Spare yourself and your car and rather pick another panelbeater.

As you have read on the other reviews available on Hello Peter, this is not a place you’d want to take a car that your hard earned cash pays for. I apologise for the long read, but this is important.

I had some bad luck and had to have repairs done to the rear bumper and the bonnet as well as the roof of my car as someone reversed into the bumper and hail damaged the roof and bonnet.

The staff were friendly and East Rand Motor Lab has a clean workshop from what I could see. First impressions can be deceiving and even though I was sure that my car would be safe in their hands, I have never been more wrong.

When I went to pick up my car, there was obvious paint chips on the bonnet, which I KNOW and have photographic proof that they were not there before my car had been repaired. They tried to blame the paint chips on stones picked up on the road, but how can a car with 6000km or that was 5 months old have gotten 10+ paint chips? One of the paint chips was on the roof, it’s impossible for a rock to bounce up that high. After checking their own photographs as well as those of the assessor, they still tried their luck saying that the lighting was bad. Then I pulled out my phone and showed them that the biggest paint chip is on the exact same spot of the biggest hail dent. To this day I am still convinced that those paint chips were either a result of bad workmanship or damage intentionally done by a greedy panelbeater who wanted to make an extra R4000 (Please note that the above statement is pure speculation and only my opinion. It CANNOT be confirmed)

I advise all of you to always take photos of your car before it goes to ANY panelbeater to prove the condition of the car as photos with time stamps and geotagging cannot lie. Finally they saw I was not going to back off and said they’d just have to respray the bonnet (with money from yet another insurance claim) and that my car has a had colour to match (metallic red). The bumper was repaired just fine, proves that sometimes even the worst things still have some good in them.

I went home sad that this happened to my car, but also scared that other things might “go wrong”. I immediately checked my Tracker logs and saw that in the 11 days they had my car, they had logged 29 trips. (Tracker even logged the trips where they drove 1 km per hour, I highly reccommend their services!!!)I do understand that it is a workshop and things have to be moved around, but Tracker provides detailed information about trips and I noticed that sometimes the car was switched on and idled for anything from 10-30 seconds. Why would you idle a car that was being moved around daily, is brand new (so the battery wouldn’t run flat) and did not have any internal or engine faults? Afterwards I noticed the radio station had been changed to a station not preset by me or the manufacturer. My car is not a sound system for someone to be entertained by whilst working on it!

After what I saw on the Tracker logs, I decided to read reviews of East Rand Motor Lab. I’ve never been one to blindly follow reviews or take them extremely seriously, but I wish I did some research before taking my car there! A Facebook review of East Rand Motor Lab with a situation similar to my own, proved that all of the bad reviews cannot be by people who simply like to complain or are just difficult. I’m not saying that all reviews are truthful, but if more than 75% of the reviews are bad, I think it’s safe to say that a verdict can be reached!

Back to my story: I picked up the car after the respray and it was in a good condition (thanks for that). I was really relieved that my car did not have to spend another night in that place where so many bad things happen to cars. I’ve read more reviews similar to my own and if you’ve read my review this far, I’m pleading that you save yourself a lot of trouble and money and rather take your car to another panelbeater.

I look forward to the response they’re going to give (if any) upon reading my review as one cannot defend yourself when you are in the wrong and so many people have complained about your terrible service.

Dear East Rand Motor Lab, Thanks for fixing the bumper and eventually the bonnet, but I never want to even drive past your workshop ever again.