I guess the idea was to keep the xB clean looking, but big flat doors made of thin sheet metal do not mix well with crowded parking lots. I need some bump strips for this thing pronto before I come out one day and find the inevitable SUV door height ding or crease in the door. Before you know it, there will be 7 or 8 of them and the car looks like ___ from the side angle when you look up it and see the sheet metal refection wavering and puckered from all the damn dents looking like a 10 year old abused Civic.

Any one know of xB specific bump strips, or should I just get some generic ____ and paint it or whatever. i really don't care about looks, anything looks better than a cluster____ of dings and dents all over the side.

HELP.

 

Almost every different car out there will have a different contact point with the XB sides when opened. This means that, unless you clad the car sides with protection, you won't be able to defend every spot on the car sides.
The best defense is park far away from other cars or minimize risk by parking in single sided spaces.
Side molding isn't worth it unless you're looking for a cheap way of covering an existing dent.
Dent door rub outs are typically around $80 + $45-50 for every dent after the first.

 

Why go on the defensive...make it so that when their kid opens the door it's their car that gets messed up...

~WC

 

^^that's about as good as you're going to get!

 

Those strips on the door don't do enough to be worth the visual degredation.

Also, besides being ugly, they look just as bad dented as a door, and if you think about it you could probably fix dings and repaint for the price you'd have to pay to get the strips to look OEM quality.

 

Um... no.

I'm going to have to disagree here.

Bump strips on a car with flat sides should work fine. The widest/longest part of the other guys door is going to hit the strip first 9 times out of 10.

I don't have any problem with visual degredation. I don't think bump strips look that bad anyway, don't care. The fact is that dents and dings are hard to remove completely, especially the long crease shaped ones when you catch the edge of a door.

There is NO way to park away from everyone all the time, period. Getting the dents repaired is expensive and often doesn't even work completely. Repainting is out of the question, it never looks right, always comes out orange peeled and thin and looking like crap unless you're going to spend $10,000 and have it painted by a pro.

NEED BUMP STRIPS

 

It's just a little confusing the way you explain it, IMO. You want the strips to keep it looking nice but you don't care if the strips themselves look bad and any sort of repair looks bad so you obviously do care about looks.

Most detail - pinstripe - tinting shops have bulk mouldings that they can do for you

or do it the old fashioned way... JC Whitney, Baby...

http://www.jcwhitney.com/webapp/wcs/...10101&ss=10101

 

OK, I can see that.

I'll try to be more clear.

No matter what, IMO, any bumpstrips, even the most ghetto, unpainted bumpstrips you ever saw look 100x better than 1,000 little ding marks and creases running down the door or $450 worth of dent repairs that you can see easily just by looking up the side of the car and will only last until the next _______ in an SUV slams his door into the side of your car.

Just MHO. I'd probably rather be without the bumpstrips in a perfect world but that's not where I live and I have a real complex when it comes to seeing ding marks on my car. Unfortunately little Asian cars like this have paper thin sheet metal which makes it alot more likely that even an innocent tap from someone opening their door will dent or crease your door. That's why nearly every older Civic you see in that teal greel or purple color has about 10,000 dings up each side making it look like a piece of crap. Meanwhile most European cars have few or none.



If the sheet metal was the gauge that my Jetta had on it, I probably wouldn't sweat it. It would take a ball peen hammer to dent that ____.