Your car has been in the shop for 3 weeks. They redid the frame, they fixed the bumper, they installed a whole bunch of new parts. Now you went to pick it up. Back to normal, right? No way. A car damaged that severely cannot be put back into its factory condition. No matter how good a body shop is, it can’t get back to normal. This is because car factories have proprietary machinery that are custom built to build the car to exact specifications. Body shops do not have this technology.

And if there’s frame damage? Forget it. That’s showing up on a CarFax report, and dealers are going to knock a ton of value off of the trade-in. But even without frame damage, few body shops do perfect work, and there may very well be substandard repairs that need to be inspected. This is particularly true where you take the car to a body shop that works with insurance companies. This is because those shops have a strong financial incentive to repair as little damage as possible, so that the insurance company pays as little as possible.

That’s where the concept of diminished value comes in. Diminished value is a form of damages that you can claim against an at-fault driver when your car is worth less than it was before the crash. A good diminished value expert will testify to the loss of value: (1) inherently, just from being in a big crash; and (2) practically, from having repairs that aren’t up to factory level. Both of these prongs have value, and a good expert can do a pretty good job putting a number to each.

So what can you do when your car is damaged in a crash? You need to consult a lawyer who is knowledgeable about how to present these claims, like the lawyers at Herrmann Law Group. There are many considerations that go into value of the claim, such as the age, mileage, and value of the car. Although it isn’t true that every car that is hit will have a viable diminished value claim, many people are leaving money on the table by failing to make these claims. They then only realize the true extent of their damage when they go to sell or trade-in their car.

You can handle these claims on your own, but beware. In the vast majority of cases, you will need an expert to testify to the amount of damage. There are online services that say they will do it for 75 dollars (sometimes less), but these reports are not admissible in court, meaning they are nearly useless unless the insurance company takes them seriously (and they often don’t.) They usually just come in the form of a standard letter from a company in a different state, and usually the letter isn’t even signed. If you need an evaluation by an experienced, local expert, contact us and we can make sure we squeeze out every last dollar.