Lease inspectors are looking for exactly this. Hail across a hood and roof is written up as excessive wear, charged at their estimate, at their price, with no say in who does the work — and you find out on the last day.
426 Miami St, Leavenworth, KS 66048 · (913) 907-5180
When the inspector writes hail up as excessive wear, you are not getting a quote. You are getting a bill, generally calculated on conventional repair, and it arrives when you have no time left to do anything about it.
Fixing it beforehand puts you back in control of all three: what gets repaired, what it costs, and when it happens.
A lease return with hail on it is not a question of whether you pay. It is a question of who prices it.
Leave it, and the return inspector prices it as excess wear. You do not choose the assessor, you do not choose the method, and you find out the number after the car is gone. Hail is unusually visible on a walkaround, so it is not the kind of thing that gets missed.
Repair it first, and you have a written figure in advance from a shop you picked, and the option to run it through a comprehensive claim rather than out of pocket.
Two things make the second route cheaper more often than people expect. Hail is a comprehensive claim, not an at-fault collision, so nobody is assigned blame for weather. And paintless repair carries no paint cost, which is most of what makes a hail estimate large.
Earlier than feels necessary. Two reasons, and neither is about our schedule:
If your return is inside a month and the car has hail on it, the useful first step is a free scan and a written number. Then you are deciding between two figures instead of guessing against one you have not seen yet.
Because nothing is repainted, there is no aftermarket finish for an inspector or a paint-depth gauge to find. The car goes back on the paint it left the factory with.
Timing is the one thing that matters here. Bring it in with a couple of weeks in hand and the whole thing is comfortable; bring it the week of turn-in and it is a scramble.
Your adjuster hands you a list of shops. The one at the top is usually a body shop, and a body shop fixes hail the old way: sand the panel, fill it, prime it, repaint it. Your factory paint comes off and a new coat goes on.
Paintless dent repair never touches your paint. A tech works behind the panel and pushes each dent back to flat from the inside. Same metal. Same paint that left the factory. No filler, no sanding, no color match.
One shop repaints your car. The other un-dents it.
Two to three weeks is comfortable. Repair itself is typically 5-7 days, and that leaves room to handle a claim if you are filing one.
Hail is normally a comprehensive claim on your own policy regardless of who holds the title. Bring your paperwork and we will tell you what the scan shows before you decide.
Bring it. It is useful to compare against a documented scan, and it is common for the two numbers to be very different.
Yes, free, so the last weeks of your lease are not spent in a rental.
Free scan and a finish date, with time to spare.
Or call (913) 907-5180 and talk to a dent tech, not a call center.