Now, if you really believe that statement to be true, not only would you be wrong, but you could be dangerously wrong. Hopefully, it won’t take a serious accident involving one of your customers – or a loved one – to convince you to research those OEM repair procedures and make sure you don’t miss this vital step. 

According to Mike Anderson (Collision Advice), “Most, if not all OEM manufacturers, have safety inspection procedures for items such as seat belts, steering columns or SRS components such as airbag sensors or the actual airbag – all the items that you may have to inspect after a vehicle has been in a collision.”

It’s a crucial step in keeping vehicle occupants safe. “If you aren’t doing safety inspections, you have no validation that the consumer will be traveling down the road safely,” suggests Will Latuff (Latuff Brothers Auto Body; St. Paul). 

Unfortunately some repairers view it as an unnecessary step to have to disassemble parts of the vehicles that were otherwise untouched, but as one New Jersey shop owner recently discovered, it really is pivotal!

Ken Miller (821 Collision; North Haledon, NJ) couldn’t believe his eyes when he learned what his team had uncovered – the seat belt and airbag systems had been rigged to appear as though they were fixed! And this discovery would not be known had Miller’s shop failed to perform the required post-repair safety inspection. 

“It’s totally disgusting,” laments Miller about the worst repair job he’s ever come across from another shop. He has been taking measures to help spread the word about this frightening situation via a video he has shared on multiple social media platforms. 

Upon performing a mandatory seat belt inspection on a 2024 Honda CRV, Miller’s team “had to visibly inspect the unit which required doing some disassembly to get to the seat belt units. Evidently, from what we could tell, the seat belts deployed and cinched up tight to keep the driver in his seat. The shop that performed the repairs cut the seat belt to release the mechanism and cut the air bag harnesses and wired in resistors to trick the computer to think the air bag system was functioning properly.

“We had no suspicions. After the repair was performed, we went through to verify everything via the safety inspection, and that’s how we uncovered this. The parts [the other shop] manipulated are the parts that cinch you into the seat. Now, that has a repercussion on how the individual would protrude forward toward the air bag and how they would hit that air bag. It’s a really big deal,” Miller outlines the dangers. 

Latuff and his team have also witnessed the frustration of uncovering issues with poor repairs done by other shops. Recently, his shop helped a customer with a 2018 Toyota Prius Prime that had been repaired at another shop with “repeated issues. She took the car back to them at least a half dozen times before she did her research and reached out to our shop.” Through a post-repair inspection, it was uncovered that the repairs that had been done “were absolutely atrocious. We notified the insurance company of all the missed damage, the undocumented damage, that they didn’t cover under the claim, and they wound up buying the car back from the customer. On that particular claim, they hadn’t done any of the safety inspections required by Toyota on the airbags or seat belts. It had just been ignored and was basically a cosmetic patch over structural damage that was performed.”

Latuff stressed how this was “an absolutely horrifying experience for the customer to have to go through,” even though it had a happy conclusion. 

“The only real explanation is money,” Miller considers as insurer pushback unfortunately leads some shops to cut corners in dangerous ways. “There was a fair amount of work put in to do what they did, but it wasn’t going to work. The retractors that keep the occupant in the seat and cinch up in an accident would not work at all.”CR

So, with all the dangers involved in not fixing cars  correctly, why would a body shop do something like this? 

I-CAR’s Bud Center believes there’s a combination of reasons collision repairers are failing to perform post-collision safety inspections. “It’s not something that’s  really easily identifiable in the OEM repair procedures. 

For example, if somebody’s replacing the quarter-panel on a car and they pull up the quarter-panel replacement procedure, there’s nothing in there that says you have to do a post-collision safety inspection. You have to look for that information in the vehicle maker’s general procedures, so there are some who will say they didn’t know that it needed to be done. And then there are others who will say they’re not doing it because they’re having a challenge getting third-party payers to agree to cover the expense.”

Anderson acknowledged the seriousness of this issue insisting “one hundred percent, safety inspections is the single biggest friction point that I see out there between shops and insurers.”

Like Center noted, Anderson relayed, “In fairness, some of the OEMS don’t provide clarity as to what defines a collision so you know when it should be done or not be done. But some OEMs really do define it. And a lot of people say, ‘I don’t find anything the majority of the time.’ Well, I get that. But instead of talking about what you don’t find, let’s talk about the times that you do find things.”

Anderson cited examples of what issues inspections can reveal like how removing the dash uncovered a damaged or cracked dash carrier or the possibility of measuring a steering column only to discover it’s collapsed. 

