It seems hard to believe.
A 1999 Mazda Protege sustains $4,609 in damage in four tests of its bumpers, each of which took place at only 5 miles per hour.
When Mazda’s 2000 MPV mini-van underwent the same tests, the total repair cost was $5,669.
Bumper tests such as these, conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, can leave consumers scratching their heads and wondering how a series of 5-m.p.h. impacts can cause so much damage.
It also can have consumers asking why the government isn’t setting rules to protect their wallets as well as their bumpers from such big whacks.
What happened when the Mazdas were tested by the insurance institute illustrates a decades-long debate about how consumers are being served by a federal cost-savings act that covers bumpers.
The insurance institute and consumer advocacy groups, such as the Ralph Nader-founded Center for Auto Safety, argue that the standard of protection should be increased.
Automakers and the government say it is fine the way it is. At one time, the bumper standard was stronger. In 1977, the federal government required that every new car meet a 5-m.p.h. bumper standard. That meant there could be no damage to safety-related items (headlights and turn signals) and no damage to exterior surfaces of the car (the body or sheet metal) in a 5-m.p.h. crash.
It did allow damage to the bumper and its attaching hardware. The standard was later strengthened to prevent substantial damage to the bumper; only minor dents and displacement were allowed. Enter the energy crisis, which prompted carmakers to increase fuel economy with lighter bumpers.
In 1983, the government relaxed the requirement. Since then, bumpers must stand up to a 2.5-m.p.h. crash with no damage to safety-related parts or body panels. The standard does allow damage to the bumper. “You could destroy the bumper,” O’Neill said. Though cars have become much more fuel-efficient, fuel is available and prices are not as high as analysts predicted, the weaker bumper standard remains. It should be noted, however, that these bumpers do not pose a safety threat to vehicle occupants.
Automakers believe the 2.5-m.p.h. standard allows them to strike a balance between competing factors that go into vehicle design, said Gloria Bergquist, spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in Washington, D.C. The 13 automobile companies that compose the alliance represent 90 percent of vehicle sales.
“First you want good bumper performance. You want good fuel economy. You want to control consumer costs. You want a pleasing style and you want good lighting performance. Right there you have five factors that you’re trying to balance,” Bergquist said. “We understand why the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety takes the position that it does. It’s making consumer costs the priority.”
The Mazda Protege and MPV are good–but not the only–examples of what happens when automakers don’t succeed in finding that balance.
Last year, when the insurance institute rammed the bumpers of a 1999 Mazda Protege into poles at its testing facility in Virginia, the Protege sustained a total of $4,609 in damage in four 5-m.p.h. crashes. It was the worst showing of nine vehicles tested and higher than the $1,930 in damage sustained by the 1997 Protege.
Mazda had changed the rear bumper on the new Protege to try to save weight in order to improve fuel economy. The rear bumper on the 1997 Protege, which was composed of an aluminum bar and foam padding, sustained only $709 in damages from backing into a pole.
When that rear bumper was changed to plastic on the 1999 model, it sustained $2,837 in damages from backing into a pole. After the test results became public, Mazda went back to the previous design, starting with the 2000 model year. Subsequent bumper damage sustained in the four tests totaled $2,058, and rear bumper damage was about $500.
At the end of March, the insurance institute conducted another round of testing that included Mazda’s 2000 MPV mini-van. It sustained more than $1,700 damage to the front bumper when the mini-van was crashed into a flat barrier. The total repair costs for all four crashes was $5,669.
“Surprisingly the 2000 MPV, a brand-new design, was introduced with an almost identical flimsy plastic bumper bar on the front end,” said Brian O’Neill, president of the institute, a lobbying and research organization in Arlington, Va., that is largely financed by the insurance industry.
While Mazda does not dispute the insurance institute’s findings, Mazda spokesman Steve Gehring noted that “we need to move away from the notion that if you are using a plastic bumper it is inherently a bad design. There are many other manufacturers that use plastic front bumpers; it is not a unique approach. There are weight and handling issues that are important for us. You don’t want a heavy bumper out in front of you in a front-wheel-drive layout. Our 626 was tested recently with a plastic front bumper and did very, very well.” (It allowed only $143 in damage when it was crashed into a flat barrier.)
