# Cargo Van A cargo van earns its living being loaded, and the damage reflects that: door hardware, rocker and step contacts, interior wall damage from cargo, and racking mounts working loose. Low roof, high roof, extended and high cube bodies all repair on the same principles. ## Low roof, high roof, extended and high cube are four different repairs Roof height and wheelbase change more than capacity. A low roof van has a stiffer body and a lower centre of mass, and its damage clusters at bumper height. A high roof van has a taller, more flexible side and takes clearance strikes at the front roof edge. An extended body puts a long rear overhang behind the axle, which is what gets caught reversing. A high cube body is a separate box on a cab chassis, which means the cab and the body are two structures joined at a subframe. That last one matters most, because a high cube body is not a van panel at all. It is a box with its own posts, skin and roof, mounted on a chassis, and repairing it is closer to box truck work than to van work. Box and cargo body repair runs $750 to $15,000, five to eighty hours. Confusing the two is how a body repair gets quoted at van rates and then discovered to be a body rebuild once the skin comes off. ## Most cargo van damage happens while the van is standing still Collision work on this class is a minority of what we see. The rest is loading damage, accumulated in small events by many people: a barn door swung into a bollard, a pallet jack into an interior wall, a load that shifted and dented the skin from inside, a step assembly bent by a dock. None of it is dramatic and all of it adds up, and it is usually reported all at once when a lease is ending or a resale is coming. That accumulation is worth pricing as a package rather than one item at a time, because the labour overlaps: a door hinge, a latch, a step and an interior panel are one visit and one setup rather than four. Rear barn door service and latch repair runs $300 to $2,500. Cargo floor and liner install runs $400 to $4,500. Cab body repair, which is the band that covers door, fender and bumper work, runs $750 to $12,000 for the heavier end of the same work. ## Racking is fastened to a wall that was never designed for it A van wall is a thin steel skin over widely spaced ribs. Racking from Adrian Steel, Ranger Design or Weather Guard is designed to spread load into the ribs and into the floor, and installed to that design it is fine for the life of the vehicle. Installed with self drilling screws into the skin between ribs, it loads the skin every time the van brakes, and over two years the fasteners work their holes and the skin cracks around them. What arrives in the shop is a cracked wall with a shelf hanging off it, and the correct repair is a panel repair plus a properly backed remount rather than a longer screw. Cargo shelving and racking install runs $750 to $7,500, four to thirty hours. Where a fleet has twenty vans with the same installation, fixing the pattern once across the fleet costs less per vehicle than repairing the same crack repeatedly on each of them. ## Livery, removal, and what sun does to the panel underneath Fleet graphics protect the paint they cover, which sounds like an advantage until a van is sold. Remove a decal set after six years in this climate and the paint underneath is a different shade from the paint around it, because everything not covered has faded and the covered area has not. That is not damage and it cannot be polished out. It is a refinish decision, and it is worth making before a van goes to auction rather than after somebody complains. Decal removal runs $400 to $2,500, two to ten hours, and it is slow work because adhesive that has cured for years does not release cleanly and heat has to be used carefully near plastics. Fleet graphics and vinyl wrap runs $1,500 to $8,500 for a new application. Colour match paint blending on a van runs $500 to $5,000, and where a panel has to be refinished after removal we match on the panel rather than to the original code, for the same fade reason. ## Scheduling a fleet repair against a working week A fleet operator is buying a date more than a repair. What makes a date real is ordering long lead parts against the first estimate, doing the body and the upfit work in one pass rather than two, and telling the operator immediately when a part slips. What makes a date fake is quoting a best case and hoping. We would rather give a longer date and hold it, because a business plans around the date it was given and pays for the difference when it moves. There is no route service and no field repair here. A frame bench, a full length booth and a calibration floor do not travel, so every job happens at the Yorba Linda facility. What we can do is stage work: bring a van in for the structural and paint stages, return it to service while a long lead trim part is chased, and bring it back for a short second visit. That is not always possible, and where it is, it is worth asking for. For operators running more than a handful of vehicles, the useful conversation is about patterns rather than incidents. Twenty vans with the same bent step assembly is a loading habit or a dock height, not twenty accidents. We report what we see across a fleet because it is cheaper for an operator to change a procedure than to keep paying for the same repair. Cosmetic and structural body inspection runs $250 to $600 per vehicle when a fleet wants a baseline written down. --- Source: https://ocrv.guru/vehicles/vans/cargo-van/ OCRV Center, 23281 La Palma Ave, Yorba Linda, CA 92887. (949) 799-3387. Serving Laguna Niguel, California. All work performed in shop. No mobile or roadside service. Licences: California Bureau of Automotive Repair ARD00288521; EPA CAL000367879. Published ranges are ranges, not quotes. Every figure traces to https://ocrv.guru/prices/.