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Formerly one-piece steel bumpers are now integrated into the vehicle's front-end design. This happened in part because new rules don't require bumpers to be as strong and protective. That means consumers wind up paying thousands of dollars to fix damage from even a minor collision.
Even the best performers in the tests wound up badly bruised. A 5 mph impact on the front bumper of the top-ranked Mitsubishi Galant resulted in $929 of damage. A similar crash inflicted $3,911 of damage on a Subaru Legacy, $4,535 on a Nissan Maxima and $4,594 on a Volkswagen Passat.
In the tests, each car collides with a steel barrier that is shaped like the front end of a car and is built with a wide plastic cushion and a flexible cover similar to the energy-absorbing bumpers and bumper covers on most cars. The institute recently redesigned its crash barriers to look and respond more like the bumper of another vehicle instead of a flat wall. The full test includes four impacts: front and rear full-width crashes at 6 mph and front and rear corner bumps at 3 mph.
The Nissan Maxima, Pontiac G6 and Volkswagen Passat each sustained damage estimated at more than $4,500 in the frontal test. These cars have bumpers that slid underneath the barrier, allowing their bodies to absorb much of the impact. The costs reflect damage to the cars' hoods, fenders, headlights and even air conditioning condensers mounted just behind their front grilles.
Rear-end tests showed similar patterns of expensive damage when the cars' bumpers weren't tall enough or were mounted too high or low to properly engage the barrier. The Hyundai Sonata performed best in this test with $739 of damage, mostly limited to the bumper. Cars' front bumpers generally were not wide enough to prevent extensive damage in corner impacts. The headlights of all 17 cars were damaged in the 3 mph corner impacts. This is because the bumper bars aren't wide enough to protect those parts.
Many cars appear to have bumpers that wrap around their front corners, but the underlying bumper structure is rarely as extensive as the cover. On many cars there is empty space behind the corners of the bumper cover, so headlights and fenders tend to wind up absorbing the energy of the crash.
Consumers also may not be aware of the differences in the cost of repair parts from one vehicle to the next. The Toyota Camry needed extensive repairs after the rear crash test damaged its body panels and trunk floor. The cost of the repairs was $1,480, which is low compared with some other models that cost more than $3,000 to repair because their parts are more expensive than Toyota's.