Mazda says it found what appeared to be a manufacturing flaw in the MPV’s bumper bar that is responsible for the poor performance, Gehring said. But, Mazda engineers reinforced the bumper to make it stronger. Mazda also sent two engineers from Japan to spend a week at the insurance institute.
MPVs with an upgraded bumper began arriving in dealerships at the end of April, and Mazda will reinforce the front bumpers on vehicles in stock as well as for owners of 2000 MPVs, a company spokesman said.
“Consumers don’t realize how much of a difference a good bumper makes in terms of what they pay every six months or so to their favorite institution: the auto insurance companies,” said Kim Hazelbaker, senior vice president of the Highway Loss Data Institute in Arlington, Va. The organization, also funded by auto insurers, provides information to help companies set rates.
“Premiums are influenced by how frequently collisions occur and how much money it takes to repair the damage,” said Hazelbaker. “There is a relationship.”
Because close to half of collision claims are for $1,000 or less, these low-end claims drive rates up, he said. And that’s not to mention the deductible, which is most commonly $500, said Hazelbaker.
This damage is almost always to bumpers. The bumper standard applies to passenger cars only. There is no minimum standard to protect the bumpers of people who own the light trucks, pickups, mini-vans and sport-utility vehicles that account for about 50 percent of the new-vehicle market.
Midsize sport-utility vehicles most recently tested by the institute sustained total damages in the four tests of $2,918 for the 1999 Mercedes-Benz ML320 to $6,282 for the 1999 Mitsubishi Montero Sport. Four of the six tested had repair bills of more than $5,000.
“These people think they are in an invincible Goliath when, in fact, their invincible Goliath has an Achilles’ heel,” said Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety in Washington, D.C. The bumpers of pickup trucks don’t fare much better. The 1998 Dodge Dakota had a total of $3,863 in bumper damage; the 1998 Toyota Tacoma had $4,361.
The U.S. Department of Transportation, through its National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, could impose stricter bumper standards, though it has declined to do so.
NHTSA spokesman Tim Hurd said that the calculation used by the agency to determine the 2.5- m.p.h. standard is still relevant.
“The calculation was made that carrying the extra weight of a bigger bumper and the repair costs of a stiffer bumper outweigh the repair cost between 2.5 and 5 m.p.h. So it’s a cost decision in favor of the consumer. There are tear-down requirements we do every few years to verify that.”
NHTSA, which is responsible for automotive safety, does not have an ongoing program to ensure that cars meet the 2.5-m.p.h. standard. NHTSA officials say it is a matter of limited resources, which it devotes to testing life-saving systems in front- and side-impact crash tests. Bumpers are a money issue.
That leaves bumper testing to the insurance institute, which began bumper testing in 1969, and Consumer Reports, which began testing in 1974.
The institute and Consumer Reports buy the cars from dealers, and test bumpers at 5 m.p.h.
The institute does four tests. The front and rear of the vehicle are crashed into a flat barrier. Then the front is crashed into an angled barrier and the rear end backed into a pole. The institute rates bumpers as good, acceptable, marginal and poor, based on the cost of restoring the bumpers to their original condition.
Consumer Reports uses a hydraulic bumper-basher, which looks like a battering ram, to hit the bumper three times each in the front and rear: a 5-m.p.h. impact in the center, an offset 5-m.p.h. impact to the left of center, and a 3-m.p.h. impact to the right corner. Consumer Reports states the overall cost to repair each bumper after it has been hit three times. The results are reported in the magazine and at www.ConsumerReports.org, for a $3.95 monthly subscription.
The insurance institute reports the costs separately for each of its four tests, plus it reports the total damage and the average damage for each hit. Its results are posted free at www.highwaysafety.org.
The tests produce different outcomes. Sometimes the dollar difference is only $100 or $200. That, however, was not the case with the 1999 Protege. It incurred $4,609 in damages in the insurance institute’s tests and $960 in damages in Consumer Reports’ tests.
Where do such huge variances leave the consumer who is researching a vehicle purchase?
Consumers should see how the vehicle they want compares to others of about the same size, said David Champion, head of automotive testing for Consumer Reports.
