2007 Pruis Towed

The tow guy damaged your car, the tow guy (or his company) gets to fix your car. Call the tow company and tell them they damaged your car. Why was it towed in the first place?

 

I would see what your insurance company might be able to do to help. The tow company may not have the legal right to require you notifiy them at the time you pick up the car. What if it is night an raining. You cannot be expected to go over evey inch of the car at that time. They need to protect themselves from people who would report damage they did themselves, or after the tow, but it may be obvious that this particular damage is a result of towing. I would ask to see the actual truck that towed your car and make some measurements, look for paint transfer.

 

Sue the towing company in Small Claims Court.

 

I hate to say it, but if it's been that long since you were towed, I'd think you're probably on your own.

Repair-wise, I'm not an expert but I'd guess that perhaps someone could bondo the area and spot-paint it...might not be perfect but it'd be lots better. And since it's so low, your eye wouldn't be drawn to it in the first place.

It's interesting how the damage appears to have also displaced the plastic splash panel behind it...at least your car won't normally see salted roads, but make sure that road gunk doesn't accumulate behind the fender over time, if you choose to not fix the damage.

 

I know I have said make the tow company pay, and take them to court, but if you are better with tools and like working on your car more than fighting with dead beat tow companies, you actually can fix it yourself with great results, fairly easily. The key is to buy good paint, not "Duplicolor", or other cheep / bad paint.

Paint World Inc. sell very good color matched spay can paints, clear coats and paint blender spay at www.paintworldinc.com.

A tale of two bumpers - I have painted two complete bumper covers, one with Duplicolor, and one with Point World spray paint, becuase the duplicolor was not available. The difference is night and day. Duplicolor bumper cover looks like crud, and the Paint World Inc. bumper cover looks just like the factory paint. I am not lying.

Here are the steps and a marked up photo.

1. Push the dent out from the back and pull the bottom of the fender back down as best as you can. Body filler should only be applied about 1/8 thick maximum.

2. Use wax and grease remover before any sanding, or you will grind wax into your work area and this can cause problems with the painting later.

3. Rough up the paint in the dent and slightly beyond with approx 50 grit sand paper. Then clean again with Paint Reducer (Fancy name for Auto Paint Thinner).

4. Fill the dent with body filler and sand it to shape and smooth with progressively finer sand paper. Start with 50 grit and then move toward 120 grit. Re-apply small amounts of body filler in any obvious low spots and repeat as needed. Featheredge any damaged paint edges (so that it tapers from full thickness to very thin, to bare medal, if needed).

5. Use Gray or Dard Red Surfacing Primer depening on your finish color. Which ever is closer to the color like gray for you since your car apears to be silver. Spay a light coat and let it tack up, followed by two or three wet coats that are allowed to tack up in between. The primer area will be slightly larger than the repaired area, perhaps up to the gray line I added to the picture. This primer is designed to fill small scratches and build up the surface.

6. Let it dry for about an hour and then spay a very light overspay coat of the other color primer, dark red, over a larger area, overlaping onto the car paint beyond the repair, up to the dark red line. This is an indicator coat that will let you see any low spots when you sand it off. Let this dry for two or three hours.

7. Wet Sand the primered area with 360 grit wet sand paper (the black closed coat kind) on a rubber sanding block. Wet sanding is when you wet the surface and keep a small stream of water running over the surface and your sanding block the whole time.

8. When most of the red color is gone (like I show on the picture by the wheel well, you have sanded enough. There will be some low spots and pin holes in your repair and maybe some chips in the undented paint area that will show up as red dots. Also, if you sand down to any bare metal or body filler, stop, primer again, and fill any low spots with more body filler. For the tiny pin holes, spot putty can be used.

9. Repeat 5-8 until you can sand down to a Gray Primer without any red pin holes, bare metal or body filler.

10. Use rubbing compount without wax in it to thoroughly compound a larger area around the repair up to the pruple lines in the picture. This will help the new paint stick on the area where you will be blending it into the new paint. Try to plan areas where the body panel is narrower for blending if posible, or if there is a seam, you can mask to the seam and forget about blending in that area.

11. Clean with Reducer and wipe it dry.

12. Mask of the door and wheel well. You will probably want to mask of some of the door jam too, up to an inconspicous area inside like a ridge in the door jam.

13. On a nice temperate day (around 65 - 70 F, in the shade, and no breeze, spay a light tack coet of color paint covering the repair, and up to the yellow lines (an narrow area like this makes the blending easier. When it tacks up, spay two wet coats, leting it tack up in between. If there is a clear coat, spay two wet coats of clear.

14. One the color and clear coat tacks up well, spay the blender spay over the edge of the new paint and overspay in the old paint up to the green lines. This will blend the new paint into the old.

