problems after getting car back from body shop...
 

so I crashed my car back in March, I got the car back last friday.

The left rear door handle is missing....but the right side of the car got hit.

during freeway speed, whenever im turning right, the car vibrates a lot.

when im turning at low speeds, or coming to a stop, there is a huge POP coming from what seems like the suspension maybe...I cant tell.

my left front tire is 235/35/zr19 and my right front tire is 275/30/zr19

both front rims are the same size....which means that my rear tires are the same. im running a staggared setup btw. I got the car back from repair on friday and didnt notice till this morning. So now i need to figure out the closest place to get them changed back to normal.

oh and another thing I found out this morning. Im 19x10 on the left side of the car and 19x8.5 on the rightside of the car...in addition to the tires being on the wrong wheels.

*edit*
ive had the wheels fixed, but not aligned.

So for people who think they might help. here are some questions:

The repair was pathetic, since i told geico that i wanted my own bodyshop to do the repairs, they cant do anything. can i go to the BBB?

what can I do to make sure my car is perfectly functioning....geico gave the bodyshop a check for more than $16000 to repair my car.

that includes 1 front tein, ms front, and 2 hiros.

so any help for a fellow r8ard?

You didn't even mention contacting the body shop about the issues yet mention the BBB. So is it safe to assume you talked to the bodyshop and they told you to take a hike?

Lastly, you didn't trust a body shop to put on a coilover properly did you? You should have made sure they gave it a good alignment and sent the car out for the suspension work. Bottom line is, a car with that much damage will never be the same as it was prior to the accident.

I think I would have turned right around and taken it back to the body shop. If I got home and the car rode so bad the whole time, a door handle was missing, and the mis-rotated the tires on a staggerd set up car, I'd raise holy hell.

Yeah, I would've been pretty torqued off if a body shop had returned a car to me in that condition and called the job "complete".

However, if you had that much damage, it is unlikely that the car will ever be perfect again.

wth, i never heard of a more jacked up repair.

did you not do a full inspection of the car when you were at the shop?

btw why didn't your car get totalled if it was 16k in damage?

Sounds like you should have used the body shop they recommended. I believe that the workmanship is warrantied for as long as you own the car if you use their body shop.

most insurances let you choose the shop of your choice, so im not sure why this is different. sounds like your problem is more with the shop itself, than the insurance company.

I think they are required by law to allow you to choose your own body shop, but if you use the "certified" body shop that the insurance recommends, they usually guarantee the work for as long as you own the car. So if something goes wrong, the insurance company makes sure it gets fixed. If you decline to use their recommended body shop and go with someone else and something goes wrong, you have to deal directly with your body shop to get it fixed. With $16K worth of repair work done, you really should have looked over the car better before you left. That way the body shop would have no way of claiming it didn't happen while it was in their possession.

I did contact the bodyshop...unfortunately, i got the car back on friday at 6pm, so i didnt have time to check it out completely...I didnt have any way to get in touch with the shop owner until monday when a few things got taken care of. Today I was there, we went on a test drive, and he noticed that my whole front steering assembly is broken, he said "ill do whatever it takes to make it perfect again"

also, there is a shop in SF that builds/works on race/tuned cars, the guy from the bodyshop sent the car to them for the suspension work.
*side note*
My CEL is still on from even when I bought the car used....it has the HKS rs suction on it, someone was saying that its what causes CEL.

there wasnt really that much damage, I attached some pics for you guys to judge for yourselves.

http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/5...32382p03ht.jpg
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/169...32382p20ky.jpg
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/771...32382p87mj.jpg

btw, all my centercaps for my hiros are now missing becuase when firestone changed the wheels & tires they lost them all...How can I get new centercaps for the Hiros?

That looks like alot of damage to me. But regardless, im not sure how Cali works. In my state, Minnesota, there are no insurance company "certified" auto body shops, not that ive heard of anyways. The ins. company is not the one that warranties the auto body shops work, its the auto body itself. So its all on the auto body shop, not the ins. company. And wow, I can believe they cut a check for 16g, I would have thought they'd total it out.

*edit
My car is currently getting work done, minor, but my ins. company gave me no recommendation on where to take it. It was all up to me to find a place.

I am in Texas, and in my area, most insurance companies prefer to do business with a company called Service King. They are one of the highest rated body shops, and I know from experience that they do good work. So it's not like the insurance companies are trying to get you to use the cheapest shop, however; they may get a discount since they send so much business to them, but they do great work nonetheless. When I had a wreck in my previous vehicle, I was told that if I used them, the work was warrantied for as long as I owned the vehicle. The insurance company itself may not have warrantied it, but they made sure that the body shop fixed anything that was not done right the first time.

I had work done on my car after it was hit slightly by a driver when it was parked. The insurance companies most often say you can take it anywhere, but if there is a huge diff btwn the appraised price vs. the 'shop of your choice's price', they need a written detailed explanation as to why, and possilby another appriaser- but most of the time it all checks out. T

hey prefer for you to use 'a recommended shop' for ease of operation, but I believe the shop's warranty is what will ultimately be what to look at for getting the fixes done right.

Sounds like they are cooperating so thats good. I'd make Firestone pay for the center caps.= they lost em!

My sister did the same thing to her Mazda6. She hydroplaned into a divider and ground up the side of the car. Required full right side panels/paint/wheels. When she got it back, an axle was warped, the tranny leaked (from having the axle jammed into it) and some of the front linkages were messed up still. The initial repair was like 12k (on a 22k car) and then a new tranny was XXK, and then the suspension work was X more. Ultimately, I think it was an 18k repair job and the car should have been totaled. Its still a little looser feeling than it used to be and if you look hard, you can tell it's been repainted on the passenger side.

A certified shop can write it's own supplements. That means, as they tear down the vehicle and see things underneath that need replacing, they write the insurance company a bill and do the work. It sounds like your shop only did what was on the initial estimate without trying for supplemental work. That's poor practice. As for rotating staggered tires like they did? That's just having a retarded tech.

I've got a body shop in the family, and sometimes it takes a second visit to get everything. The insurance adjustor and the shop may not catch everything (or test drive it a lot). Just work with them and I'm sure they'll take care of you. But I agree, no wrecked car will ever be just like it was before the wreck. My wife hit a deer a year ago with her Jeep, and we weren't able to use our family shop to fix it. It took a second visit to the shop we used, as the guy for one that did the final buffing left some compound in cracks and even on the hood! I wasn't real happy about that... he looked like a slacker, but the owner fixed it right.

The front grill also had to be replaced, and although it's clipped in correctly, the new grill doesn't fit as 100% snug in the bottom left corner as the original one did.

At the family shop, I saw a Miata come in that had been rear-ended. The owner had never waxed the car in it's life, and it was obvious what was newly painted. The old paint was just faded. But of course that's not your case. The paint if anything should look perfect on a relatively new car.

Anyhoo... good luck!