TL;DR — For Those Who Don’t Want to Read All This. Why can’t I just tell you how much a repair costs? Because an estimate is not a price lookup. It is an engineered prediction of the cost of a repair that hasn’t happened yet. How do we make an estimate? We research the repair procedure, identify every required part, material, and special tool, find and price the parts, inspect the actual vehicle, and then do our best to predict how much time and effort the work will really re