KIA Soul Rear Body and Floor Pan Replacement & Collision Repair
This vehicle came into us for collision repair. Fortunately the driver if this vehicle was not injured but she was pretty shaken up. At first glance the damage does not appear to be that bad. Just a rear bumper replacement.
The pictures shows that the rear body panel and floor pan took the majority of the impact. This required the removal and installation of a new rear body and floor pan.
We started by removing the interior and factory seem sealer so we could access the KIA factory spot welds. The next step was removing rear suspension, fuel system and emission system. After these systems were removed, the air bag and other vehicle electronics were disabled to protect them from an electrical damage during the welding phase of the collision repair. We then removed the damage floor pan and rear body panel.
The next step was to fit the new rear body panel and floor pan into their perspective locations to make sure we had everything we needed and it all fit properly. Then we used a 2 part rust proofing system every place the new parts came in contact with other parts to ensure factory level or better rust preventing before we reassembled the parts for a final time.
In the picture you can see CarSmart Collision Repair followed KIA & ICAR’s recomended resistance welding system to install the new parts just like the factory did when the car was originally built. This insures that not only will the car look just like it did the day it rolled off the assembly line but the strength and rigidity the engineers engineered into the construction of this vehicle remained as they were originally designed. This is very important. Making repairs the proper way lets us know the how the car will respond if it gets into another accident. If a repair is too strong, a part closer to the people inside the vehicle may fail and collapse potentially causing injury of death to the passengers. If it’s too week, it might not properly protect the people inside the vehicle from an intrusion of another vehicle or object. One other very important issue is the Airbag timing. If the structure does not collapse to absorb the impact properly or provides too much resistance the airbags may not deploy or deploy too early in the collision. Again this could result in injury or death.
The finished product is a car that was as safe as it was designed by the engineers, looks like it did the day it came off the show room floor and will last as long it originally designed.
