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A vacant former car dealership in north Bibb County is becoming a new body shop. Minnesota-based ABRA Auto Body & Glass bought the 20,129 square-foot former BMW dealership at 111 Riverside Parkway in Macon, GA, and spent nearly four months renovating the building, said David Kulkis, regional business development director in Atlanta.

On April 25th, the Society of Collision Repair Specialists (SCRS) hosted a face-to-face meeting of national repair associations, I-CAR, the OEM Roundtable and the vast majority of the top automakers in Oklahoma City prior to the start of the Collision Industry Conference (CIC).

Louisiana Commissioner of Insurance Jim Donelon and James H. Freis, Jr., Director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) within the U.S. Treasury, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) aimed at boosting anti-fraud efforts.

A San Antonio company has been fined $46,000 by OSHA in connection with a fatal loading dock accident.

A Yukon High School and Canadian Valley Technology Student competed for eight hours to win a state SkillsUSA championship.

Caliber Collision Centers announced that it has acquired Legend Collision Center and reopened the location as Caliber West San Antonio.

“West San Antonio center brings our total number of locations in the San Antonio market area to 10 as we continue to grow both organically and through strategic acquisitions,” said Steve Grimshaw, Caliber Collision Centers’ Chief Executive Officer.  “This new center also creates additional capacity across this important market as we provide our insurance clients the customer focus, operational consistency and cost management they require in today’s competitive insurance market.”

The newly acquired 19,900- square-foot collision repair facility is at 11720 Culebra Road, San Antonio, TX 78253.

“Our new West San Antonio center provides another example of how Caliber Collision continues to grow across the Texas market,” added Mark Sanders, Chief Operating Officer for Caliber Collision Centers. “This brings our total number of centers in Texas to 49.”

Service King Collision Repair Centers, a Texas-based operator of collision repair facilities in the Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio and Austin markets, announced the opening of their 12th new collision center within the Houston marketplace on May 22. The shop is located in Clearlake, Texas, at 17080 Mill Forest Rd. This facility is the 48th location in Texas.

The economy in Abilene, TX is still cashing in on the 2011 Easter storm that dumped 2.4 inches of rain in three hours and hammered cars, shattered windshields and punched holes in rooftops with pea to softball size hail.

According to Hector Guerrero, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, four weather elements combined to create a “perfect storm” on Easter Sunday 2011.

State Farm’s forced implementation of its PartsTrader e-bidding process within its Select Service Program shops has ignited a firestorm of criticism from the industry, not just from its own DRPs.

Blink, blink. A new study suggests failure to properly use turn signals causes 2 million accidents annually, a more serious problem than distracted driving.

When’s the last time you used your own turn signals? According to research by the Society of Automotive Engineers, drivers either neglect to use their signals when changing lanes,  or fail to turn the signals off  48% of the time.  And when making a turn, the failure rate is around 25%. That works out to 2 billion times a day drivers fail to use signals, or 750 billion times annually.