Special Report Experts - Getting to the Bottom of Complex Damage Cases
Author: Joachim Geiger
Special reports go beyond the conventional framework. Often, special issues and frameworks make it necessary to employ a special reports expert. But how do you actually become a special assessor? And how do these experts work? We checked with the specialist department.
When a substantial engine failure, damaged paintwork, a smouldering fire under the hood or a badly damaged electric car are involved – that's when DEKRA special report experts come into play. Special assessors are experts or accident analysts who can draw on a broad repertoire of know-how and testing methods.
Their special expertise is often required by investigating authorities, courts, insurance companies, businesses, and private customers. Their task is to prepare technical facts to enable the competent authorities to make a legal or insurance law assessment on this basis.
Every special report has its own specific set of questions
“A special assessor almost always has the ambition to discover things that others can't find. Every appraisal has its own set of questions, every claim has its own conditions,” says Harald Eder, who is responsible for special reports and is part of DEKRA's product management for damage appraisals. The mechatronics engineer with years of experience in the workshop sector and the service department of a car dealership has specialized in determining the cause of fires in all types of vehicles. His team is made up of four other experts with extensive specialist knowledge in the areas of aggregates, paintwork and electric vehicles. “A special technical report for an electric car is required, for example, to determine whether the battery poses a risk after a serious accident,” says Eder.
To become a special appraiser, you have to gain the right qualifications
The special reports department is both a competence and a training center. On the agenda are, among other things, technical customer service as well as the training and further education of special report experts – anyone who wants to be part of this exclusive team has to obtain special qualifications. To this end, there is a special qualification course for each field of work, which is supervised by the department's experts. These courses generally last one week; they focus on a practical component in which the participants analyze selected cases of damage and discuss the procedure up to and including the preparation of an expert report. The demand for these courses is certainly high: today, there are around 50 special assessors for the investigation of fire causes, around 500 in the areas of aggregates and electric vehicles and around 160 special assessors in the area of paintwork.
Special assessors - archeologists of damage appraisals?
Another focal point of this department is providing technical support to colleagues in the regional divisions. “Special reports and technical damage analysis are also always a team effort,” explains Harald Eder. Among other things, his department has set up its own platform to support colleagues in the branches. And what characterizes the work of a special expert? Harald Eder likes to use an image from archaeology: “An archaeologist uses fragments to reconstruct what an object looked like in its original state. The special assessor finds a defective component and reconstructs its condition before it was damaged.” An essential method for this is the exclusion procedure. As a first step, the expert examines the possible causes of the damage. Next, he examines every technically plausible cause of damage and assesses how likely or unlikely it is in this specific case. This usually allows the causes to be narrowed down considerably – In the best case to a single cause, which then clarifies the issue in question.
Harald Eder still remembers one case in which he had to pull out all the stops: an almost two-year-old off-road vehicle with a diesel engine and a mileage of around 60,000 kilometers presented with fire damage in the dashboard area. The insurer has asked him to investigate the cause. The process begins with an interview with the owner of the vehicle on how the damage occurred. The DERKA expert also examines the vehicle's history. It turns out that the vehicle was converted with headlights from a different manufacturer's series after purchase. A technical inspection reveals that the control unit behind the dashboard, responsible for controlling the electrical system in the front of the vehicle, has burned out from the inside. In addition, the cable bundles in the entire area of the front end are scorched.
In the further course of the special report, the experts dismantled the front end of the vehicle; an X-ray examination of the electronic components and further analyses of the fault diagnosis log and other control units were also carried out. The result: “We were able to prove that the wiring to the circuit for the parking lights had been connected incorrectly when the lighting system was converted,” recalls Eder. As a result, there was a fault current every time the vehicle lights were switched on. The control unit then switched off to prevent damage. Over time, however, this electronic component was so badly damaged by several thousand switching operations that the protective device failed. This caused the cables to overheat, resulting in scorching damage to the cables and a headlight.
The DEKRA special experts were also able to prove that the vehicle system regularly indicated the malfunction in the electrical circuit by means of a fault signal shown on the display. The fault in the electrical circuit was also repeatedly displayed in the previous diagnostic logs of the maintenance work. For Harald Eder, there is one thing certain in this case: had the fault not been permanently ignored, the damage would likely not have occurred.