Complaint Review: Caliber Collision

The initial estimate we received from Caliber Collision was not used in the repair of our car, and instead a competitor's estimate on file with Liberty was taken as the basis for repair and billing.

We spoke to Ozzie's and they told us that it is common for Caliber to give low estimates to get people in the door, then they increase the estimate, working directly with the insurance company, never informing the customer. This clearly happened to us and Caliber never bothered to inform us that they were increasing our estimate by 43%.

Ozzie's (Caliber's competition) gave us a realistic estimate, then Caliber got ahold of Ozzie's estimate and increased the estimate to match Ozzie's estimate, and we were never informed of this change, and never had a chance to get our car out of there. This is factual and I have recorded calls where Caliber flat our admits that they took Ozzie's estimate and matched it. Then they threw out the original estimate that we agreed to. Without ever telling us.

Not sure why they can claim they found 'Hidden Damage' beyond the original estimate. All the damage was clearly visible and addressed in the original estimate.



Caliber broke some molding toward the end of the project when they were removing it, they didn't tell me and got $144 directly from my insurance company to cover something that they clearly broke. They admitted to breaking the molding and kept the car for another 3 days never offering to help with transportation even when it was their fault.

Liberty tells us that Caliber can do these strange things since Caliber had attained 'Power of Attorney' so this gives them the right to get our policy number from Liberty, find out how much Liberty gave us for the repairs and to even have access to other shops estimates? I don't think so.

Apparently we signed a section titled: 'Authorization to Repair' and "Authorization to Access Vehicle Data" which had a conditional "Power of Attorney" "…For insurance claims". As we see it, it is only for "Insurance Claims". Obviously we already handled the claim and had the check so this section is irrelevant. I will post exactly what that small print says even though it never applied to our drop off, since they would NOT be handling our Claim.

Power of Attorney

• For Insurance claims, I hereby constitute and appoint Caliber Collision and its authorized employees to be my true and lawful attorney-in-fact with authority to sign my name on any check or draft covering repairs to my automobile and to take any actions as may be necessary to negotiate any such check or draft.

They never needed to 'negotiate any such check or draft' until the end of the project. This does not include any rights to ask for my payout or for my competitor invoices. We already handled the claim and had the money to pay for the repairs. It was a simple fix to the edge of a door. They had no reason to use any such Power of Attorney without informing us especially since they already had their own estimate for the work and should have just fixed the door.

Caliber clearly lied to us by telling us ok when we told them that we already handled the claim, we have the check, and they should not go through our insurance company for the work. We told them we will pay ourselves. Caliber then told us that the correct term is 'Self Pay' and that they also call it 'Cash Pay'. We had never heard those terms before, so we wrote it on one of the drop off forms and continued to use Caliber's term "Self Pay" through all of our calls since then.

Again, Caliber had no claim to deal with, we did that ourselves, we even submitted supplements with Liberty and got all the payments prior to even deciding if we would ever get the car repaired.

I have used a Power if Attorney in the past and they never went behind my back and disregarded my explicit instructions to benefit themselves. I clearly told them we would be paying for the work. The sections related to the claim and insurance info were ignored and left blank. Caliber typed our insurance name in small print on one section but the option for 'Claim Made' was left blank because it was irrelevant. Again, entire sections of the form were ignored since they didn't apply to our drop off situation as Self Pay.