We love a good detailing or dry-ice blasting video, but neither type of before-and-after transformation can hold a candle to footage of a paintless dent repair master in action. Watching a dent wizard massage a body panel back to health when conventional wisdom says the only fix is an entirely new section of metal and hours of prep and paint time, never ceases to amaze us.
This video showing Matt “Dent Slayer” Boyette working his magic on a crunched Rivian R1T is a perfect case in point. The owner transported his EV 600 miles (970 km) to Boyette’s All Out Paintless Dent Removal shop in Jacksonville, Florida, after being quoted a shocking $41,000 to repair a dent in the rear quarter panel of the green truck.
Boyette says that the high quote was a result of the quarter panel stretching right through to the front of the car, and the original quote factoring in the removal of the panoramic roof and even the battery, though as one commenter suggests, it sounds like the shop might have come up with a high price because they didn’t want to take on what they guessed might be a nightmare job. Either way, the cost of doing all that, then fitting a new panel before painting the lot wouldn’t have simply been a financial one for the R1T‘s owner. He would have been facing multiple weeks without his truck. But Boyette and his team had it fixed in just two days.
Related: Why Rivian CEO Isn’t Worried About Tesla’s Cybertruck
The video shows the team attacking the Rivian’s rear quarter with a mixture of glue pulls, rods, and hammers, and it doesn’t take long before the quarter has regained its basic original shape. But it still looks like a mottled mess that’s covered in high- and low spots needing major attention. This is where the real magic happens and Boyette says in his narration that it was made particularly complicated by access to the back of the panel being limited to one small hole at the bottom.
But the finished job is so good it almost looks like new. Boyette freely admits that there are a couple of tiny imperfections, one being a small chip and the other a tiny dent that couldn’t be teased out because it was too close to the edge. To be honest, we struggled to see it on the video and we imagine it’s the same story in the metal and most people would never guess it had been in an accident.
Boyette doesn’t disclose how much the Rivian owner paid for the repair, but since it only took two days you know it must have been a fraction of what he was quoted by a shop for a traditional fix, and this way he got his truck back on the road without it having been pulled apart and put back together, which is a big plus.