In Consumer Reports testing, other cars the same size as the Protege suffered damage ranging from $129 for a Saturn to $399 for an Oldsmobile Alero.
O’Neill, of the insurance institute, said: “Don’t fixate on the $4,000. There’s the Protege with a bad bumper and a New Beetle in the same class with a very good bumper.” In all four tests, damage to the New Beetle totaled $134.
“The Beetle is the only car the institute has tested that begins to compare with the 1981 Ford Escort,” said O’Neill, who cites it as the standard. The Escort’s bumpers sustained no damage in the institute’s four tests. Like the bumpers of many cars of the past, the Escort’s were mounted to shock absorbers. And they stuck out, which did not make it one of the prettiest cars.
WOULD YOU LIKE CHROME OR PLASTIC?
In the ’50s and ’60s, bumpers were generally made of chrome-plated steel and were primarily decoration. They were pretty and fun to polish, but didn’t provide much protection against damage to cars in low-speed crashes.
With bumper regulations in the mid-’70s came changes.
“At that point they were still the typical chrome-plated face bar, but there were additional reinforcements behind that face bar in order to strengthen the impact bar. And you saw the development of energy-absorbing systems,” said Scott Stokfisz, senior project engineer of General Motors North American Exterior Center.
These were the bumpers you could see. Unlike the bumpers today, their pieces and parts were not hidden by plastic covers. The systems that we have today, which are the plastic bumper covers or fascia that cover the actual bumper, had not been developed yet.
Styling trends brought about the plastic fascia that covers the bumper beam, Stokfisz said.
“It was to try to integrate the bumper system into the vehicle, and it gave the designers more flexibility with styling.”
New energy-absorbing systems have been developed, too. We have gone from a hydraulic type of shock absorber between the bumper system and the frame in the mid-’70s to plastic and more recently to foam, he said.
However, the chrome bumpers from the ’50s and ’60s looked so sturdy that someone is bound to ask: Weren’t we better off with them?
The answer is generally “no,” though there is still disagreement on that point.
“The problem with chrome bumpers, the big metal bumpers they used to have, if you hit something at 5 miles per hour, they usually bent, stayed bent and damaged and looked awful. So you would have had to have them replaced,” said David Champion, director of automotive testing for Consumer Reports.
“They may have looked stronger and durable but, in fact, they weren’t. Today the modern plastic bumpers with all the energy- absorbing material actually absorb the crash and still look fine, as long as they are well-designed,” said Champion.
Furthermore, bumpers from the late ’60s that evoke nostalgia were bolted to the sheet metal at either side. When they bent, they tended to rip the sheet metal, said Brian O’Neill, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a lobbying and research organization in Arlington, Va., that is largely financed by the insurance industry.
“Some chrome bumpers did very well and some did very badly. We were not necessarily better off,” said O’Neill. Champion and O’Neill say that you would have to look to the cars of the ’20s and ’30s to say we had better bumpers. One thing that made those better was the amount of space between the bumper and the car, O’Neill said.
Leaving enough space between the bumper and the car is important because it makes it harder for damage to reach the expensive sheet metal, lights and other parts of the car.
Another advantage to bumpers of the ’20s and ’30s is that many were made from a type of steel that would bend on impact and spring back to its original shape, said Champion. In the ’40s and ’50s, for reasons of styling, they went to a type of steel that could be chromed.
“But when you hit them they bent and stayed bent,” he said.
“But I think what people are thinking about is the ’50s and ’60s, where the steel was chromed and if you hit at 5 m.p.h. it would do quite a bit of damage and would stay an unsightly mess,” Champion said.
When it comes to the scratches, dents and dings from parallel parking on city streets, there is disagreement over the merits of chrome versus plastic bumpers.
Mike Porcelli, who owns Central Avenue Collision Works in Glendale, N.Y., has been dealing with what he calls “bumper rash” for 50 years, and he prefers chrome.
“They could get dinged, dented and twisted. We could straighten them out and polish them and they were fine for most purposes. Now you have plastic bumpers. They get gouged and torn up. They are more easily damaged, and they are more expensive to repair,” he said.
