Abstract. In recent years a tentative description of the short-range part of hadron interactions with constituent quark interchange has been developed providing an alternative approach to meson physics. Quark interchange plays a role, for example, in the nucleon-nucleon (N N ) phase-shifts and cross-section. In heavy ion collision simulations at intermediate energies one of the main features is the N N cross-section in the collisional term, where in most cases it is an input adjusted to the free space value. In this paper we introduce the quark degrees of freedom to the N N cross-section in the Vlasov-Uehling-Uhlenbeck (VUU) model and explore the possibility that these effects appear in the observables at lower energies.