good morning all! I was wondering if I could get some advice from fellow Acura owners:

About a couple of months ago, I was backing into a parking space at my job. Not knowing that the the Ford F150 in the parking space behind me, litteraly had his entire hood in my parking space, I tapped my rear bumper against his plastic licensce plate cover.

See diagram:
T-"Ford Truck", W="Truck Front wheels", L="Parking Line"


FFFFFFF
W
L




Anyway it was minimal damage to my bumper, but I have two small indentations on the corner of my rear bumper on the left side and the middle. Its barley noticable unless I am right up on it, but its is annoying as hell.

I took it to Acura and they said it would cost $700 to replace and repaint the bumper. The money is not really a concern, but I did hear that any body work would decrease the value of the car no matter how minimal.

The car is not leased either and I don't plan to get rid of it anytime soon, so i really don't HAVE to get it fixed, it is just an eyesore. Do you guys think that it is worth $700 to replace the bumper for minimal damage, and if doing so how bad would that hurt the value of my car in case I did want to get rid of it down the road?

Dent Wizard told me that they could just sand down the existing bumper and repaint it, but I don't think I trust them to do that, especially since I have the Antracite Metallic paint.

 

hmm.. get the ronjon kit.

 

Can you post a picture of the bumper? It would help a lot in understanding the nature of the damage.

Your story is another reason why I don't believe in back-in parking.

 

Not trying to be a smart ass, but if the $700 is not a concern, why the drop in value is. I am sure it would be minimal, especially that it was not really an accident.

How much would the dent wizard charge you? If not much, try going that route. I am sure they blend the paint, etc. to minimize the showing of the fix.

Good luck, Mark.

 

I'll post a pic when I get home today. It looks as if someone just mashed the edge of the bumper with their thumb. there were no scratches from the impact and even the clearcoat is still intact.

 

Do you believe in backing out of the space?

Yes, post pics, so we can understand the nature of the damage better.

 

Dent wizard quoted me $250 for the job.

The reason I am wary of just getting the bumper replaced and/or repainted is because I had a bad experience with the repainting of my Mustang GT. Ford repainted the entire car through the warranty. Even the the car was never in an accident, the repainting killed my resale value when I sold it 2 years ago. I never want to go through that again.

 

good point. I only back in park now when there are no cars behind me. Or better yet, I just drove through the two parking spaces so the front of my car is facing outward.

It is very hard to see out the rear window of the car when backing up which makes it kind of tricky to back out of a parking space. I think I should have invested in the back up sensors!

 

How else would you get out of the space? At the risk of hijacking the thread, I see these people at the office every morning who insist on backing in; some of them go back and forth four times trying to back into spaces that they could get into in a single move if they just pulled in normally. I genuinely do not understand the point--I mean, maybe you save 5 seconds in the afternoon, but don't you waste more than that doing the back-in dance?


Anyway, getting back to the topic, in all seriousness I can fully sympathize with hitting another vehicle in that circumstance. Last November I was backing out of my driveway at night in the pouring rain, couldn't see a damn thing and thus did not realize that the fuckhead across the street had backed a pickup into his driveway but left it hanging out into the street because he already had another car parked there. I scraped up the right rear quarterpanel when I made contact with his front bumper-mounted license plate. Big scrapes, too; cost about $700 to fix. All the more reason that people who park in the driveway need to park completely IN the driveway (not to mention that it's the law anyway)

 

 

I would leave it alone... If you are going to keep the car a while it could happen again. My 2G had the rear cover replaced 3 times... Not sure who told you that a number bumper cover would diminish the value of the car, I have never heard of that since it is not structural damage