With numerous cars left damaged after a severe hailstorm hit Calgary, a local company has deployed a high-speed scanner to help process auto insurance claims for damages related to the weather event.
DCC Hail has a hail scanner that can detect all possible hail-related dents and damages on a vehicle within minutes. Having an insurance adjuster manually assess the damage of a vehicle can take hours, but DCC Hail’s technology makes the process even more efficient, it claims.
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“We have the ability to drive a car through the scanner, [it] takes about six seconds to actually scan the vehicle and another couple of minutes to analyze what it saw, and it spits out a complete dent count and dent map of every dent on your vehicle,” DCC Hail general manager Devon Fenton told CTV News.
The scanner utilizes five cameras to scan a vehicle from multiple angles. An AI-powered program then puts the photos together to provide operators a comprehensive map of every dent on the vehicle, as well as how large each dent is.
“We don’t have to go around the car and count every dent to make sure we find every one. It does that for us,” said Fenton.
The company has eight proprietary scanners, with one deployed in Calgary to assist adjusters. The other seven are placed on standby, ready to be shipped to other parts of Canada that have also been hit by hailstorms.
The hailstorm that struck Calgary on June 13 had been estimated to cost about $1 billion in damage across both houses and vehicles. With so many vehicles left damaged after the hail, insurance adjusters will need every bit of help to get the job done.
Read more: Calgary hailstorm damage estimate revealed
The hail critically damaged so many vehicles, that CTV News reported that DCC Hail has about 200 cars, trucks, and SUVs in its parking lot that have been written off as “total losses” by insurers.
