Nudge Bars

[Karlo]

What is the law about having nudge bars fitted to the front and rear of your vehicle. I know in a high impact situation they can have a negative impact on your vehicles foes crumple zones. But in my experience most accidents are low impact around built up areas or some idiot reversing into your parked vehicle in the Tesco car park.

[manfredtillmann]

they may effect or disable your airbag sensors

[Karlo]

hmmm, thanks for that input I never thought about that..... It's perhaps why you see very few vehicles these days with nudge bars

[IMHO]

If your car has airbags, you definitely want to buy a genuine nudge bar from the manufacturer (if available) as these have been designed to work properly with crumple zones, airbag sensors, parking sensors, and cruise control/frontal collision radars.

It's not the kind of thing I stay up to date on, but AFAIK Ford are the only manufacturer offering them as genuine accessories in Thailand.

[IMHO]

The fronts of modern trucks are usually nice and rounded with a plastic panel, l assume this will help if you have a minor altercation with a pedestrian. I feel those nudge bars would cause major trauma even in a minor altercation.

Plus they are mainly useless, being made of thin gauge tube purely to be a dress up thingy.

Not entirely useless:

[DavisH]

Yeah they could do more harm than good rw coliding with a pedestrian. They may not help much in a major collision anyway.

[pgrahmm]

On many vehicles it's about the only way to mount auxiliary lights....There's not much to the plastic front fascias.....

[NanLaew]

The fronts of modern trucks are usually nice and rounded with a plastic panel, l assume this will help if you have a minor altercation with a pedestrian. I feel those nudge bars would cause major trauma even in a minor altercation.

Plus they are mainly useless, being made of thin gauge tube purely to be a dress up thingy.

Yup, the nudge bars only offer minimal protection of the molded ABS 'bumpers' that is the primary part of the crumple zones. As stated earlier, anything more substantial will impact airbag effectiveness, proper shock absorption zones, etc.. As far as I know, there only a couple or maybe three fabricators of proper Australian style roo bars and back bumpers. The back bumper I bought is class approved by the Australian federal authorities since 80% of the local manufacture is for export. I just read that the add-on airbag type shock absorbers/ride stiffeners that are popular with the tradies with fluctuating bed loads in Australia have been deemed illegal on some pickups as they prevent the crush bars (another built-in energy absorption feature) from working effectively.