Allstate Insurance Company announced today that it will no longer specify full-body sectioning on damage estimates. A release from the company stated that full-body sectioning will be authorized by Allstate adjusters only “when a collision repair facility is confident that a full-body section is the appropriate repair, has the proper training and equipment to facilitate a quality repair and has the approval of the customer or claimant for such repair.”
Allstate believes that although full-body sectioning could be a viable repair in some circumstances, “the varying metallic composition of some modern vehicles may prevent collision repairers from facilitating a quality repair.”
In the past, Allstate has considered payment for full-body sectioning in limited circumstances on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the loss characteristics, the vehicle, the repair facility’s ability and desire to complete the repair, and the customer or claimant’s approval of the procedure.
The statement comes after Allstate and Tech-Cor, a segment of Allstate which provides insurers, manufacturers and repairers with a better understanding of auto and property restoration issues and damage estimating practices through research and training, recently revisited the full-body sectioning issue in response to evolving vehicle construction methods and materials and much discussion of the issue in the collision repair industry of late. The issue was first researched in the 1980s to address procedures for new unibody vehicles.
