41, BUT CERTAINLY NOT OUT!
Trying to keep pace with the moving target that is the collision repair business sometimes feels like trying to sleep with one eye open. The world is changing at a pace that makes it increasingly difficult to predict what the future of body repair will look like.
Recently, we travelled to Europe, and the predictions of an ever-changing collision repair landscape were clearly in view. The car parc of the future is already beginning to take shape, although last month’s sales figures do not necessarily reveal the contradictions within a rapidly changing market.
In some European markets, close to 30% of new vehicles sold are now battery electric vehicles. That gives us a fairly clear indication of where the market is heading, even if the timing and speed of that change remain uncertain.
Nobody really knows what the eventual demand for ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle repairs will become. The relationship between new-vehicle sales and aftermarket repair demand is certainly not immediate, as these vehicles move into the wider life of the car parc and begin to find their way into collision repair businesses.
The car parc is undoubtedly heading towards a two-speed market. New Chinese vehicles are entering some markets in large numbers, with the UK being one example. There are reports of around 850 000 Chinese vehicles unsold, with sales incentives of £3 000 Pounds in back-hand payments for each vehicle sold being offered to sales personnel.
Whether this is simply aggressive market penetration or part of a much larger strategy of market domination is a question for another day. The reality for the collision repair industry is rather more straightforward: these vehicles will eventually need repairing. And this is where the real challenge begins.
The technology-rich vehicles arriving in body shops today are increasingly complex. A significant proportion of damaged vehicles are between zero and three years old, creating what will effectively become a dual-phase collision repair market.
Repair businesses will have to invest heavily in ADAS capability, electric vehicle repair and the high-voltage safety and specialist equipment required to work safely on these vehicles. At the same time, they will need to continue to repair the older ICE vehicles that make up the bulk of the existing car parc.
It is not simply about buying equipment. Competency, procedures, diagnostic tooling, training and manufacturer-specific repair information will become increasingly important. Health and safety will also play a much greater role, particularly when dealing with damaged EVs and their high-voltage systems.
After 41 years of watching, writing and crusading for change in this industry, I decided to act my shoe size and not my age and took a trip to Scotland to see family recently. I found myself standing as far north as you can get in Scotland, at Canisbay cemetery beside a small church, where kith and kin are buried from the mid 1500’s.
There is something about that place that keeps drawing me back. I don’t really know why, as I am not looking for answers. Four hundred years is a long time to contemplate in a moment of solitude, and it is difficult not to wonder about the hundreds of lives that have passed through the centuries — soldiers who never returned, nurses, road sweepers and farmers, et al.
Standing there, looking back over all those generations, it struck me that the changes facing us today will eventually pass us by, just as every other period of change has done so before. History has a habit of repeating itself as life moves on.
Maybe we will all need to become amphibians, straddling two worlds at once. A hybrid approach of embracing both ICE vehicles and BEVs – with everything in between – will inevitably dictate the rhythm and pace of your business going forward.
By Ian Groat
