August 2023 Collision report
Auto Insurance Study Says Underwriting Losses Doubled Last Year, increased auto insurance claim costs will stretch into 2023 and beyond. A new study Auto Insurance: The Uncertain Road Ahead released by the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA), examines how insurance claims inflation has continued to rise faster than the underlying consumer price index (CPI), far outpacing increases in auto insurance premiums. The combination of rapidly increasing overall economic inflation and claims inflation has driven up auto insurance losses and combined ratios.
I-CAR announced that it has officially launched CollisionCareers.com, a seminal online experience dedicated to connecting individuals to rewarding opportunities in collision repair. CollisionCareers achieves the first objective of the talent attraction marketing strategy by providing a neutral brand and platform under which industry partners can collaborate on strategic programming and marketing efforts to reposition the industry as a growing, exciting and stable field while amplifying the inter-industry’s efforts to solve a talent crisis that, because of a combination of unfilled roles and expected retirements over the next five years, is estimated to be leaving the industry 100,000 skilled technicians short.
CCC and Audatex have become the first 2 of the Big 3 estimating system providers to say it will offer users more flexibility in establishing or adjusting refinish blend times within the system. Audatex currently defaults to a labor time for the blend panel equal to 50% of the full refinish time – though the Audatex system does allow a user to adjust the automated blend hours on estimates. In a change to be implemented in the coming months, the systems will still default to 50%, and the user will continue to be able to adjust it on a per-estimate basis, but the Audatex system also will allow a user to set a blend formula at the profile level to any percentage between 50% and 150% of full refinish time for the blend panel.