Door dings have cropped up many times on this website and a forum search gives so many hits that I'm not going to trawl through them, but after the driver's door on a Mercedes ML left a crease in my V70 front passenger door at Heathrow Pink Elephant parking I wondered how much steel properties varying with build date (age) and make has a part in susceptibility.
My wife's 306 Sedan is now eleven years old and is at high risk of door dings; it is frequently parked in hospital car parks (she is a midwife) with narrow slots, town centre car parks, and airport car parks. I have lost count of the number of times I have polished away paint from other car doors but despite all this contact it only has one actual dent (tiny) where a door was opened into it with great force (I watched it happen). Look down the gleaming polished flanks and they are beautifully ripple-free.
In comparison my V70 is 3 years old and spends most of its time sitting in the security of the home garage. It does not get left in hospital, town centre, or supermarket car parks though does get left at airports, which is where we come in. Every time contact is made, the ding is a dent. I have never polished someone else's paint off without seeing a crease left behind. The crease always propagates for some distance from the contact point, too; yesterday's dent is actually a small sharply radiused one from the corner of the Mercedes door moulding but the door is creased enough to show in oblique viewing for an inch vertically either side. I made one of the dings by letting the Pug door clatter in to the side of the Volvo on a moderately breezy day. No paint was swapped but the dent was made.
My father's S80 is similarly affected with dents and so was my brother's V70, recently sold.
These dents have nothing to do with increased showing of them due to body panel shape or shiny paintwork so it seems that the Pug's tinpot sheet metalwork is actually an advantage in the car park world (if not a collision!). In other words the Pug predating current side impact and other legislation and having thinner gauge steel that allows the whole panel to bend and absorb energy as well as metal composition perhaps with higher yield point or elastic limits.
Any metallurgists amongst us who can pass informed comment?
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Did you kick the Mercedes and see if your foot dented the metal easily? ;)
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I am not sure that the pug does have thinner panels. The panels on my V70 seem very flimsy, I have various dings, and when one of the arch liners was off the wing was laughably flexy.
The v70 that hit the tiny lancia (Y10?) that got squashed against my old subaru looked amazing. The front wings and bonnet were just peeled off. the wings actually flapped in the breeze. (OK the lancia wasnt very well either - looked rather shorter than it should have done - but the panels were in much better shape)
I think that the fact of there being strong insert in the doors etc means that they get away with using very thin material in the panels. keeps costs down, not just of material but presumably the tooling is cheaper and the die lasts longer.
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Some cars have composite panels bonded onto the inside of the door skin. This was only on upmarket cars in the 1980s, but now most seem to have them, they resist denting and make the door close with a more solid sound.
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Some cars have composite panels bonded onto the inside of the door skin. This was only on upmarket cars in the 1980s, but now most seem to have them, they resist denting and make the door close with a more solid sound.
I wonder if you've hit the nail on the head; pushing quite hard with flat of hand in the centre of any of the Pug's door panels elicits a very visible flex across a wide area of panel.
Repeating with the V70 using the same amount of force gives no visible flex whatsover.
The pug doors close with a "clang" and the V70 a muted "thunk".
As an aside, the entire bonnet and tailgate on the V70 is plastic. My brother found out the latter on buying a magnetic GB badge and watching it fall to the ground in front of other passengers on the same Channel crossing!
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my old reliant 21e never had any dings in the door.
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I have never had a car that didn't dent very easily. It always annoys me intensely at the time but life is too short to let it become a major annoyance.
We collected my wife's new Swift yesterday and there is not a sign of a dent anywhere, nor are there any marks on the pristine alloy wheels (not even a scuff mark on the tyres). We will see how long that state of affairs lasts.
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When I say 'new', I mean new to us. It is about 10 months old but looks as good as new.
