Just some thoughts about automotive safety after seeing an accident. This is not entirely a new idea but it is something that we should be paying more attention to.
Road vehicles are designed with the possibility that a crash may occur. It is presumed that the area of impact will most likely be on the vehicle's bumper, either the front or rear bumper.
If the bumpers of all vehicles were at the same height this is how it would work. Unfortunately that is not the case.
The height of the bumper varies widely among the vehicles that are on the road, which might be involved in collisions with each other. The vehicle with the lower bumper usually gets the worst of a head-on or rear end collision.
To make matters worse heavier vehicles are the ones that tend to have higher bumpers. We can see the combined mismatch of both vehicle weight and bumper height when a van or pickup truck collides with a small car.
There would certainly be far fewer automotive fatalities if all bumpers were at the same height. This is because all vehicles are designed to take an impact at the bumper. But this is not really practical.
Why couldn't all vehicles have two bumpers, a high and a low bumper, with all highs and all lows being at the same height on every vehicle? The low bumper would be at the normal height of the bumper on a small car and the high bumper would be at the height of the bumper on a truck, SUV or, pickup.
The vehicle would be designed considering that the main point of impact could be at either the high or the low bumper. This would greatly reduce road fatalities and serious injuries since the worst accidents seem to occur when the bumpers are mismatched and we have never gotten around to establishing a standard height for bumpers.
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