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Anytime your Volvo gets whacked in the quarter, the doors, or in any way that is anything BUT a bumper hit from straight ahead, the frame is likely to be bent. I always wonder, when someone says "make sure the car never had any frame damage before you buy it"... because in a lot of cases, you can't even tell. A parking lot hit can (and does) bend the frame on the car. And while it sucks while
I'm amused by the cars that people allege to have been in 40mph collisions "but there was never any frame damage!" (as if that makes it OK). The thing is, there WAS frame damage, but either it wasn't a) fixed; or b) noticed.
The doors are particularly vulnerable because on a hard door hit where the B-pillar gets bent, it tends to vacuum the rest of the car inwards around it. That might not be the case in this person's vehicle, but I bet that the repair, involves measuring and aligning the frame if necessary. Sometimes you can't quantify it until measurements are taken.
If this car (the one in this post, I mean) doesn't have any measureable frame or structure offset, this is more of a parking lot bump than a hit.
Reason? The frame, is the whole car. It isn't a body-on frame vehicle, and it isn't even a part-frame/part unit body vehicle like people have mentioned. Like all unit frame vehicles, the front frame structures terminate into the body of the vehicle, and there is no actual frame underneath the car. Likewise for the rear structure. This is not a bad thing; actually it spreads crash loads much better over the entire vehicle rather than containing them and refusing to give way to a hit.
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a Brickboard.com Expat
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