OK, maybe Small Claims Court is less work. It depends what you like to do with your time.

 

I might have exagerated the area needed for the small repair. The blending area probably needs to be that size, but you might be able to keep the bondo, primer and feathering area a little smaller.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(DreamcastDC @ Jun 23 2007, 11:05 PM) [snapback]467159[/snapback]</div>

Sorry, I have been asleep at the wheel.
I think you will want to remove the inner plastic liner in the fender well.
At the bottom where you say pulling down here, if there is a flange or lip on the bottom, you could attach a clamp of pair of vice grip pliars with wide jaws to the flange and hold it at the right angle while you tap down on it. The wider the area you can grip with the clamp or vice grip pliars, the less you will risk distorting the flange.
For the dimple higher up on the fender, hopefully it will get smaller as you pull down below. You can start by using firm pressure with you fingers to remove the dimple and pushing in on the back of the crease near the bottom..
If you need more force, you might be able to get a small adjustable wrench closed tightly on the flange at the dimple to bring it back into place.
If you need to use a mallet or hammer, you will want to have a hand dolly (metal bar about the size of a large bar of soap) to hold behind the fender flange while you tap on the outside or in fromt of the crease on the bottom as you tap from the back side.
Start out tapping first, and use more force only if you need to. You can try a rubber mallet, but you may find that it just bounces around without really doing much. Give it a try though, and use a flat metal hammer if you need to.

 

If you don't want to do it yourself, an alternative is calling one of those mobil repair guys. They charge much less than an autobody shop and can do a good job. Especially for small repairs like that.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(DreamcastDC @ Jun 19 2007, 10:38 PM) [snapback]465021[/snapback]</div>

My Prius was also improperly towed, though it damaged the computer, not the body. Though the company maintained that they towed from the front, the police officer on the scene, to whom I ultimately spoke, said it was towed from the rear, a no-no for the Prius unless the front wheels are placed on dollies. The Toyota dealer who reset the computer also noted that the stored computer history showed a rear tow.

Not only did I have to sit at the tow yard for two hours waiting for the Toyota authorized tow truck to pick me and my car up to take it to a dealer for the fix, but the dealer wanted it overnight to ensure that all had reset properly. It turned out to be a very long day, with a long walk home at the end.

The first thing I did when I got the Prius back was to drive to the street where I'd been parked. I discovered no signage indicating towing for snow removal on that day, so I felt I was within my rights to fight on a number of fronts: I shouldn't have had to pay the towing fee, shouldn't have to pay for the computer reset, and shouldn't have to pay the ticket I was issued.

My suggestion to you is to be diligent. Just because someone tells you that you can't make a claim does not mean that is so. Everything can be fought. Of course, it may be more difficult to prove that the dent wasn't already there prior to the towing, or that it occurred afterward; however, it's still worth a valiant effort. I must admit that I walked around the car in the towing yard to inspect the body before getting into the car. Relieved to find no obvious damage, I was surprised to find that all the warning lights on the dashboard lit up and stayed on when I turned on the motor.

I wrote very legal sounding letters to the owner of the towing company (my father was a lawyer), to the police department, and to the city's office for ticket arbitration. Each received copies of the letters to the others so they could see I was arguing on all fronts and serious. When I didn't hear back from the towing company after two weeks, I made a follow-up call to the president. He tried to talk his way out of culpability, and I simply and calmly kept repeating my case, suggesting that refunding the money was the right thing to do as a good will gesture. He finally relented and refunded the fee for the computer reset, refusing to own up to his tower doing anything wrong, yet responsive to the "good will" ploy.

The City ticket arbitrator was an even harder nut to crack. Through a series of emails, she kept insisting that there was proper signage, despite the fact that I sent her photographs of the street and all of it's signs, showing no proper signage on the side of the street where I parked. She let me know twice that she was ruling against me and I would have to pay the ticket. Both times, I persisted, making a clear case, suggesting that she wasn't considering all the facts. She finally said she would visit the street . It took weeks of perseverance and lots of time, and she finally admitted that the signage was inadequate, dismissing the cittation.

If you really want to have success, you must be persistent. Don't take no for an answer -- they're paid to try to thwart you because it usually gets people off their backs.

Good luck.

 

I just bought my Prius yesterday, and the business manager told me emphatically not to let it be towed except by flatbed due to the nature of the gears. I asked the salesman when we went over the features, and he said it wasn't about the gears, it was because of body damage potential. A quick look at he owner's manual shows it being towed with the front wheels on a platform.
Who's right? I don't have a lot of technical knowledge (or understanding). Am I going to have to insist that AAA send a flatbed if I ever need it towed?

Laura
2007 Prius - aka The New Silver Schnauzer Mobile