Yes. Whatever the call handler implies, the choice of repairer on a motor claim is yours in law, not your insurer’s. An insurer may recommend a shop from its approved network, and those shops are often perfectly competent — but they are working to rates and methods negotiated with the insurer, and where those rates and your car disagree, the rates usually win. If you would rather instruct us, tell your insurer you have a preferred repairer and give them our details. We do the rest, including the assessment negotiation. It does not slow the claim down; in our experience it usually speeds it up, because we answer the phone.

A wing and door is eleven working days here, most of the time. What moves that number is almost never the paint — it is parts. A discontinued trim clip for a fifteen-year-old car can add three weeks and there is nothing anybody can do about it except tell you early. So we quote a date at the assessment based on parts availability we have actually checked that morning, not on an average, and if a part slips you hear it from Rachel the day we hear it. We would rather give you a longer date and keep it than a short one and apologise, which is the opposite of how most of this industry is incentivised.

A courtesy car is included in every job here over five hundred pounds, and it is genuinely included rather than recovered somewhere else in the estimate. What we will not do is the thing some shops do with credit hire: put you into a vehicle on a credit agreement whose daily rate is then claimed from the third party’s insurer at three or four times the market rate. It is legal, it is lucrative for the shop, and it occasionally leaves the client personally liable when the claim is disputed. If somebody offers you a like-for-like prestige hire car after an accident and the paperwork runs longer than a page, read all of it before signing anything.

Whether the shop measures anything, or only looks at it. Whether paint is mixed on site or bought in ready-made. Whether structural work is checked on a jig against current manufacturer data, and whether you are given the printout. Whether the person quoting is the person who will do it. What happens to the car overnight. And what the guarantee actually excludes, which is a far more revealing question than what it covers. Any workshop worth leaving a car with will answer all six without hesitating, and will not mind being asked.