topsider

Ha, i love it, reminds me of spring break last year in miami

Mike5215

I need to drive an E. Sounds like the E leans closer to the S than the C. A more plush, relaxed cruiser vs a compact sport sedan. After a decade of piloting S Class boats I'm kind of digging the little C's handling though. It's like a slippery little knife. Granted I went for Air and swapped the runflats to get close to a smooth ride. Maybe an E when the lease is up.

topsider

the E feels like it has a really long wheelbase when cruising, great feeling.

116Benz

Kinda reminds me of the Pink Flamingo lol

Mike5215

Had a chance to check in at the shop today after the initial tear down. As expected the rear rebar and absorbers, structural rear body panel and trunk floor are shot. The trunk floor is unique in that rather than being a welded component of the rear unibody structure, it's basically a plastic tub that's urethaned in place using the same adhesive for windshields.





The rear frame rails seem to have survived intact, but there's a lot of work to be done. I'll be surprised if I see the car back before 2017. I should have a dollar value on the first supplement tomorrow. Right now it's at $6,000 and my guess is it'll take double that before it's over.

Meanwhile I'm learning to like the MKZ, mainly because its audio system is really outstanding.

Mike5215

Still mid repairs. The shop's supplement was double the first estimate to $12,000. I went ahead and got a C63 rear diffuser and tips since we're replacing all that stuff anyway. Current status:

Mike5215

Pre-pull to bring the tail light pockets back in. Once they're happy with the alignment they'll cut the rear panel out. Expected delivery 11/3. I have my doubts.

dnice-1

Good read. Keep the updates coming nice to see it all coming back together smoothly.

Mike5215

Trunk floor and rear panel.

teksurv

It sucks that this happened to you, but it is interesting to see the breakdown, thanks for that.

akın

I am sorry for you. Did the headrests turn up ?

Mike5215

Sure. May as well make some good come of it. Later today the rear panel gets cut out and they use an impact tool to bust the trunk floor out and remove the old adhesive. Then the new floor is glued down and the new rear panel gets welded in. That's a key step because if the new rear panel is out of spec just a little bit, nothing else will come together correctly.

Mike5215

Some progress. The floor has been cut out. The new rear panel has been set with temporary sheet metal screws and clamps. The tech will then test fit the rear body components, decklid, tail lamps, etc and confirm the rear panel is exactly where it needs to be.

Then it will be welded in place, the seams sealed and the panel primed and painted. The copper colored material is weld-thru primer for corrosion protection.

insame1

that suck but at least you're all okay. I know how it feels though. I only got to enjoy my clk55 for 3 weeks. Didn't make it to the first payment.

dnice-1

Its coming back together nice. Looks like you found a great shop not cutting any corners doing everything to spec.

Mike5215

Yep, so far so good. Rear panel welded and seams resealed:




Once the paint fully dries they'll start putting it back together.

Mike5215

Composite trunk floor back in. This is fairly unique. Normally the trunk floor is a stamped steel panel welded into the rest of the rear unibody structure. It usually serves as a major structural member, spanning and connecting the rear frame rails as well as the rear body panel.

In a hard hit, the trunk floor tends to cave inward and drag the frame rails inward with it. But in the 205, the composite tub that forms the floor is essentially a sacrificial part. Destroying it doesn't impact the underlying unibody structure at all, and it's not a load bearing component. Mine split open but the frame rails were unscathed.
The rails are the large longitudal box structures on either side of the tub.

Shadwell

Hey mike, get them to Dyna mat then crap out of the **** end before they complete re-assy..
Super easy while it's all stripped down....
the plastic trunk floor is a bit of a drum.... 😉

Mike5215

Oh man that is a great idea! How many SF of material did it take?

Shadwell

Well the extreme bulk pack has X 9off 18"x32" sheets.

I used perhaps 3.5 sheets doing the trunk floor the trunk sides the inner face of the rear wings and behind the suspension towers etc. and the rear hatch (wagon remember).
I used approx 2 sheets doing under the rear seats area.
I used .5 sheets on the b pillars
And the remaining 3 sheets across the 4 doors...
I covered pretty much every available surface I could access single layer only with minimal gaps.

Hope that gives you an idea..

chicago-guy

@Mike5215, just a shout-out for sharing this process. We all could be there at some point.

NYbenzzz

funny how the insurance works.

on my accident, the initial estimate was like $5.5k. they ended up paying like 12k~ish

the one time i was really happy to lease instead of buy.

Mike5215

Yeah, generally a 100% supplement is frowned upon as an adjuster. For big hits the accepted practice is to write a couple hours labor for the shop to tear down the car enough to expose the entirety of the damage, then write one comprehensive estimate. But because issuing a check, even if it ends up being short by half, shuts down the exposure adjusters do it to improve their internal measurements.

nycphotography

How does it shut "down their exposure"?
What exactly does that mean?

(just curious)

Mike5215

So a common misconception is that insurance companies earn their profits by collecting more money in premiums than they pay out in claims. The truth is they either break even, lose a little, or (rarely) make a little on premiums minus claims.

For a publicly traded company, that figure is expressed as the Combined Operating Ratio (COR). The COR represents the money paid out in claims, plus the cost of their claims infrastructure (adjusters, offices, fixtures, computerized claims management equipment, private investigators, forensics, lawyer defense costs, legal settlements etc) expressed relative to a dollar in collected premium.

So a COR of 1.00 means the company spent in claims exactly what it earned in premium. A COR of 1.05 means it spend a nickle more on claims than it took in for each dollar of premium. Most companies run a negative COR in that 1.04 to 1.06 range. Progressive when I was there typically made a small underwriting profit with a COR around .97, or 3%, but that was an exception, and they had a very robust claims operation.

The actual way insurance companies make money is in their investment portfolios. They essentially take money in from policy holders and treat it like an interest free loan to buy and sell securities. It's the proceeds from those transactions that drives most of an insurance company's profits. For a publicly traded company, they also sell a crapload of stock.

But they have to maintain a level of liquidity (cash) to pay pending claims. This is known as the claim's "reserve". Reserves are funds that are not committed to the investment portfolio, and as a result aren't "working" for the insurance company. Managing reserves is a huge part of running a claim operation.

When a claim comes in and a coverage is opened (Property Damage, Bodily Injury, etc), the claims system typically sets a generic "system reserve". So say every Collision feature starts with a $3,000 system reserve based on the insurers own claims experience. The longer the claim is open (unpaid), the higher the system adjusts the reserve, since statistically the longer a claim is unpaid, the more expensive it becomes. In two months it could be $10,000. That's $10k not earning any income, multiplied by thousands and thousands of active exposures.

Claims managers are under pressure to keep their overall reserves low by settling claims quickly. This puts pressure on the claim reps to cut a settlement check, which automatically zeros out the reserve, because the system thinks the exposure is gone, or mostly gone. On a publicly traded company this helps the stock price, since analysts look at COR and Reserves.

So when a rep writes a $5,000 estimate and cuts the check to close the feature, but then has another supplemental expense of an additional $5,000, they've basically worked the reserve to improve the branch's performance numbers at the potential expense of inaccurate reserving. Do enough voo-doo with enough exposures and it's possible to be so radically under-reserved that the company gets hit with a big, unexpected, unreserved verdict that wipes them out (or triggers their re-insurance, with dooms the stock price).

Most systems do allow reps to manually post a reserve and stick it there until the claim is actually settled and closed. Progressive wanted accurate reserving whether it helped or hurt the performance metrics.