The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has conducted low-speed crash tests of new cars to determine their relative bumper protection since 1969. The ability of bumpers to protect against damage in these tests has varied considerably over the past 26 years, depending on the strength of the federal standard in effect at the time as well as on manufacturer design choices. The cost to repair the damage sustained in these tests has been published regularly in the `Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Status Report'. A brief history of the changing standards for car bumper strength and the resulting changes in crash test performance is provided in `Low-Speed Crash Tests: 1993 Mid-size Four-Door Passenger Cars', Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, May 1993. Bumpers have been federally regulated on passenger cars since the 1973 model year (49 CFR Parts 571.215 and 581), but the bumpers on the other three classes of light duty vehicles defined by federal safety standards (49 CFR 571.3) have never been regulated. These three classes are trucks (including pickups and cargo vans), buses (including vans designed for carrying more than 10 people), and so-called multipurpose passenger vehicles, which include smaller passenger vans as well as utility vehicles such as those tested for this report. Manufacturers are therefore not required to provide any type of bumper protection for these kinds of vehicles, which are steadily gaining in popularity among new-vehicle purchasers. In the Institute's first low-speed crash test program that focused on a group of passenger vans, test results were poor overall (Low-Speed Crash Tests: 1994 Passenger Vans, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, January 1994). Utility vehicles accounted for one in nine new passenger vehicles sold in 1995. To determine the bumper protection afforded by a variety of current model utility vehicles in low-speed crashes, a series of 24 crash tests was performed on September 15-20, 1995 and January 24-25, 1996 on six mid-size 1996 models. The cost to repair the damage sustained in each crash test was estimated using standard appraisal criteria and procedures. (A)
Abstract