Modern car bumpers are, in the majority of cases, beautiful but utterly useless. They just don’t work. From experience, it often takes huge amounts of money to repair damage from fairly minor accidents—sometimes requiring a replacement—from a relatively minor shunt. And that’s the fundamental problem: modern car bumpers are designed to break.
But before heading there, it’s a good idea to qualify first on how bumpers should work. Basically, a car bumper should be that part of a car that satisfies a simple criterion: it should be able to take some, without you giving any. The ideal car bumper should allow you to crash into another car or object, stationary or moving, at speeds below 8 km/h with zero visible damage. A good bumper design should provide the driver with a sort of buffer zone where small errors in judgment can be absorbed and forgotten. Of course, the modern bumper fails at doing this. However, there was a time when bumpers were able to achieve this ideal, but sacrifices had to be made in one area: aesthetics.
