I own a jeep. I’ve always owned jeeps. From the old 70s CJ models to the newer, way more comfy (or so my wife tells me) cherokees. I don’t know why I do, but I’ve always loved them. Recently on an outback excursion I hit a kangaroo. I was only doing about 10km/h so the damage was minimal, but this incident got me thinking about frontal protection. So I called my mates at All Vehicle Accessories in Melbourne to have a chat about bullbars. During this chat they brought up the topic of smartbars. Before the conversation, I didn’t even know they existed. So I got onto Google to do some research on the products and found a lot of opinion (most of it based on aesthetics and perception rather than utility and fact) but pretty much no factual information. So me and my mates at All Vehicle Accessories dug a little deeper, and this is what we found.
Topic 1. Safety
With frontal protection products, there are 3 general areas of concern regarding safety. These are the ability to protect passengers, the ability to protect pedestrians and the ability to protect your car. Talking about protection generally, I find it starnge how many bullbar exponents out there point out that when you are travelling at 150kms/h, no matter what you hit, its going to be fatal to the object and probably the vehicle. Personally I think such arguments are ridiculous as they suggest all collissions are at excessive speeds and dismiss the relative safety performance of the products at lower speeds. Continue reading ‘Smartbars Vs Bullbars; a Critical Comparison’ »