Farmers Casualty windshield replacement Arizona and Florida

Starting the claim

Most people who reach us with a Farmers Casualty policy have already reported the damage themselves and come to scheduling with nothing more than a claim number. That is the usual pattern here. Some carriers route glass work through a third-party administrator that issues a separate referral or dispatch number before anything can be booked, and customers get stuck waiting for that number to appear. On Farmers Casualty claims we rarely see that step — the claim number generally carries the file on its own. If you were given a referral or dispatch number, hold onto it and read it to us, but do not sit on a cracked windshield waiting for one to arrive.

What actually speeds things up is having the vehicle details ready: year, make, model, trim, and the VIN. The VIN is the part people skip and the part that decides whether the right glass shows up. On the makes we see most often under these policies — Honda, Hyundai, Chevrolet, Toyota and Ford — a single model year of one model can have four or five distinct windshields depending on whether the car has a forward-facing camera, a rain sensor, a heated wiper park, acoustic interlayer, a heads-up display, or a humidity sensor behind the mirror. Two identical-looking Honda CR-Vs or Chevrolet Equinoxes in the same parking lot can take different parts. We order off the VIN so that does not happen.

The choice of who does the work is yours

In both Arizona and Florida, you select the glass company. Your insurer can tell you who is in their network; it cannot make the decision for you. You are free to have us do the replacement and bill the claim regardless of network participation.

Your deductible depends on which state wrote the policy

This is the single most important thing to sort out before you schedule, because Farmers Casualty policyholders come to us from both states and the rules are not the same.

If your policy is Florida

Florida law (Fla. Stat. 627.7288) requires insurers to waive the deductible for windshield replacement when the policy includes comprehensive coverage. Two conditions are doing real work in that sentence. First, the policy has to actually carry comprehensive coverage — liability-only policies are not covered by the statute. Second, it applies to the windshield and nothing else. A shattered driver's door glass, a quarter glass, a back glass or a panoramic sunroof on a Florida policy falls under your normal comprehensive deductible.

If your policy is Arizona

Arizona law (A.R.S. 20-264) requires insurers to offer optional no-deductible safety-glass coverage. The operative word is offer. Arizona does not hand every driver zero-deductible glass automatically the way Florida handles windshields. It requires that the option be made available, and the driver has to have elected it when the policy was written or renewed. Plenty of Arizona drivers have it and have forgotten; plenty assume they have it and do not. Pull up your declarations page or ask your agent whether the safety-glass option is on the policy before you assume the deductible is gone.

Half these vehicles are camera cars, half are not

The Farmers Casualty vehicles we work on split almost evenly around the 2018 model year, which means this page has to cover two fairly different jobs.

2018 and newer

If your Honda has Honda Sensing, your Toyota has Toyota Safety Sense, your Hyundai has SmartSense, your Chevrolet has Chevy Safety Assist, or your Ford has Co-Pilot360, there is a camera mounted to the windshield glass looking down the road. Lane keeping, automatic emergency braking, and adaptive cruise all read from it. Replacing the glass moves that camera, and moving it by a fraction of a degree at the mirror translates to being off by a lot at a hundred yards. Recalibration is not an upsell and it is not optional on these vehicles — it is part of finishing the job correctly, and we treat it as part of the job rather than something you go arrange somewhere else afterward. Some of these vehicles calibrate by driving a prescribed route at speed; others require a static target setup. Which one applies is determined by the manufacturer, not by us, and we will tell you which yours needs when we confirm the part.

2017 and older

The older half of this fleet — the higher-mileage Silverados, Camrys, Civics, Elantras and F-150s — usually has no camera, and the work shifts to fitment and bodywork. On a vehicle with eight or ten years of Arizona sun or Florida coastal humidity, the concerns are the condition of the pinchweld under the old urethane, corrosion along the lower channel, brittle cowl panels and A-pillar trim that has gone chalky and snaps at the clips, and moldings that have shrunk. We check the pinchweld with the old glass out. If there is rust, painting over it is not a repair and we will say so rather than bonding new glass to a compromised surface. Broken clips and degraded moldings get replaced rather than reused, because a windshield is a structural part of the roof crush path and it only performs if it is bonded to sound metal.

How the appointment actually goes

We are mobile only. We come to your driveway, your workplace parking lot, or wherever the vehicle is sitting, in Arizona and in Florida. There is no location for you to drive to and no waiting room. Most claims we schedule for the next day once the correct glass is confirmed against the VIN.

Plan on the vehicle staying put for a while after we finish. Urethane adhesive has a safe drive-away time that depends on the product and on the temperature and humidity that day, and in a Phoenix August or a Tampa summer afternoon those conditions matter. The technician will tell you the specific window for your vehicle before leaving. Driving before that window closes undermines the bond the glass depends on in a collision.

Glass other than the windshield

We replace door glass, vent and quarter glass, and back glass as well. Two things change on those jobs. The deductible treatment is different — Florida's windshield statute does not reach them, and in Arizona it depends on whether the safety-glass option was elected. And tempered side and rear glass breaks into thousands of small pieces that end up in door cavities, seat rails and carpet, so allow extra time for cleanup. We do not do rock-chip or crack repair of any kind; we replace glass.