“Insurers will talk about how much it drives up severity, but what’s the price of a life worth? Because when seat belts don’t work or the steering column collapses, what does it take to save a life? So, at the end of the day, we can talk about how it drives up severity, but on the flip side, it also saves lives when these components work as intended.” 

“I’m not an attorney, so don’t take legal advice from me, but if any shops were to run into a problem down the road when someone gets hurt in a subsequent accident and the shop didn’t do the proper safety inspections, they are going to have a legal problem,” Center predicts. “They have some liability. So, at the end of the day, just because a third-party payer won’t cover it, that does not remove the shop’s liability, and they need to understand that.” 

How insurers feel about safety inspections is one thing, but unfortunately, the collision repair industry is also not very educated about it. Anderson believes shops need to really fully gain an understanding of what needs to be done. 

“I was doing a seminar out west recently, and a shop owner showed me their estimate, stating they got paid for doing a safety inspection. They had one hour on the estimate for the safety inspection. He was proud of himself, and I didn’t mean to burst his bubble, but I told him there was no way he spent only one hour doing a safety inspection. I explained to him that he had to remove the steering column and remove this and that, and he admitted he didn’t realize that.”

Anderson sees many make the mistake of thinking one doesn’t need to do more than jerk a seat belt once, “but some OEMs require you to test drive the vehicle, at three different speeds and braking conditions to test them. Sometimes, it involves a diagnostic tool; sometimes, it’s inspecting the mounting location. It’s not just a one-hour procedure. It can be very invasive and very time-consuming.” 

According to Center, the OEMs are wide open to helping educate the industry about post-collision safety inspections. “The conversations we are having with OEMs have been about getting more clarity around the requirements. They’ve actually asked us to help them understand how they can help”

Center pointed to examples that leave a lot of room for interpretation, which is another snag in the process of getting the industry on board with safety inspections. 

“In some cases, you’ll see things like ‘following a collision with damage that is beyond cosmetic, you will need to perform the post-collision safety inspection,’ and then they will list out the tasks that need to be done for post inspection, but what is the definition of cosmetic? Or if there is substantial damage that’s considered more than cosmetic, it leaves things open to interpretation. Repairers are going to have to put together their own definition of what that means, and it causes confusion.” 

In order to collect information to be shared with OEMs, I-CAR has set up a link rts.i-car.com/srs-inspection-feedback-form via its Repairability Technical Support (RTS) “to allow people to submit information about post-collision safety inspections or safety inspections on SRS systems. They can submit any kind of questions, information or photos they have to report what they are seeing when they perform these types of inspections. We can put all that information together and work with the OEMs to figure out how to make some of this better.” 

Where some shops are starting to offer re-inspections on vehicles that were steered away, performing inspections is really just part of the repair process, as Latuff points out. “We’ve had three or four of these cases where a customer has come to us with this need, and we uncovered issues which resulted in having their insurance company buy the car back. 

There are a lot of fake reasons for shops to not perform these inspections. None of them are valid. They are just excuses or barriers keeping them from doing what is right for the customer.” 

Endangering vehicle occupants is one important factor, but shops also need to be aware of the liability aspect. Had Miller not uncovered what he did when he did, who would have been on the hook if that vehicle were to get into a subsequent serious accident?

“That’s an even bigger issue here,” he states. “The unsuspecting repairer, like ourselves, fixing this car. Now, I knew it was in another accident because the repairs that were done on the front weren’t great. This was a minor repair, so my guys were complaining a bit about having to do a safety inspection, but we replaced the gate, so the answer was yes. If we didn’t uncover that, I was the last person to touch it. I wouldn’t have had photos of the good parts, if they were not undamaged. So, then I would have been on the hook if somebody got hurt or worse, because I was the last person to touch it.”

Center validates the importance of industry education on post-collision safety inspections. “Those doing these inspections are actually finding some things that are concerning. Some manufacturers say that following a collision, you need to check the steering gear and the steering rack. You’re doing very specific testing that requires some unique equipment and processes to do these tests. Shops need to understand what their investment is in equipment, what they need to be looking for and why. The industry needs more education and more clarity on this.” 

A customer will understand what needs to be done to keep their car safe when shops keep them engaged with the process, Latuff insists. “I’ve yet to have a customer tell me ‘don’t make my car safe’ when we explain to them that we need to do a seven to eight page inspection on their vehicle which may have only suffered cosmetic damage. If a bill payer doesn’t think a safety inspection is necessary, the customer will advocate and will get their carrier to cover it.

“You have to be committed to it and know your why for performing these inspections,” he adds. “You don’t do it for the 99 percent that are okay; you do it for the one that is not to make sure you’re protecting your customer and your shop. That makes it all worth it.”