Jason Demands Better Bumpers So We Had Better Give Him Some

“I need to speak with President Torchinsky immediately.” The voice on the other end of the phone slightly scared the secretary at the Royal Palace of Jasonia. “May I have your name, sir?” the secretary sheepishly asked.

“This is Elon Musk. My team had a photoshoot scheduled next to the Mount Fiero volcano on Jasonia and I was just told that my Tesla cars will not be allowed in the country.” Before the secretary could reply, Musk continued, his voice up half an octave. “Apparently my car’s bumper standards are not acceptable, and your President personally refuses to let my cars off of the boat until they can be reclassified as ‘paperweights’ and not motor vehicles, which is outrageous and going to create a major public relations issue for me that the press is just going to eat up like Doritos”.

The secretary was about to head out for a Supa Burger but instead was witnessing this tiny island nation about to become the source of the Bumper Wars of 2024.

The Torch Demands The Impossible….

You might remember that Jasonia is a beautiful island nation in the Pacific presided over by Dear Leader, whose real name is Jason “Torch” Torchinsky. Torch is not exactly the most stable leader; the President of Jasonia can be a bit “out there”, sometimes so much so that he makes Kim Jung Un look like Al Gore.

Still, his latest writings on The Autopian car website that he co-owns are quite coherent and seem to have gotten a lot of people thinking. Jason’s recent post in question dealt with rear bumpers, or more accurately the lack of real, functioning back bumpers on modern cars. Compounding the issue is that many of these cars and SUVs feature tailgates that are in fact the first point of contact in any collision, ensuring that even the lightest collision will result in thousands of dollar’s worth of damage.

After this post, Torch decided that Jasonia would institute the bumper laws that existed in the United States during the late 1970s. The Jasonia Highway Traffic Safety Administration (JHITSA) now would start with the American requirement from 1974 that all cars feature bumpers that could withstand impacts of 5 MPH with no damage to a car’s lights or mechanical systems. Many cars dealt with this regulation by adding park bench-like appendages onto the front and back of cars like these, which the video below shows actually worked (but if you bash that Pontiac into wall when it’s cold I’m told that the paint will just flake right off):

Ah, but Dear Leader Torch decided to take it a step further. Look at this requirement that he first presented to me via Slack in a sort of Haiku manner:

I want massive bumpers

I want to back into a hydrant at 5mph and not give a shit

no painted surfaces for the smackable area

I want my ideal full-forgiveness bumper

Think LLV

Oh, shit. That LLV literally has big-ass black ram bars on it. It is beyond ugly:

So Jason wants to go beyond the “no damage to lights and mechanical systems” and create something where “no damage” REALLY means “no damage.” That’s gonna be a challenge to make something even halfway appealing for everyone, including Mr. Musk and his Tesla cars. I still think we can find a solution to allow Elon’s cars and those of other makers to pass muster from Torch and be allowed to legally explore the beautiful roads of Jasonia.

… But Is It Really Impossible?

Nobody can deny the appeal of a car that can ram into a wall or another vehicle at a walking pace and suffer nothing more than a removable scuff. The issue was always the weight and appearance that these appendages usually added.

As far as weight goes, the addition of beefier bumper shocks would hardly impact (excuse the pun) today’s cars where a compact weighs as much as a full-sized seventies American car. In terms of appearance, ugly ram bars are not always a given. Jason’s reasoning is that cars can provide such protection and still feature styling that’s attractive, as proven by cars from the most heavily regulated bumper era such as the Porsche 928 and various Chevrolet Corvettes.

Park-by-feel never really went away in urban environments. Jason also cites the fact that when Giorgetto Giugiaro (designer of the Mark I VW Golf) was given the first five-door GTI as a gift from Volkswagen to daily drive at his home in Italy, his specifications included the US-style bumpers! We can’t say if he liked the looks of these things better, but his choice says that he didn’t he certainly didn’t seem to mind the visual compromise. Seriously, somebody handed him the keys to a brand new, free-of-charge one-of-a-kind black hot hatch to parallel park daily in Turin: what would YOU do? I wouldn’t bother giving him the ruin-the-visual-integrity speech. Did you design the Lotus Esprit and the Maserati Bora?

