This Is The Worst City To Get Your Car Fixed

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 26, 9:25AM EST

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This Is The Worst City To Get Your Car Fixed — © ermess / iStock Editorial via Getty Images

The average age of a vehicle on the road in 2020 in America is 11.9 years. It is not unusual for some brands to have over 5% of their cars on the road after they have accumulated 200,000 miles.

Why do Americans keep cars so long? One theory is that cars are built better than they were a decade ago. Another is that there is a scarcity of new cars because of a shortage of the chips used to operate electronic and navigation systems. These shortages are so bad that some car companies have had to shutter assembly lines.

It stands to reason older cars need more repairs, particularly if people want to keep them several years longer.

Auto body shops differ from mechanics in that they specialize in cosmetic repairs and modifications like fixing dents, replacing broken glass or damaged trim, and restoring scratched surfaces. They also have the special equipment and skills necessary to paint vehicles. Painting can be an expensive and time-consuming process, but a new paint job goes a long way towards improving a damaged car or just an old one that still runs well but is showing signs of age.

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24/7 Wall St. has reviewed Junk Car Traders’ list of the scammiest auto body shops to determine which places are ranked lowest overall among such businesses. The study used Yelp ratings of 47,778 auto shops across the country, as well as a survey of 1,025 car owners. A low rank doesn’t mean that these cities don’t have good body shops — just that drivers should be especially careful in choosing one, asking around and reading reviews to find one that does quality work.

Additional commuting data for the cities listed came from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for 2019, the most recent to be published.

The worst city to get your car fixed is Norfolk, Virginia. Here are the details:

> Average auto body shop Yelp rating: 3.58/5
> Avg. area commute time: 24.6 minutes
> Pct. of area workers who drive 89.1%

Click here to read The Worst City To Get Your Car Fixed

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.