Collision repair shops absorbing higher costs for sensor replacement and camera recalibration now have insurance-industry data quantifying the tradeoff on the other side of the ledger.
In an analysis published Aug. 11, Matt Moore, chief insurance operations officer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and its Highway Loss Data Institute, cited an HLDI comparison of otherwise identical 2017-22 model year vehicles with and without a bundle of driver assistance features, showing higher claim severity but lower overall losses for the equipped vehicles.
Severity climbs on equipped vehicles
Collision claim severity, essentially the dollar figure needed to close out a claim, ran about 10% higher for equipped vehicles than for unequipped ones, according to the analysis. Severity under property damage liability coverage, which pays for damage to a vehicle hit by the policyholder, was even higher, 15%.
Moore attributed part of the gap directly to calibration, noting that replacing the sensors involved frequently requires a follow-up calibration that adds to the repair bill.
Overall losses fall despite the higher severity
Overall losses, the product of claim frequency multiplied by claim severity, ran about 5% lower for collision coverage on equipped vehicles, according to the analysis. Moore explained the pattern as arithmetic rather than a sign that sensors are cheap to fix: since minor, lower-cost collisions account for most claims and equipped vehicles avoid many of those, the claims that remain skew toward more serious, higher-cost crashes, which pulls the average severity figure up even as the total number of claims falls.
"Though they're expensive to fix, they're remarkably good at preventing crashes," Moore wrote of the systems.
A reimbursement fight shops already know
The severity increase Moore attributes partly to calibration lands on a cost category shops and insurers have been contesting directly. Steve Davis, founder and CEO of Techmotive, an ADAS calibration services provider, has said he has seen individual adjusters deny payment for calibrations, a dispute he has said gets escalated within the insurer until it reaches someone who understands the liability exposure involved.
Reimbursement risk has also been cited as a reason some shops hesitate to invest in calibration equipment at all, even when they recognize the technical need, according to Joel Adcock, director of strategic partnerships at Revv, in prior ABN coverage. Insurer pressure was named as one of three competing explanations for the industry's broader ADAS calibration gap in ABN's coverage of a public dispute among repair industry leaders over how calibration work gets identified, performed and documented.
Ties to ABN shop data
The severity trend lines up with data collision repairers have been tracking through 2026. Enlyte's 2026 trends report found calibration penetration on repair estimates reaching 34.7% in 2025, up from 12.1% in 2022, while CCC Intelligent Solutions' Crash Course 2026 report documented a vehicle fleet growing older and more complex, with claims frequency continuing to decline. Data ABN covered heading into 2026 showed repairable claims down 10.4% through August 2025, the same shrinking claims pool that helps explain the lower overall losses IIHS-HLDI describes from the insurer side.
IIHS and HLDI are nonprofit research organizations funded by member auto insurers and insurance associations, according to the organizations' websites.
