I am really nervous and stressed out...i got my maxima dec. 31st and then on jan 7th, i was involved in an accident...well, to make a long story short...they just put it on the frame machine, and in order to get the frame nice and straight again, they had to bend my front left wheel about 3 INCHES!!! so now, i am afraid that my car will never be the same... i don't know if i should sell the car, or be in it for the long haul b/c the car only has 70k on the odometer, but i heard that once a frame is bent, there will always be problems with it, but i also heard that with unibody frames there usually is no problems, and they get it almost back to factory specifications again...i don't want to deal with uneven tire wear, and have the car pull to one side for as long as i own the car!!! i don't know what to do, i love my max, and only got to drive it a week!!! what should i do?

any info you can provide me will be of great service!!!

a sad and depressed short term maxima owner

 

BUMP...i need help so i can stop worrying

 

To be honest, you're worries are pretty accurate. In all likelihood, your car will never be the same.

 

oh thats jus frigging SPLENDID!!!

 

What did you hit/what hit you?

 

guardrails

 

i wouldnt exactly say its garbage yet... if you try to sell it, you wont get as much as you could... but the car isnt a total loss.....

of course it depends on what kind of driver you are and what not... are you going to auto cross your car ? do you take corners wildly fast.... i mean like fast enough to get the tires to screech ? ... if not then your car isnt garbage .... sure handling may not be what it used to be, but you can put the sway bar on it and front strut bar back on.......

and if the frame is bent .... how did insurance not total your car ?!?!?!?!?

 

b/c there was no collision insurance on the car...

 

well that would be stupid

 

If it is fixed right you will not be able to tell there was ever an accident unless you look very closely and you know what you are looking for. With modern equipment, body shops can do amazing things. Its going to cost though. Too bad you don't have collision, if you did you could take it to the best shop in town and have it done right.
If I were you, pay to fix it right and keep car(will be expensive); or fix it as cheap as possible and sell it.
Good luck.

 

They didn't bend the wheel back, they bent the UNIBODY back into alignment. If they did the repair properly, you probably won't be able to tell where the work was done(as the previous poster mentioned). You might still have suspension pieces that are bent though.

 

minor frame damage on the front rails near the radiator support is not problem at all.

most qualified body shops can align the car within factory specs. however, your suspension may be bent but the only way to really find out is to get an alignment after the car is done.

again, minor front rail frame damge is not a big deal at all. most accidents bend or push some part of the frame in the front end.

i'd stick with the car unless you can get what you paid for it a month before.

 

What would worry me most is the lost integrity of the chassis on a whole, in terms of impact protection. Even if they get the frame PERFECTLY straight, the chassis will never be as strong. Thus, when you REALLY need the impact protection, it will no longer be there.

 

If the repair was done correctly, please explain how your statement would be true. Remember his was only slightly bent. Not crushed. And even if it was crushed, the frame shop can weld in a new piece at the factory weld/joints.

 

Part of your chassis, which was either meant to absorb impact, through crushing at a certain pressure or load, has now been stressed. When you straighten it, it is the right shape now, but no longer has the same resistance to stress. The only way to get the chassis to retain the original stress resistance, is to heat and temper the chassis, and I'm telling you, NO ONE does this. No shop would EVER take on this task. Why? Because it would require removing the chassis part affected, and tempering under controlled conditions, to which, they DEFINETLY do not have access too.

As for welding on extra material, NO ONE does this. That's just asking for trouble. What if you over strengthen an area that is supposed to absorb impact? How do you know it's even as strong as the original design? It may now be too strong, and will now force another section to absorb the impact, which may not have been engineered to do so, causing another area to fail, which was originally not designed to take that kind of stress. Or, could be too weak, and will no longer absorb impact, causing the rest of the car to absorb the impact.

As soon as the chassis is bent, you will have problems. It's a given. Don't get me wrong. If there is minor damage to areas which are not critical, at most, there will be slightly more damage, upon the next accident. However, odds are, the chassis integrity has been sacrificed, and no longer meets impact parameters, originally designed by Nissan Engineers. If you want to gamble with that in a 3000 lbs vehicle, be my guest. I wouldn't.

