Most dents end up at one of two places: a paintless dent repair (PDR) tech or a collision body shop. They're different trades with different tools, and the right one depends mostly on one thing: whether the paint is still intact.
What each one actually does
Paintless dent repair moves the metal back to where it was. A tech reads the dent with a striped light board, gets behind the panel through a window opening, an access hole or a removed trim piece, and pushes the dent out with steel rods in many small steps. Where there's no access, glue tabs pull it from the front. Nothing is sanded, filled or repainted.
A body shop rebuilds the surface. The usual process is to pull or hammer the dent close, fill what's left with body filler, sand it to shape, prime it, and repaint the panel, often blending into the panels next to it so the color matches.
Both are legitimate. They solve different problems.
When PDR is the better fix
- The paint isn't cracked or chipped. This is the big one. If the paint survived, PDR can usually keep it.
- It's a ding, a soft dent or hail. Round dents from doors, carts, balls and hailstones are what PDR was built for.
- You care about resale or a lease return. Factory paint is the best paint the car will ever have. A repainted panel shows up on a paint-depth gauge, and appraisers and lease inspectors use them.
- You want it back today. A single ding is usually an hour or two. A body shop repaint takes days, partly because paint needs time to cure.
When you need a body shop
- The paint is broken at the dent. Once paint cracks, the metal underneath needs to be sealed and refinished. PDR can sometimes reshape the metal first, but the panel still needs paint.
- The metal is stretched or torn. Sharp impacts can stretch steel past the point where it can be pushed back to its original shape.
- It's a plastic bumper cover. PDR is a metal technique. Some plastic dents come back with heat, but scuffs and cracks are body-shop work.
- There's structural damage. Anything that bent a frame rail, a pillar or a mounting point is collision repair.
- The panel already has filler in it. If someone filled that spot before, there's no clean metal to work.
How to tell from a photo
Take a photo from a low angle so you can see the reflection of a straight line, like a garage door edge or a fence, running across the dent. Then look closely at the center of the dent:
- Smooth, unbroken paint with the reflection bending around it: likely a PDR job.
- A crack, a chip, or bare metal at the impact point: likely needs paint.
- A sharp crease with a bright, tight fold line: could go either way. A tech needs to see it.
Text the photo to a PDR shop before you book anything. A good tech will tell you if it's not a PDR job, because doing a bad PDR repair on the wrong dent costs them a customer.
A note on cost
For dents PDR can handle, it's usually less expensive than conventional repair, because there's no paint, no materials and less labor. Exact prices depend on the dent's size and depth, its location on the panel, whether the panel is aluminum, and how hard it is to reach. Any shop that gives you a firm price without seeing the dent is guessing.