[sokoloff]

If you don’t care if the paint matches, you can repair only the small area. You can even use a rattle can if you want and don’t care about the appearance. If you want the paint to match closely and blend so the eye can’t readily see that a repair has been done, you need to do a lot more work to accomplish that.

I had a driver back into my parked classic Mustang. They were not at all happy with the eventual cost of the repair, thinking that they could just pay out of pocket a few hundred bucks (really) because the dent wasn’t that bad in their opinion. Well, tough. The eventual repair was the entire fender and blend time for the hood and door, with associated labor for disassembly and reassembly because the car started with no detectable damage and that’s the state to which it needs to be returned.