Just had a great Thanksgiving road trip - 13 hours out and back to a friend's house in the '21 TLX, which performed well; smooth and comfortable cruiser, and fast passing and merging. Alas, somewhere along the way a rock or piece of road debris of some kind struck my front grille and took out one of the diamond pentagons. Is this a common problem with diamond pentagon grille? A friend of mine seemed to think it was way too delicate for that to happen. No other apparent damage, radiator looks fine, the radar plate also looks fine and the adaptive cruise performed faultlessly. Will learn soon how long it will take to fix. Anyone else ever experience this? Would appreciate knowing length of time to repair and cost. I called my dealership's service dept. and they didn't want to speculate until looking at it, so until I have time to take the car in, I'm in the dark.

 

I would hope it… wonder what smacked into it.

I’d contact a reputable body shop for pricing too. The labor rates tend to be lower as I had checked into this when I scraped my front splitter on a curb.

 

I haven't had the problem you describe (thankfully), but the grill "seems" structurally sound (for now). I agree that you should use a competent body shop rather than the dealer. Dealers, in general, seem to be higher priced and sometimes don't do the body wok themselves but rather farm it out to an independent body shop. Good luck.

 

I had the dealer look at it after work and got an estimate - about 500 bucks part and labor. Steep, but I trust them to do the work right the first time. If the car was an older 1st gen TLX I'd let a body shop do it. The only damaged piece is the grill - the radiator looked fine to the tech, and the radar plate is fine as well and will not need to be recalibrated. They can do the work onsite since it's a part swap. I likely hit a rock thrown up by a car ahead of me at some point and did not hear the impact over my very loud ELS sound system doing its very solid 17-speaker business, or it is even possible some asshat vandalized the car.

 

get the Type S grille while your at it