What Happens When They Stop Crashing?

by Ken Miller, AASP/NJ President

I recently came across some information from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) regarding the effectiveness of advanced driver assistance systems in preventing collisions.

Some of the numbers caught my attention. IIHS has found that automatic emergency braking reduces certain front-to-rear crashes by approximately 50 percent, while other technologies such as blind spot detection and rear automatic braking are also producing measurable reductions in the types of collisions they were designed to prevent. None of that should really surprise us. Preventing collisions is exactly what these systems were designed to do. What I found much more interesting was thinking about where we are on the timeline.

The average vehicle on the road today is almost 13 years old, which means a significant portion of the current vehicle population was manufactured before many of the ADAS technologies we deal with today became commonplace. According to the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI), only about one-third of registered vehicles were equipped with front automatic emergency braking in 2024. Yet, we are already measuring significant reductions in certain types of collisions. The obvious question is what happens as the vehicle population catches up with the technology.

Assuming vehicles continue to remain on the road for roughly the same amount of time, the average 12-year-old vehicle a little more than a decade from now will be manufactured today. Instead of the relatively unsophisticated 12-year-old vehicles currently making up a large portion of the fleet, those vehicles will commonly have automatic emergency braking, forward cameras, radar, blind spot monitoring, rear cross traffic detection and multiple other systems specifically designed to prevent or mitigate collisions. The technology will continue to improve as well. We don’t know exactly what that will do to overall claim frequency, but it seems difficult to believe that the effect won’t become greater as these systems make their way into a much larger percentage of the fleet.

For years, we have talked about how ADAS is changing the repair. We talk about scanning, calibration, programming, sensors, cameras, modules, repair restrictions and increasingly complicated manufacturer procedures. We have invested enormous amounts of money and time learning how to properly repair these vehicles, but perhaps we haven’t spent enough time considering what this technology could eventually do to the number of vehicles we actually repair.

There is another part of the equation that makes this even more interesting. We used to have small repairs. I am not sure there are many truly small repairs anymore. A relatively minor bumper impact can easily become a $7,000 or $10,000 repair once you account for sensors, brackets, modules, wiring, calibrations, scans, programming, manufacturer required inspections and the increasingly expensive components packaged into the areas most likely to be damaged in a collision. Minor physical damage does not necessarily result in a minor claim anymore.

That increasing repair cost also affects whether the vehicle gets repaired at all. CCC reported total loss frequency reaching a record 23.1 percent in 2025. Repair costs, vehicle values and salvage values all play a role in the economics of the total loss decision. As the cost of repairing increasingly sophisticated vehicles rises, it doesn’t take as much physical damage to move a vehicle toward the point where repairing it no longer makes economic sense. The technology can therefore affect our industry twice. It can help prevent the collision in the first place, and when a collision does occur, the cost associated with that technology can help push the vehicle toward a total loss.

We could be heading toward a collision market with fewer accidents, dramatically higher repair costs when accidents do occur and a growing percentage of those damaged vehicles never being repaired at all. I don’t know exactly where those three lines eventually intersect, and I don’t think anyone can responsibly predict the number of repairable claims 10 or 15 years from now. What I do think is worth considering is what happens to our industry if the number is substantially lower than it is today.

We have spent years discussing the technician shortage. We need more technicians, better training, apprenticeship programs and more young people entering the trade. Those are legitimate concerns today, but they are also based upon an assumption that the amount of collision repair work requiring those technicians will continue. What happens if the vehicle population eventually solves part of our technician shortage for us, not because we found enough technicians, but because there are fewer vehicles to repair? That doesn’t mean the technicians who remain will be less important. Quite the opposite. The vehicles that do get repaired will likely require increasingly capable technicians with greater training and a much broader understanding of vehicle technology. We may ultimately need fewer people while demanding considerably more from each of them.

The same question applies to repair facilities. There is an enormous amount of capital being invested in collision repair right now. MSOs continue to build and acquire locations while independent shops invest in buildings, equipment, calibration capabilities, OEM certifications, training and increasingly expensive technology. Much of that investment makes perfect sense based upon the vehicles we are repairing today. The harder question is whether today’s car count is a reasonable basis for determining how much collision repair capacity the market will need 10 or 15 years from now.

A declining repairable claim count would not necessarily mean declining sales at the same rate. Average repair orders could continue to rise as vehicle complexity increases, and the repairs that remain could require substantially more labor, equipment and technical capability. A shop could conceivably repair fewer vehicles and still produce considerably more revenue per vehicle. But that doesn’t eliminate the capacity question. Buildings, technicians and production systems ultimately require vehicles moving through them, and there is a point where increasing severity cannot completely compensate for declining frequency.

It could also change the competitive landscape. Shops built around high car count may find that model increasingly difficult to maintain. Investments that make sense when spread across hundreds of repairs may look very different when spread across significantly fewer of them. Specialized capabilities, manufacturer certifications and the ability to properly repair increasingly sophisticated vehicles could become more important, but the geographic area required to support those investments could also become larger. Consolidation may continue, although even consolidation becomes a different proposition if everyone is ultimately competing for a smaller pool of repairable vehicles.

None of this suggests that collision repair is going away. Vehicles will continue to crash, drivers will continue to make mistakes and there will always be circumstances that even the best crash avoidance technology cannot overcome. The point isn’t to predict the demise of our industry. It is to recognize that the vehicle population supporting today’s collision industry is changing, and the change isn’t limited to how difficult those vehicles are to repair.

A shop owner looking 10 years into the future has plenty of reasons to ask what equipment will be needed, what certifications will matter, what training technicians will require and how much it will cost to properly repair the next generation of vehicles. Those are important questions, but perhaps there is another one that deserves just as much consideration. How many of those vehicles will actually need us?

For decades, collision repair has largely worried about having enough people and enough capacity to handle the work. The next problem may be very different. We may eventually have to decide how much capacity the work can support.

Want more? Check out the October 2026 issue of New Jersey Automotive!