Continued: Ding ... ding ... ding: 'The sky was shooting bullets'

A field of dings rippled across the hood of a 2003 Ford truck, the worst-hit on the lot at Saturn of Golden Valley. Nearby, cracks spiderwebbed across the windshield of a new Saturn Aura. Thousands of new and used vehicles were damaged by hail on Interstate 394, where Saturday's storm hurled golfball-sized hail across a dozen new and used car dealers' lots. Borton Volvo, Luther Jaguar Land Rover Minneapolis, Morrie's Cadillac and Saab, and others had varying degrees of damage on their lots.

On Monday, many were still assessing damage, doing inventory and coordinating with insurance adjusters and dent repair crews.

While car dealers might take a hit in insurance premiums and deductibles, consumers are likely to get the benefit if they buy damaged or repaired vehicles in the coming weeks.

Aaron Velick, general manager at that Morrie's dealership, said a crew from Dingmasters Inc., a paintless dent removal company based in Muscle Shoals, Ala., is due to arrive to work on the dealership's cars on Wednesday.

Dingmasters owner Andy Terry said the painstaking job of massaging each ding back into shape could take his crew of as many as 30 workers as long as two or three months.

Farther north along I-35 in Forest Lake, cars damaged the weekend before in the Memorial Day storm went on sale over the weekend. Discounts ranged from a few hundred to thousands of dollars, said Barb Jerich, president and chief of staff at Denny Hecker Automotive Group.

Managers at I-394 dealerships said it's too soon to say what kind of discounts consumers might see in this storm's aftermath, but several said they hope the prices will be low enough to move the cars off their lots.

"Some cars might have been out of [customers'] range," noted Saturn's used-car manager Andy Westerlund, "but they might be in their price range now."

This storm, Westerlund said, was comparable to one that did major damage to a dealership he worked for in Bloomington in 1998, but it was milder than the one that hit the I-394 strip last September.

This week is likely to bring scattered showers and thunderstorms through Friday, with a chance for severe storms -- including large hail, damaging winds and possibly a tornado Thursday and Thursday night, said Byron Paulson, a forecaster with the National Weather Service.

"We started out a little slow as far as severe weather goes," he said. "But we've started to pay our dues the past week or 10 days and it's become much more active."

Bill Abraham, president of the Greater Metropolitan Automobile Dealers Association, said "You can never really prepare" for hail-dropping storms. "You hope they never happen."

'After that, it's up to God'

Tony Vann, a sales and leasing consultant at Morrie's Cadillac and Saab, was closing up when the storm hit just after 6 p.m. Saturday.

"All of a sudden, I heard a sound like the sky was shooting bullets at us," he said.

He hustled outside to try to save some of the cars that had already been sold; he succeeded in getting two of them inside before it was too late, then watched hail pelt the lot for nearly half an hour.

"You want to protect the customers who have already bought cars, but after that it's up to God, who's controlling the elements," he said.

His car, an '08 Impala, was badly damaged by the quarter-sized hail, as were more than 200 new luxury cars.

On the south side of I-394, at Jaguar Land Rover Minneapolis, general manager Mike Jensen said most of his cars had light to moderate damage.

Dealerships often carry hail insurance; deductibles and the amount of damage insurers are willing to fix depend on the age and value of each car.

Velick at Morrie's was philosophical.

"Eventually, it will be a good deal for everyone," he said. "As a car salesman you just don't want to have stories attached to your cars, in general. But if it's a good enough deal, people don't seem to mind."

Maria Elena Baca • 612-673-4409

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