Let’s take one of the banned-from-Jasonia Teslas (a white Telsa Model Y) sitting on the boat in Tor Chin Ski City harbor and see what options we might have.

The Hard Way…

Jason is not totally devoid of heart; he wasn’t going to back down on his laws but he also didn’t want make the life of the Tesla employees any worse and take out his wrath on underserving targets. Upon hearing of the situation, he summoned his black Tatra 613 limo to take him from the palace (in the postcard below) down to the docks to take a look at the quarantined cars. A scout at the port (big old Jed, at the lighthouse) reported black SPACE X helicopters approaching the island.

By the time Jason’s sinister Czechoslovakian sedan reaches the port, the choppers had deposited a dozen bewildered-looking staffers from the Mars vehicle project next to the cars. They’re hungry so Torch takes them to the Bananyama Café across the street, a place that serves local Jasonian favorites (it’s a weird combination of the indigenous people’s fare and Jason’s own culture). He orders big bowls of Gogomobilia (a stew that’s sort of a deconstructed Reuben with corned beef and cheese over plantains); they grab Sharpies and draw on the table paper.

Starting at the rear of the car, the team quickly realized that there had to be a hard and easy approach to the problem (we call it a “step” and “leap” approach on some projects at work here). The difficult way would be to totally redesign the rear of the car.

One step would be to make the trunk liftover a bit higher to allow the sweep on the side of the car to continue all the way around the rear of the car and then move the whole lower section outward so that you’d the entire bumper would move into the wheel wells when hit, bounce back, and not harm the tailgate one bit. Now the bumper can extend further out the back of the car, looking a bit like an “underbite” but nonetheless blending in with the character line that runs around the rocker panels. Plus, you now have an honest-to-God bumper.

The other way would keep the trunk opening where it is now but build up around the opening in a manner that most car makers did from the nineties up to about ten years ago before it was somehow agreed that the tailgate latch should be the impact absorbing part of the car. You end up with a sunken area at the back of the car that in some ways isn’t totally unappealing since any concave space can help to visually break up mass.

I’ll admit that neither approach is as appealing as the smooth, flush look of stock, but the tradeoff to thousands in repair dollars might be worth it (and I promise when they fix your stock Tesla after such a shunt the tailgate will likely NEVER shut perfectly ever again or you’ll get erroneous TAILGATE OPEN messages, and ask me how I know).

Ah, but there isn’t time to redo the whole car right now, and even if you did the body-colored impact parts won’t pass President Torchinsky’s byzantine regulations. Is there another way?

…And An Easier One

The lack of protection for body-colored bumpers has recently forced the aftermarket to come up with some solutions for the problem. One of the more popular items made to deal with the issue is from a company called Bumper Bully. Their products include a simple rubber flap that hangs down over the bumper, installed by simply opening your trunk or tailgate and shutting it onto the straps that hold it in place. For a few more bucks, Bumper Bully is now offering more complex things that are a bit absurd and look sort of like the headgear you dreaded wearing with your braces back in the day.

I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to remove these once you leave your parking space, but most people are too lazy to take it off and reinstall it every time they park so they just let it flap in the breeze as the car drives down the highway. They’re pretty unattractive, and when do people actually take them off? Maybe when it’s time to take this Camry or whatever to a local car show? Maybe to impress your date with your scratch-free bumper? Of course, if you’ve left it on for months it’s possibly trapped moisture or caused scuffs to damage the paint like those “car bras” used to do, negating its value as a protection device.

Jason’s point to the Tesla staff was that if it’s rarely ever coming off the car, the better answer is just to make something to permanently mount in place. Besides, a lot of people willing to extend their bumpers now by sticking on those diffuser things to the back of their cars. Inspired by the race car appendage below the bumper that helps with downforce, they’re rather pointless beyond aesthetic for road use. Like those absurd ironing-board-sized rear wings, functionally they do jack shit and, on the street, the only downforce they provide is the extra dead weight that they add.

