SAVOY — If you don’t mind some dents, now’s a great time to buy a new car.
The Honda-BMW of Champaign in Savoy is anticipating an influx of customers hoping to get deals on cars damaged by Saturday’s hail storm.
“Everybody gets a really good deal,” Executive Manager Ben Quattrone said. “We want to sell the car, the factory helps us replace cars generally, and you’re going to take your car to work and know your coworkers are going to give you a door ding.”
“It’s a windfall, essentially, for the market, and it’s a little bit of a shortfall for dealers because we get chaos and don’t make more money,” he said. “But we do sometimes have this purchasing acceleration because people want to buy the hail-damaged cars.”
After Quattrone left the dealership Saturday, it started raining on his way home when “I started getting pelted. I thought someone threw a rock at my car,” he said.
On Monday, he said that of the 237 vehicles on the Honda-BMW lot, more than 200 had at least some damage.
The dealership has insurance for damage to its inventory and now is working on getting estimates and the cars repaired for customers who want that.
“The real trouble is that it hit most of the lots in town, so now there’s a rush to get accurate assessments,” he said.
He said two teams will start writing estimates today and fixing the dents.
“They can write an estimate in 10-15 minutes, but fixing it could take four to five hours, depending on what needs to be done,” Quattrone said. “And how many dents do you want to pop out before you say it just needs a new hood.”
He said all the cars will have estimates by the end of the week, and a third will be repaired by then.
“When you have a hail dent, it wants to get back to where it was,” Quattrone said. “A lot of times you can pop them out.”
Country Financial spokesman Chris Coplan encouraged people with hail damage to contact their insurance agent immediately, save receipts for emergency repairs, make an inventory of damaged property and take photos of all damage.
“This weekend’s hail and wind storms have resulted in hundreds of claims already filed by clients of Country Financial,” he said.
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July 14, 2020 at 07:00PM
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Hail's impact felt at Savoy car dealership | Business | news-gazette.com - Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette
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