The past five years have transformed the industry, though not always for the better
A few months ago, I returned to Collision Repair after a five-year absence. I expected to find the industry moving in the same direction it had been when I left. How wrong I was.
It did not take long for me to recognize the scale of the change. When I departed, it was at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic. At the time, the industry’s most pressing conversations revolved around survival and preparation. Shops sorted out work-from-home policies where possible, braced for the widespread arrival of electric vehicles and debated the long-term implications of consolidation that, even then, showed no signs of slowing.
Some of those conversations aged exactly as expected. Consolidation did not slow. It accelerated. Over the past half decade, countless well-known independent locations joined MSOs and franchise networks. During my first tenure as the magazine’s editor, many owners told me they would never surrender control. When I came back, it was clear consolidators had fine-tuned their approach.
What I did not anticipate was how thoroughly the industry conversation pivoted toward the challenges created by new technologies, particularly AI in management software and increasingly sensitive advanced driver assistance systems. AI and ADAS were discussed in the 2010s, but they were not the dominant topics of conversation.
I should have seen this coming. I was hardly the only person taken aback by the speed of the AI revolution, but the ADAS tea leaves should have been clearer. At the beginning of 2021, about 50% of new vehicles featured some form of ADAS. By the time I returned, that figure had climbed above 90%. The complexity increased and the tolerance for misalignment shrank to the point that a 0.5° error could cause a system to detect a person 20 metres away as being about 17 centimetres from their real position.
As a result, shop owners no longer debated whether post-repair calibrations were necessary on newer vehicles. They debated whether bringing calibration in-house was more practical than subletting it to third-party providers. A consensus seemed to be forming around the in-house side of the argument. By 2025, about 57% of calibrations were performed in-house, up from about 12% in 2021.
In general, these trends look a lot like this shift was simply the result of an industry making progress. Not all the changes it has seen over the past half-decade, however, seem so beneficial.
The most dramatic — and disturbing — one relates to the customer experience. Even in 2021, it was difficult to find a top-tier collision repair centre that did not highlight friendly, personable service in its marketing. By the time I returned, the emphasis had shifted away from face-to-face customer care and toward convenience. Some shops adopted custom apps that provided immediate, real-time updates. Others used AI customer service tools to offer similar services.
Proponents of this approach argue times have changed. They say the pandemic proved people did not want to spend any more minutes than is absolutely necessary at a bodyshop. Convenience, they add, is now king. I would argue that was utter nonsense. The only reason people did not want to go anywhere five years ago was that public spaces were dangerous. Humans have never paid much attention to what is convenient when it is not what is familiar.
If you drink coffee or tea, you probably agree. Starbucks launched its order-from-your-phone app in 2009. At the time, some predicted it would replace the personable — even lightly flirtatious — barista. It did not. Last year, less than a third of Starbucks’ sales were made through the app. It turned out most of us still preferred to trade a few friendly words with the effortlessly cool twenty-something steaming our milk lattes.
Should I return to the magazine after another five-year break, I hope this move away from the faceto- face approach will have subsided. I take some comfort from the fact that, in parts of the country, the pushback had already begun. During a call with a repair technician operating out of a smaller facility in the Maritimes, I asked whether the shop used any AI tools to handle customer service challenges. He said no, pointing out the business operated in a small municipality where everyone knows everyone. “We’re a part of the community,” he said. “I’m not sure it would be wise for us to limit our face-to-face interactions. Our customers would think we were upset with them.”
