A couple months back, I was involved in my first-ever accident when my Lexus IS 300 was rear-ended on a highway in Toronto. I’ve already gone over the specifics of the actual event, and now it’s time to talk about the repair.
The first surprise after my accident happened shortly after, when I brought the car to the local Lexus-certified collision center for an estimate.
From the outside, the damage appeared minimal — just some denting on the rear bumper. But taking the cover off, the appraiser found that the entire steel impact bar had pushed into the rear panel and broken both of the crumple zone clips. The car was no longer safe to drive, the protection gone if another accident occurred.
This began an odyssey of repair that took almost two months to resolve. There were communication delays between the collision center and my insurance, a Lexus parts shortage in Canada, protracted discussions on OEM vs aftermarket parts. I had already been concerned about the paint shop matching the Atomic Silver exterior, but this morphed into a whole other level of aggravation.
(There was a silver lining, as I managed to score an 2018 Audi A4 as my rental car. I’ll cover that experience more at a later date, but it was a lot of fun getting an extended test drive of an IS competitor.)
In the end, the IS was flawlessly repaired. I can be borderline obsessive about my cars, but no matter how hard I tried, there was no discernible difference, no indication that any damage had occurred. In fact, the repainted bumper eliminated some previous scuffs and stone chips behind the rear tires, making it even better than before. Sometimes bad stories have happy endings, even if they take longer than expected.
This IS 300 AWD was made possible by the folks at OpenRoad Lexus Richmond, the premier Lexus dealership in British Columbia and a proud sponsor of Lexus Enthusiast.