On 2005-04-10, Paul S. Brown <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Agree about exacerbating a pedestrian impact - not good in those
> situations.
After some outcry in our wonderful objective unsensationalising media
about child-killing bullbars the government did some research into it
with the help of the various agencies that actually attend accidents
and fix people up and so are in a position to know. After an argument
in an unrelated newsgroup about bullbars I dug the report up and read
it, I don't have it to hand now and can't be bothered to find it so if
anyone's interested they can look for themselves.
The gist of it was;
* Bullbars have been implicated in a grand total of 3 deaths in the
UK in one year, and only tipped the balance from almost certainly
fatal to actually fatal,
* On some 4x4s the Bullbars have caused a relatively minor increase in
injury to accident victims,
* On some 4x4s the Bullbars flex more than the vehicle itself and so
are likely to have reduced injury to accident victims.
* The potential for injury caused by the Bullbars is entirely
dependent on the design of the Bullbars and the design of the
vehicle on which they are mounted.
Basically fitting Bullbars to a Defender isn't going to make one tiny
iota of difference to someone you hit, it's the whacking great big 4x4
with the chassis sticking out the front that'll kill them. A Toyota
Rav-4 or a Volvo XC90 (or whatever it is) on the other hand is much
less likely to kill someone than a Defender, fitting Bullbars to such
soft-roaders is likely to cause extra injury but the statistics from
the crash reports indicated that it wasn't significant.
Hence they weren't banned in this country.
People who worry about the morality of fitting Bullbars really
shouldn't be driving Landrover products, they're not very nice things
to hit people with, much worse than most of their competitors.
Insurance industry figures released last year showed that across the
whole of the UK, in accidents involving two vehicles in which one
vehicle's occupants were killed, the surviving occupants were most
likely to be driving a Defender. Much to my surprise this was
trumpeted in the press that I saw as proof that the Defender is very
safe, personally I'd say it shows the exact opposite! Post-BMW
Discoveries and Range Rovers won't be any better.
In addition to all that waffle, the majority of Bullbars are mounted
at the base with bolts through the chassis and have a levering effect
on those mount points. This means that a heavy impact on them is
likely to put so much force on the mounting point that you risk
tearing the chassis at that point, if the bolts or Bullbar don't break
first. With vegetation and other such stuff that's not likely to make
a difference, but if you are ever tempted to tie a tow rope to the
Bullbar and pull something with it or be towed with it, you stand a
good risk of causing some nasty damage to the vehicle or Bullbar.
--
For every expert, there is an equal but opposite expert