 

Maybe your knowledge is above my head but let me try to explain:

1) In this case, he's okay. So not to worry the guy
2) If a part of the chassis is not bent that bad, it can be straighted w/o loss of strength. Manufacturers should be accounting for this during their design. Otherwise their cars would be all totalled after even a minor accident. Plus if the metal is so stiff as to not to account for some flexing/bending, metal fatigue would set in pretty fast(as when cars drive, the whole unibody flexs to some degree)
3) If part of the chassis is bent too much out of spec, a GOOD frame shop will weld in(not add welds) a new factory section. The will weld it to the exact same places the factory did and use the same type/amount of welds. If the repair is done PROPERLY, there shouldn't be ANY affect on the safety of the car.

I don't know if this is a good example or not. But race cars are damaged and fixed on a weekly basis. And many are unibody based. If the unibody structures are weakened to such a degree, teams would have to totally scrape their expensive unibody chassis' every week. I don't see this happening afaik.

I never mentioned or advocated the adding of welds.

 

"1) In this case, he's okay. So not to worry the guy"

Well, I don't know just how badly damaged his car is. But should there be 3" bend in my car's frame, you better believe I would never drive it on the road again.

"2) If a part of the chassis is not bent that bad, it can be straighted w/o loss of strength. Manufacturers should be accounting for this during their design. Otherwise their cars would be all totalled after even a minor accident. Plus if the metal is so stiff as to not to account for some flexing/bending, metal fatigue would set in pretty fast(as when cars drive, the whole unibody flexs to some degree)"

3" in bend, is a HECK of a lot of bend in a unibody man! And there is a HUGE difference between flex, and bending. A unibody that flexes, returns to its original shape. But when bent, does not. And if the chassis is bent 3" now, you know that upon impact, it was bent even more than that.

"3) If part of the chassis is bent too much out of spec, a GOOD frame shop will weld in(not add welds) a new factory section. The will weld it to the exact same places the factory did and use the same type/amount of welds. If the repair is done PROPERLY, there shouldn't be ANY affect on the safety of the car."

By the time a car needs a section of chassis cut off, and a new section welded in place, this car is very difficult to certify. And rightly so.

"I don't know if this is a good example or not. But race cars are damaged and fixed on a weekly basis. And many are unibody based. If the unibody structures are weakened to such a degree, teams would have to totally scrape their expensive unibody chassis' every week. I don't see this happening afaik."

If by race cars you mean tube framed, those are entirely different. If by unibody, you mean a street car, raced on a track, most rely on the roll cage for protection, and not the chassis. Thus they can afford to have weakened, breakable areas around the roll cage.

 

Sin. Do you have some type of automotive background to quantify your statements? Or is this just a difference in opinion?

3" bend is nothing to me. I bet the chassis flexs much more the 3" just by going over a big bump.

As far as the car being junk if it's needed a section of chassis rewelded, that's unfounded. What do you think 60-70 thousand dollar cars get done when they receive major damage? To think a qualified top notch frame people can't fix an expensive Mercedes/Porsche/BMW to factory specs is again unfounded.

Race cars. Unibody based race cars. Yes they use roll cages for protection but the don't rely on the cages for consistent suspension geometry that a frame damaged car(that you say is now junk) might have. If it's truely unsafe, it can't hold their specs either. But they wreck/fix these cars every week.

There is a difference in what YOU would do vs what is safe. Unless of course you have some really good industry knowledge that you can share with the rest of us

 

Although all of the above opinions and advise are warranted, I don't think you should worry too much about it as this wont help you any. If you are not autocrossing or so forth you will be Ok, chances are if you sell the car right now you won't get back nearly the same as you paid if the buyer knows what to look for.

I know how you feel cause I am **** about my car too and if it bothers you that much then maybe you should just sell it because you will kill yourself psychologically. If you get over it after a while then you are good to go.
I have a couple of friends who are mechanics in FL and they actually bought wrecked cars (rx7s, 3000Gts, Eclipses) straightened the frames and raced them, Yes, raced them without any problems so there is my $.02

 

http://www.maximafreak.com/accident

Believe it or not, they fixed the car $8000 later. They put it on the rack, straightened it back out and (rather surprisingly) it drives like it did before the accident. Maxima's don't really have a frame, but rather sit on a subframe so they can be straightened out pretty easily.

I hope I provided some relief.

 

Well, I had a different opinion all together. My car is paid off, it's 5 years old, and while I was REALLY ****ed when it happened, I figured when I get a new car, I'll trade my car in to the dealer at the last second on a rainy dark night so they do their 5 minute inspection and give me way too much for the car. They bend everyone else over, so why not bend them over if you can.

