When Bumpers Don’t Bump

Yesterday's biggest driving story was the news release from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety regarding its study into how the varying heights of auto bumpers create damage in a collision that could have been prevented.

Specifically, the relative height between the bumper on a car with the bumper on an SUV, pickup, or minivan.

To quote Joe Nolan, the Institute's chief administrative officer, “The problem is they don't share the same bumper rules, and consumers end up paying the price.”

For this test, the people of the IIHS crashed cars and SUVs from the same manufacturer together and evaluated the cost of the resulting damage. A Nissan Sentra versus a Nissan Rogue. A Ford Escape versus a Ford Focus. Get the whole story here.

Of course, bumpers only reason for existing is to minimize collision damage to the less durable, more expensive parts of the vehicle — which often includes the nut that holds the wheel — and standardizing the height among the various kinds of motor vehicles on the road makes sense.

But it would be nice if, just sometimes, our government's response to a driving danger would be to put better trained drivers on the road.

The Biggest Repair Bill: A Corolla hitting a RAV4 resulted in nearly
$10,000 in repairs. More than half of that was for the RAV4.