To attract customers in the face of the giant Carglass and its advertising hype, certain companies in the sector are increasing their offers. Insurers are looking for solutions to avoid overbidding.
Of the “abusive practices” and prices “swollen” : the president of France insurers, Florence Lustman, is not angry with certain windshield repairers who are playing with overbidding gifts to attract customers to their homes, at the expense of the community. A quick search on the internet is enough to realize this: scooters, game consoles and gift vouchers are widely highlighted in the advertisements of certain garages offering their services to replace a damaged windshield, thus directing people towards Drive Glass, AG Pare-Brise or even MF Pare-Brise.
But these gifts are far from being free, underlines Florence Lustman: they have repercussions in “hourly rates, labor times and parts prices well above market averages”. Faced with the bills presented, insurers have no choice but to foot the bill for cracked windshields. But they then take it into account to re-evaluate future car insurance premiums applied to their customers. “Ultimately, it is the community of policyholders who pays the bill”asserts Florence Lustman.
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Explosion in the cost of windshields
The situation is all the more critical as these increasingly technological pieces are subject to an inflationary surge. “Windshields are becoming more and more sophisticated”including “driving assistance components, cameras that require compulsory adjustment” during the replacement, pointed out last month Nadhir Baba Arbi, from the firm specializing in insurance Addactis. Last year alone, their costs increased by 14.4%, according to data collected by the firm, much more than other families of automobile parts such as hoods or doors.
Insurers are somehow stuck by the “free choice of repairer” guaranteed by law to the insured, whether or not the repairer is approved by the insurer. However, they have been looking for solutions for several years to limit this increase in costs. Crédit Mutuel insurance (ACM), for example, inaugurated this year in Mulhouse a first “Mobility Station”able to carry out expertise and repairs “live and on site for broken glass”.
Macif went even further by purchasing the third player in the French market, Mondial Pare-Brise, in 2023 for 103 million euros. “It wasn’t an easy bet because we were changing world”says the general director of this mutual group, Jean-Philippe Dogneton. The company “is overall half the price of standard operators without having to offer gifts and anything else”.
The shadow of the giant Carglass
Its competitor France Pare-Brise, a brand of the French construction materials giant Saint-Gobain, follows the same policy: “Scooters, tires, Nintendo switch, Cookeo cooker, fuel card, television, tickets for Disneyland Paris or Europa Park, check up to 300 euros, we don’t offer any of that to our customers”can we read on its website. The reason given? “Transparency, towards our customers but also our partners, we want to offer everyone the right price, without re-invoicing their gifts to insurers as we can sometimes see.”
The companies are fighting against a giant, Carglass, which must amortize significant advertising costs (more than 300 million euros gross last year, according to the research firm Kantar) but whose incentives for policyholders – promotions on windshield wiper blades or technical inspections – remain light.
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Broken glass is, in frequency, the leading cause of automobile damage in France, according to Addactis. Car insurance premiums as a whole are expected to increase next year by around 5%, according to several specialist firms.
