Check your coverage before you check the car
Hail is the rare claim with nobody to blame. It falls under comprehensive coverage — an optional coverage, not one of Ontario’s mandatory ones — so the first question after a storm is not “how bad is it” but “does my policy include comprehensive.” If it does, the claim involves no fault determination and no other driver: you pay your comprehensive deductible and the coverage responds. Notify your insurance company promptly once you spot damage; policies expect notice within seven days of discovering it.
If your policy skips comprehensive, hail becomes an out-of-pocket decision, and we treat it as one — a straight price for the repair, options laid out from most thorough to most economical, and no pressure about which you choose. Either way, the conversation starts with photos sent to us the day you notice the dents, because after a real hail event the shops fill in the order the phone rang.
Forty dents you can only see at seven in the evening
Hail damage is a lighting trick. At noon under flat grey sky a peppered hood can pass for clean; at seven, with sun raking low across the panel, every strike throws a shadow and the count triples. That is why we never estimate hail from a customer’s overhead photo — the car comes in, goes under angled light, and each panel gets its dents counted and mapped individually. The estimate your insurance company receives reflects the entire storm on the first pass, which is what keeps the claim from limping through supplement after supplement while the car waits.
Bayview Village splits predictably when hail arrives. Underground cars at the Bessarion towers sleep through it; the crescents’ driveway cars, the commuters caught on the 401 or 404, and everything sitting in the open rows at the mall take the strikes. Roofs, hoods, and the tops of fenders — horizontal surfaces facing the sky — collect nearly all of it, and the aluminum hoods common on this neighbourhood’s newer SUVs register strikes more readily than the steel of a decade ago.
From mapped panels to finished car
The repair follows what the mapping found. Shallow strikes in reachable panels are worked back to shape from behind. Strikes that stretched the metal or cracked the paint need filling and refinishing, blended so the repair reads as one surface. A roof hammered hard enough can cross the line where replacement beats repair, and when it does we price both and recommend what we would do on our own car. Anything refinished leaves under the lifetime paint warranty, same as every other job in the building.
Do not park a hailed car for the season and plan to deal with it later — broken paint plus a winter of Sheppard’s salt spray converts clean comprehensive damage into corrosion nobody covers as willingly. Send photos early, take your place in the queue, and we schedule the in-person mapping right away. Hours run 8 AM to 7 PM Monday to Saturday with Sundays by appointment, rentals are timed to your coverage and your drop-off, and the whole file runs from our office so you are never chasing the insurance company yourself.
