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Re: A bumper tale. Posted by Justin VanAbrahams [Email] ![]() ![]() In Reply to: A bumper tale., MS, Wed, 6 Mar 2002 03:57:37 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
It's not that the newer design is less secure, it's that it's a newer design! Saab updated the rear of the car several times over the years to improve passenger safety. I'm betting your '82 is like my '80, with a shock absorber mounted in the spare tire well... On these cars, the rear end was designed to crumple in a certain way, on later cars they changed it to crumple in a new way. I'm sure there was some cost-cutting in there, but I'm also sure that Saab did not compromise safety to save a few cents. In fact, it's very possible that mounting the bumper "in a less secure way" improves safety since the bumper and the parts its attached to will be destroyed, thus consuming energy that may have otherwise been passed along to the cabin...
That "flimsy internal honeycomb" is one of the key design features of Saab's bumpers. That honeycomb is capable of absorbing a huge amount of energy, and it's main feature is that it will mostly bounce back into its original form... Saab's famous "reforming bumpers" rely on this assembly... It was pretty expensive and a major feature of Saabs since the days the first 99s. Adding foam to this would do two things - eliminate the reforming capability of the bumper and make the bumpers energy TRANSFERRING instead of energy ABSORBING. The result is that impact energy would get transferred to the rest of the car, damaging it and its occupants more readily and more seriously.
Take a look at your front fenders and the few weld spots that attach everything to one another - they could have built the car in a more secure fashion by welding everything along the entire seam, but then the sheetmetal wouldn't break away and frontal impact energy would be passed along to the passengers... Saab knew what it was doing when it chose to use a few, carefully placed weld spots. I'd be surprised if the bumper was not the same story.
Saab's safety record is built on technologies like this... they know what they're doing, and for all the little quirks of these cars they're not designed by accident....
-Justin
posted by 66.123.9...
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