I'm pretty sure ships have always, or at least for many years, had some kind of collision boundary with each other, with stations, etc. Case in point: a highly effective tactic to keep huge ships that take forever to align for warping from actually getting into warp, was to take a small ship and "bump" it, causing it to get out of alignment. This was used in portions of space where aggressive actions on ships (such as warp scrambling) would be met with swift destruction.

I think they recently changed it to be mass-based though, so you can't really bump a Freighter with a Frigate.