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I had no end of problems with dings on my V70. I'm very careful where I park, and the car is parked at home and work in places where it can't pick up dings. Trouble is, there's always places where you have to park where you don't get much control of who parks next to you, Motorway services and the like. I managed to pick up several dings in those kind of circumstances.
I found it very fustrating, especially since I'd never had a problem with dings before or since, with any of my 13 other cars.
I thought the problem was down to the pronouced curve of the doors outwards just at the point, allowing the energy from another car's door to be absorbed over a small area, thus making it more likely to crease the metal.
Drove me batty. Over 13 months I picked up 7 dings!
I wouldn't buy another Volvo now unless they made the sides a bit flatter to avoid these problems. My Vectra is very slab sided with a good protective strip, already with a couple of small marks in the strip - so it must be doing its job well! :)
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Perhaps I should patent my idea for a pair of inflatable tubes tied together with bits of rope that would hang over the roof of a car and protect the sides!
Failing that, then door edge protectors should be made mandatory - I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to get the EU Commission to require that they fitted to all cars for safety reasons.
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The problem may be partly due to the width of the cars in question.
My S80 will barely fit between the white lines in many parking bays, so it's not surprising that it gets clonked more often by other car doors than a narrower car would.
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Not true of the S60 and V70 which are both narrower than the S80 and comparable to other cars that don't get dented so easily.
But that width thing wouldn't help either!
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Door strips are no good at protecting doors on ordinary saloons from damage by doors on big 4x4s, as these doors are so much higher than door strips.
We didn't pick up a single dent in our C5 until this year. It had sustained a deep scratch to the front bumper, which I blamed on the paper boy cycling olong our front garden path, but the latest two are high up on the car. One is on top on the rear offside wing and the latest, which it picked up in the last 24 hours, is high on the nearside rear wing, where it really catches the eye. However, I don't think it was done by a 4x4 door, as I suspect the paper boy again, as it is at about the height of a handle bar and looks as though it could have been done by a brake caliper. There is a mark above the dent that looks like something has slid down the bodywork before leaving the dent. We had something similar on the Xantia years ago.
Do dents have to accessible from inside the bodywork to be able to be removed? I read on a web site, not long ago, that they do.
It always amazes me that one rarely sees a BMW with any dents at all. I am as careful as the next person where I park my car but it doesn't prevent someone parking next to it who is careless. Do they treat BMWs with more deference?
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Nah, it's just that as an unintended consequence of flame surfacing, the side repeaters for the indicators happen to be positioned so that they usually absorb the knocks. Sadly, this often stops the indicators from working at all, an I-Drive related problem that BMW technical division has yet to resolve - hence the vast number of unfair jokes about indicators as optional extras. In fact, the BMW drivers everyone gets so worked up about are actually the silent victims of petty vandalism, and deserve our sympathy as well as our deference.
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andymc
Vroom, vroom - mmm, doughnuts ...
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Nah, it's just that as an unintended consequence of flame surfacing, the side repeaters for the indicators happen to be >> positioned so that they usually absorb the knocks.
In fact, the BMW drivers everyone gets so worked up about are actually the silent victims of petty vandalism, and deserve our sympathy as well as our deference. -- andymc Vroom, vroom - mmm, doughnuts ...
Side indicators don't extend the whole length of the car. What is flame surfacing?
By the fact that BMWs are rarely seen with dents, I can't see how they are victims of petty vandalism any more than ownwers of other makes.
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None of the above was meant to be taken in any way seriously ....
Flame surfacing is the name given to the styling of more recent BMWs.
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andymc
Vroom, vroom - mmm, doughnuts ...
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Andy,
BMW (and indeed Volvos) have had non fuctioning indicators long before flame styling and I drive were ever thoguht of.......
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Only a BMW driver can get away with saying that!
However, not indicating is preferable to what happened to me a few days ago - car in front indicated left, slowed down, and turned right just before I put my foot down to overtake. Muppet.
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andymc
Vroom, vroom - mmm, doughnuts ...
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