I’m a bit of a 4WD buff, I always have been. From climbing impossible mountains to cruising through the sand dunes for an ocean fishing expedition, I just love getting out there, into places unreachable by foot or road.
On a recent trip, I hit a kangaroo at a low speed. Thankfully the kangaroo bounded off with little more than a fright and there was basically no damage to the vehicle. The incident got me thinking about frontal protection though. If I were going any faster, the damage to the jeep could have been significant, leaving us stranded and putting my family in harms way.
So I rang the guys at All Vehicle Accessories in Melbourne to get a bullbar installed. While chatting, they told me about these new pastic bullbars. Intrigued (as I’d never heard about them before) I jumped onto Google to do some research. Smartbars vs bullbars, what would protect us the best. Initially I found a lot of opinion and little fact, but digging a little deeper, a pretty clear picture emerged.
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 strange 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. But just to make it clear to everyone, when we are comparing these products along safety lines, we are comparing performance at the fatal margin. This means we are comparing safety performance at the point where an impact will kill a pedestrian, or buckle your chassis to the extent that your vehicle is written off.
The difference in performance of the two products comes about due to the relative rigidity which is a result of their make up. In a nutshell, bullbars are designed to be solid, rigid and inflexible. The immovable object protecting your car. Smartbars are designed to absorb, cushion and decelerate the forces of an impact. There are many independent studies on the two, all showing the same thing. The simple fact is that smartbars work better to protect everyone. Do some research, the facts are clear and available.
To put this point in perspective though, into words you can feel, smartbars are made out of similar materials that they make those big wheelie bins from. Imagine you fell over in the street and smacked your head into a big iron postal box. It would hurt right? Now compare the same fall if your head hit the middle of one of those big wheelie bins. The bin would cushion the impact somewhat and the damage to your forehead would not nearly be so bad. (Or painful for that matter) Thats the way the smartbars work.
Beyond protection, there is the matter of performance. Given smartbars are significantly lighter than bullbars, its not hard to see that this equates to better fuel consumption, better tyre wear, better suspension wear and safer handling for your vehicle. Vehicles just drive better with a smartbar. Did you also know that the construction of a smartbar creates about 1% of the greenhouse emissions that bullbar construction creates? Better performance on the road, better performance for the environment.
And I have one final point to make on the subject. I love taking the jeep out bush but I’m pretty lazy about it when I come home. I don’t want to spend hours polishing, buffing or scrubbing my bullbar because its rusting a bit (especially after those ocean fishing trips) or has lost its shine. A quick wipedown with a soapy sponge is all the smartbar takes to clean. Which means I can spend my time planning the next trip.
These are the facts I’ve found when comparing the traditional bullbar against the newer smartbar alternative. I encourage you to do your own research when considering frontal protection, I’m sure new information about these products will come up in the future, but currently to my mind, there is no choice. I know which product my front fender will be sporting tomorrow.
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Tags: smartbar, vehicle parts, auto parts, automotive
