I-CAR earlier this year put out a request for collision repair shops to submit information on what they are "seeing and struggling with” in terms of OEM safety inspections related to secondary restraint systems (SRS), but the organization reported this summer the industry response was less than overwhelming.
“So far to date we’ve only received 27 submissions, and over half of those were from one shop,” Scott VanHulle, manager of I-CAR’s Repairability Technical Support and OEM Technical Relations, said during the Collision Industry Conference (CIC) in Cleveland in July. “I think he sent in about 15 of them, in fact.”
The project arose from a discussion centered around whether the industry had adequate information about what inspections were required and when, what the inspections should look like and the “why” behind the inspections. The OEMs may not be aware of shortcomings in their procedures related to this, VanHulle said.
I-CAR hopes to develop industry-vetted best practices related to the inspections, provide feedback to the automakers about any needed potential repair information improvements and press for some level of standardization among the automakers.
But to do so, VanHulle said, I-CAR needs “real information, and not just a few examples” of what shops are “struggling with, anything that is a pain point or confusing.”
VanHulle compared it to I-CAR’s push over the years for more collision repair help from automakers, which has resulted in far more than the “body repair manual in the 2000s that might have been eight pages.”
I-CAR has posted a brief form shops can use to submit information on the SRS inspections they perform, what triggered the inspections and what was found, to help I-CAR get OEMs to make needed changes.
“Because if they don’t know what the problems are, how are they ever going to fix them,” VanHulle said.
John Yoswick