But like I said, I notice little to no difference in my car. It really is phenominal what they did.

 

I'm heavily involved with SAE, and The Canadian Volvo Club. So when it comes to safety in cars, that's probably my forte. I was a Volvophile before I got my Maxima (didn't stay with Volvo just because I wanted to try another make, before the 98' SE I have now, I had a 760 Turbo, and then an 850 Turbo).

I've kept tabs on frame straightening of an Acura Teg, NSX, a Volvo 850 Turbo and a Chev Lumina (all friends or family). All of these cars could all be made to allign within specs. But not one, would ever be certified as a pre owned, and all would need to be declared salvaged, with quite a bit of goozing. Why? Because upon inspection, no tech was quite willing to put their signature down.

 

Sounds like a quality of repair problem. As I see it, what makes a car a "salvage" is not the quality of the repair perse. It's the cost of the repair vs the retail value of the car. Maybe we are talking about two different definations of "salvage". The problem lies in that ther is a serious conflict of interest inbetween the quality of the work and the cost of the work. I truely believe any medium damaged car can be just as safe as before. BUT I also truely believe that the # of shops willing to do the work necessary to get it there is small(vs the # of shops that would actually work on the said car) I think you and I would both agree that "made to align to specs" is a leaves a very, very big gray area as to the quality of work required to make it align correctly again vs aligned correctly AND repaired correctly. Both could align correctly but there could be thousands of dollars in quality of work differences.

 

When purchasing a used car that has been in an accident, if the damage was not severe enough, you may never know about it, even though the insurance company was involved. However, if damage was severe enough, it is the responsibility of the certified repair shop, to report the car as salvaged. I seriously doubt this is the case here, but nonetheless, the purpose of said title, is to make potential consumers aware of the severity of the damage the car sustained at one time.

 

For a person that is heavily involved in SAE and other stuff concerning this matter then why do you(Sin) keep referring to the maxima as having a frame. The maxima does not have a frame and is built with unibody construction. Cars on this type of platform have collapse points that are there to absorb the impact and to prevent further damage. If done properly on a frame rack, then a car should operate the same as it did before the accident.

But you have to becareful with what insurance company you use also. they play a key part in what is the final decision to total a car or to fix it. For example, All State insurance is known to use all used parts and in some cases section cars to fix them because this is cheaper than to total it. When i say say section cars, they will take whatever half of the car is not damaged(front half or rear half) and match it to a new half of the same type car. If you have ever seen on the freeway, half parts of cars whether they be the front half or rear half that is what they are going to be used for.

 

I have State Farm and every part (aside from the rim they had to replace) was brand new. I have receipts for all the parts and stopped by periodically to see the car. It depends on how strict you are with your insurance company. I think people have a tendancy to forget that you are their customer and you have a 75% say in how things happen. I say 75% because 25% of what people demand is unreasonable, but the insurance company should do everything in their power to help you with a reasonable request.

 

Yes, I know all of this. The only way a car is given a salvage title is if the cost of the repair exceeded 75% of the value of the car.
But I still don't know if we agree on the other parts or not.

 

State farm is the best "well-known" insurance company when it comes to repairing wrecked cars. they were involved in a lawsuit a few years ago where people we suing them for repairs that went bad.
Instead of blending a panel, they paint the whole panel and they use all new OEM parts to avoid anything ever happening again.

Reason for me knowing how this stuff works is that i used to work at a bodyshop and have seen first hand how all of this works.

 

I thought they totaled cars with Bent frames?

 

Just so I understand, you are saying State Farm at one time went as cheap as possible on repairs but now they are awesome because they want to avoid lawsuits? I hope that what you meant because I have State Farm.

 

I bought a mercedes for my girl wrecked and had it rebuilt.. The passanger frame was crushed so that the drivers front tire was jammed into the front drivers door.. (like 4 inches) I had it pulled.. measured each side from tire center to lift hole.. got it perfect... 25K later tire wear is perfect... no pull... car is great... If it is done right there is nothing to worry about...

 

I'm practically in the same boat. I finally got a 96' Max with great milage. Just had some rust and needed a few repairs. But the passenger side frame is bent so it won't pass inspection. I'm wondering if I should spend the money to have it straightened out or just sell it for the parts.

 

You resurrected a post from 20 years ago !

You might want to investigate how much it would cost to fix your car properly.

then consider how much your car would be worth afterwards.

I'm almost sure that you would lose money.

id sell the parts.

then find another car you like.