A Testimonial - Mitigation of fleet repair costs

Recently one of our clients reported the failure of the front chassis rails of a popular utility vehicle they use in central Australia. The photos provided were disturbing - why would a 2 year old vehicle have this sort of damage?

Catastrophic chassis rail failure

Questions arise such as was it a case of overloading the vehicle, or some sort of unusual incident? However we diagnosed it as fatigue failure due to a similar fracture on the opposite side. The failure was in our opinion due to a combination of speed on corrugated outback roads, with a winch mounted on a heavy steel bullbar causing oscellations forward of the front suspension beam. Simply put, it cracked at the weakest unsupported point.

Our client has a large fleet and operates an accident management fund for collision repairs utilising our advanced accident solutions. In circumstances like this there are a number of options in regard to reaching a resolution on how to proceed. A typical response would be to have the chassis repaired as there is a repair section available from the manufacturer. This would entail the complete stripping of the front end and doing a sectional repair. Due to high work loads in the small number of collision repair shops in this small town with a delivery time of at least a month to import the section, we considered this to be a poor option.

Mitigation of fleet repair costs

Mitigation of costs must always be balanced with efficient claims turnaround where commercial vehicles are used as tools of trade. Our strategy involved approaching the dealership that sold the vehicle with a request they put in a warranty claim for the chassis failure to the manufacturer. To bolster our case we requested the fleet manager to write to them demanding a replacement vehicle.

We then followed through with the dealership providing expert commentary and were delighted when the manufacturer finally agreed that the 2-year-old vehicle that had travelled some 140,000 km would be replaced with a brand new one. Our client was absolutely delighted with this result and emailed us congratulating us on a great job... "Honestly, we were able to secure the replacement vehicle thanks to your valuable insight and deep understanding of vehicles. Without your feedback & support we would have ended up paying for an expensive repair."