Windscreen chips: the daily check that avoids the replacement bill

A stone hits the glass on the way to a job. There’s a tick, a small star-shaped mark near the edge of the screen, and the driver carries on with the day. Nobody logs it. Three weeks later the mark is a crack running across the driver’s line of sight, and what could have been a 30-minute repair at the depot is now a full replacement, a van off the road, and an ADAS recalibration.

Run vans and it’s happened to you. A windscreen defect takes seconds to spot and gets more expensive every day it isn’t dealt with.

Why every chip eventually becomes a crack

Our partner Autoglass® describes chip damage precisely: a chip is thousands of micro-cracks in the outer layer of glass. Those cracks grow. Road vibration, potholes, temperature swings, even blasting the heater on a frosty morning – all of it works on the damage until it spreads.

If you leave a chip it won’t settle. The only variable is how long you’ve got until it deteriorates, and that’s why it helps to catch it early:

• Repair is faster. Technicians can often repair a chip in under 30 minutes, and their technicians carry the right equipment as standard, so a repair is quicker to schedule than a replacement.
• Repair is cheaper. Where damage is repairable, it’s around 80% cheaper than replacing the screen.
• Repair is greener. A windscreen repair produces at least 70% less carbon than a replacement screen
• Repair keeps the vehicle compliant. Damage over 10mm in the driver’s line of vision (a 290mm vertical strip centred on the steering wheel) is an MOT failure. Elsewhere in the area swept by the wipers, the limit is 40mm. A chip that’s within tolerance today won’t stay that way once it starts spreading.
• Repair restores strength. The windscreen is a structural part of the vehicle and supports safe airbag deployment.

The windscreen is only part of the walkaround check

A windscreen chip is an easy defect to see. The reason it gets missed isn’t that it’s hard to spot – it’s that nobody was asked to look, or there was nowhere to record it, so nothing happened. That’s true of most vehicle defects.

Tyre tread and pressure, lights and indicators, mirrors, wipers and washer fluid, load security, fluid leaks, bodywork damage from a tight loading bay – are all easy to identify. The key is to ask your team to look and give them somewhere to record their findings.

Whether you run three vans or three hundred, the legal position is the same in principle: as an employer you have a duty of care for the vehicles your team drive for work, and the driver has a responsibility to check the vehicle is roadworthy before setting off. A daily walkaround before the first journey is best practice. Anything with a busy duty cycle, a long working day, or high mileage warrants more attention. We’ve written separately on how often company vehicles should have safety checks to help with this.

Paper checks let defects go unreported

We track vehicles for 35,000 businesses, and we hear the same thing from a lot of them: a pad of check sheets stays in the van, filled in with varying enthusiasm, handed in at the end of the week, filed in a drawer. Often the defect still isn’t raised in the office until the driver mentions it, or until it becomes a breakdown.

This is how problems compound. You can’t tell who checked and who didn’t. You can’t tell whether a reported chip has been dealt with. When something goes wrong and you need to show a pattern of diligence, to an insurer, to an enforcement officer, or to your own board… you’ve got a drawer of paper and no way to search it.

How Quartix Check changes this process

Quartix Check is our vehicle inspection app, an add-on to Quartix vehicle tracking. Drivers conduct their walkaround checks on their phone. Defects get reported the moment they’re spotted, with photos, and land with the office straight away rather than at the end of the week, or never.

For you, that means:

• Visibility of completion. You can see which checks have been done and which haven’t, without chasing.
• Defects with evidence. A photo of a chip tells you immediately how urgent it is and what you’re likely dealing with.
• A searchable record. Inspection history sits alongside your vehicle tracking data, so the check and the journey it preceded are part of the same picture.
• Something to act on. A reported chip on Monday morning can become a repair that afternoon.

A driver reports a chip at 7:40am. You can see where the van’s been that day, and whether it’s back by three or out until six. That’s what decides whether you send the mobile technician to the job or catch it when it’s in.

Autoglass® discount for Quartix customers

If you’ve spotted a chip, you need to act fast, and it helps to have an account with a service provider already in place.

Quartix customers get a substantial discount on Autoglass® windscreen repair and replacement, across every van you run, with no per-vehicle limit, and no cap on use. It covers chip repair, windscreen replacement, side windows and rear windows.

What that looks like in practice:

• Nationwide mobile service. A technician comes to your depot, the driver’s home, or wherever the vehicle is
• Over 100 Autoglass® branches across the UK for drop-in appointments
• Lifetime guarantee on all work, for as long as you own the vehicle
• ATA-accredited technicians
• ADAS recalibration included where a replacement needs it
• Glass inspections at no additional cost, to find repairable damage before it becomes a replacement

It’s one of several benefits that come with Quartix tracking. So is the contract itself: 12 months, no auto-renewal, and UK-based support throughout. The Quartix customer discount applies to new Autoglass® fleet accounts and it’s free to set up, ready for whenever you need it.

Autoglass® use their ART® System to achieve a complete chip fill, with HPX4 resin bonding to the glass so the damage shouldn’t reappear. If a chip has been left for several weeks or more, some visible trace may remain, so it always helps to fix it promptly.

Find out more about the Quartix Autoglass® discount

Where to start

If your checks are currently a pad of paper and good intentions, here’s what to do:

1. Agree what a walkaround covers and when it happens, e.g. before the first journey, every day
2. Give drivers a way to report a defect in seconds, with a photo, such as via the Quartix Check app
3. Make sure someone owns what happens next
4. Book the repair before it progresses into something worse

The Quartix Check vehicle inspections app for your drivers is available free for the first year of any of our vehicle tracking contracts.

See how Quartix Check works