CollisionCast

The Collision Repair Education Foundation (CREF) made an impact at the recent American School Counselor Association (ASCA) conference, where school counselors considered alternative career options for the students they guide.

The I-CAR Academy curriculum is designed to prepare entry-level technicians for a collision repair career. I-CAR Director of Product Management Jesus Guerrero talks about how the Academy, with guided hands-on learning and gamification in five foundational learning areas, helps new hires become productive technicians.

AI is making an impact across all sectors of business, including collision repair.

FenderBender speaks with Ryan Taylor, the founder and CEO of Body Shop Booster, to learn more about what he is doing to develop AI for collision repairers and how AI can impact the industry.

As the world is forced to adapt to climate change, it should spark interest among collision repairers on the matter of hail repair. FenderBender speaks to Dr. Stefan Liess, a climate researcher from the University of Minnesota, and Mo Kayeni of Elevated Hail Repair to learn more about the future of hail and whether collision repairers are up to the task.

In this episode, the team at Ratchet+Wrench, a sibling publication to FenderBender, interviews Sara Fraser of Haas Performance Consulting to dispel the myths about Gen Z workers and discuss five traits that make them among the best workers in the workforce.

Drew Barnes and Heather Sebben of the North American Council of Automotive Teachers discuss what NACAT is and how it serves the automotive industry. They are approaching their 50th anniversary of operation and plan to celebrate it at their annual conference this summer.

Data security and privacy may seem hard to achieve, but there are solutions to those issues in collision repair.

Pete Tagliapietra, the managing director and founder of DataTouch, explains what data pumps are, how they operate, and what DataTouch is doing about it.

How shops approach repair planning is often not optimal for where collision repair is headed, with added repair cost and complexity. Although much of repair planning is currently focused on identification through the pre-scan, it needs to move to data-driven repair recommendations, says Sam Poradish, director of automotive intelligence at asTech, one of the sponsors of our inaugural Best Repair Planner/Estimator of the Year Award.

The tech shortage is impacting many trade industries, including the collision repair industry.

Eddie Hightower, the senior vice president of sustainability and social responsibility at Caliber Collision, shares how their Technician Apprentice Program (TAP) is making a difference in addressing the issue not only for their repair centers but also across the industry in the U.S.

If something is expensive to buy, it’s likely even more expensive to repair. This certainly applies to EVs.

Kevin FitzPatrick, the senior vice president of North America operations at Opus IVS, explains why this is the case and how quickly one should get certified to repair them.