A recent BMW concept car displayed (what we think is) a rear diffuser that looked a whole lot like a bumper to us:

Some of the best-looking 5MPH rear bumpers of all time, the Porsche 928 and later C3 Corvettes, accomplished the task by incorporating tiny bumper guards.

Using diffusers and 928 as an influence, the team quickly developed an add-on rubber pad that blended in with the existing design to add extra inches to the rear bumper; this would contact the hypothetical fire hydrant that Dear Leader Torch wants cars to be able to back into with abandon. Such a bumper piece could likely just sheet metal screw right into the existing bumper cover, with the fasteners concealed by a snap-in cover. Transmitting Solidworks files back to the factory, the Tesla team was able to rapid-prototype a part and overnight it to Jason for his approval.

Not as attractive as the original car, but those extra inches make a world of difference (ahem). Again, you can whine about “violating design purity” if you want; I’ve got work to do so just let me know when you’re done and I’ll come back. But what about the front of the car?

The Nose Knows And Grows

If Jason is going to hold fast to his “no damage whatsoever” rule for a 5MPH hit front and back, we’re pretty much stuck with black (or grey) rubber for a bumper material, or at least for the contact points with the theoretical wall or bollard.

We’re working with that white Tesla so this would be the worst-case scenario in terms of color contrast for these add-ons. I’d still like to hide the bumper shocks behind the body-colored cover, but the rubber bits will take the brunt of the impacts and can be buffed and Armor-Alled out.

One quick solution is just the full-width black rubber “bumper” trim, which honestly doesn’t look that bad (and very similar to an Ioniq6). Yes, I know the tow hook needs to move:

The next solution someone drew on the Bannanyama restaurant table was a “fake grille outline” that sort of filled the space that always kind of looked like it was made for a grille on Model Ys anyway (and added body-colored area below to make it look less like a Peppa Pig face):

We could also echo the rear of the car with an “underbite” black trim the extends forward of the body-colored parts:

One Tesla team member suggested an “overlanding nose” that could be part of a package with tough looking off-road wheels and lifted suspension. You could add some LED lights on the lower bar, too:

The table was covered in scribbles and Gogomobila stains, but everyone was disgusted by the food but happy with the design results: really any of these directions could be made to pass the must of Jason.

Once the rapid-prototyped samples arrived, Torch was more than willing to let the team get the Teslas over to Mount Fiero and proceed with the photoshoot in front of the volcano (“It’s technically active” said Jason “But I wouldn’t worry since that’s it’s as about as likely to blow as my aorta exploding”).

What about Jason and Elon? Well, let’s just say that when Musk launches his next space mission, you have a pretty good idea of whose palace the spent, empty rocket boosters are going to land on, don’t you?

Things That Go Bump In The Night

Like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand (the dude, not the band) starting the First World War, small events can cause global conflict. The Bumper Wars of 2024 began with a simple difference of opinion on a small island nation, but the repercussions spread far and wide.

Are you one of the “we will never go back” types that sees any form of add-on big bumper as a slippery slope that will eventually lead to battering rams on Smart Cars? On the other hand, maybe you’ve felt the pain of a nonfunctional tailgate from a minor shunt and will fight to see no one ever feel this kind of suffering.

What side do you fall on? Choose wisely, my friend.

Modern Rear Bumpers Are A Sad Joke – The Autopian

I’m Pretty Sure This Renault Is The Only Time A Carmaker Put A Whole Other Bumper Onto A Bumper – The Autopian

Carmakers Once Cared About Damage From Minor Crashes And Now They Couldn’t Give A Damn – The Autopian

The BMW Neue Klasse Concept May Be Re-Introducing Something Unexpected And Important: A Real Bumper (Sort Of) – The Autopian