2010 rav 4 sport 76k miles
Should I buy a rav4 that has been in a few accidents but has low mileage. Not rebuild status but has been rear-ended and has had front end damage. It is being sold by a toyota dealership and is a 2010 v6 sport. Everything looks mechanical fine on it however they are asking 10k. Any thoughts on this would be great.
That's an insane price for an old RAV4 that's been in accidents. I'd run away from that deal.
I'd pass. They want way too much money for that. Modern cars are unibodies, not body-on-frame vehicles. In the old days when vehicles had separate frames, you could take out an entire frame that was no longer good and replace it with new frames and bodywork, with the designed original strength.
Unibodies have no frame, the body is the frame. Unless it was in a literal fender-bender with no underlying body damage, weak spots (crumple zones) are strategically placed within the vehicle's body when it was initially designed, allowing the car to be sacrificed instead of you in event of an accident. When they're pulled back out, you strengthened the metal, causing it to not collapse predictably ever again (bad). You'd need to anneal it (heat it up until the metal is red-hot) in order to restore the metal's original properties.
