5% less if they use best quality bricks.
The public generally have no idea what parts are used in their car’s re- pair but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of them assume that they will be genuine. They probably won’t find out that a five year old door has been put on their one year old car, even though the man- ufacturer could have improved the im- pact resistance of said door two or three times in the intervening years.
It’s up to this industry to educate cus- tomers – if you use genuine parts in the repair, point that out and make sure they know there are plenty of insurers that don’t allow the use of genuine.
Having said that it’s time to take the dog on yet another walk. See you on the other side of lockdown.
Now I hear that Suncorp have just
Sam Street – Editor