Ten loud minutes, one uneven neighbourhood
GTA hail arrives inside summer thunderstorms — a cell tracks across North York some July afternoon, drops ice for ten minutes, and moves on. Lansing takes it unevenly. The cars stacked underground near Sheppard-Yonge station never feel it, while the driveway-parked cars on the side streets west of Yonge catch every stone on the horizontal panels: hood, roof, trunk lid, the top edges of the fenders. Two cars a hundred metres apart come out of the same storm with a $0 difference and a serious one.
The damage is also easy to misjudge from above. Hail dents read shallow in flat daylight and multiply under angled light, which is why the assessment happens panel by panel under proper lighting, not in a driveway squint. Counting honestly matters — an underestimate surfaces later as a supplement, and an overestimate pushes a repairable car toward a write-off it didn’t deserve.
Each panel gets its own decision
Hail repair is really thirty small repairs wearing one claim number. A shallow dimple in the middle of a roof skin, paint intact, is a different job than a sharp strike that cracked the finish on a hood edge, and a panel peppered past a certain density is often better replaced than repaired. We map the car panel by panel, choose the right approach for each, and write the estimate from that map — so the plan reflects your actual car, not an average storm.
Where refinishing is called for, the colour is matched against your panels as they have weathered and blended so repaired surfaces don’t read differently at noon than the untouched ones beside them. Everything painted here carries the lifetime refinish warranty, and replaced panels carry the parts-and-installation warranty.
The claim is comprehensive — and we run it
Hail falls under the comprehensive portion of your policy, not collision, so the claim stands apart from any fault question — there is no other driver and no Fault Determination Rules math involved. Your deductible applies as your policy sets it. We open the claim with your insurance company, provide the panel-by-panel documentation, and handle the adjuster’s questions ourselves; if you have questions of your own, the owner takes the call directly.
One practical note for Lansing: after a widely reported storm, every shop in the city gets busy at once. Sending photos the same week gets your written estimate and your booking slot locked while the queue is short. The drive over is the usual one — Sheppard Ave W straight to Keele — and if the storm also cracked glass or trim, we fold that into the same claim rather than making you file twice.
- Panel-by-panel damage map under proper lighting — the honest count
- Repair, refinish, or replace decided per panel, not per car
- Comprehensive claim opened and documented by the shop
- Photo estimates prioritized in the week after a storm
