New Automotive Fetish Unlocked: Color-Coordinated Rubber Impact Strips

I know there are many of you out there who feel like one automotive kink is enough for you, and I respect that. But only a little. That’s because I’m greedy when it comes to automotive fetishes, and I want to hungrily develop as many as possible so I can get lavish hits of dopamine or whatever happy fluids course through my mind-flaps when I see a car with exciting taillights or indicators or bumpers or space utilization or whatever. I love it, love it all, and I am currently in the process of developing an all-new automotive fetish: color-coordinated rubber bumper impact strips. Is it hot in here? It feels hot in here.

I’ve realized that most of my automotive fixations and fetishes tend to skew towards the small and strange and foreign, well, foreign from my American-based perspective. This particular one, though, is extremely American, as the only examples I can think of are all American cars, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s. It’s a strange little design detail, something that adds a nice little bit of zing to a pretty utilitarian part of a car, and there’s something about this detail that somehow feels almost, I don’t know, comically snazzy. Color-coordinated rubber bumper impact strips feel like the automotive design of something being too, were it fashion, matchy-matchy, a belt matching the shoes matching the hat matching the glasses matching the earrings matching, oh, the colored contact lenses worn under the glasses. It’s that.

[Editor’s Note: Holy crap, I just realized I wrote this article back in 2018, well before I was given a free Nash Metropolitan by a local Los Angelino!:

It was meant to be! -DT]

Since modern cars don’t really use rubber impact strips anymore – to their detriment, as these little chunks and strips of rubber actually made cars more forgiving and prevented a lot of minor accident damage – it may be worth explaining just what the hell they were.

Rubber impact strips are pretty much just what the name says: strips of rubber, placed on bumpers, designed to absorb small impacts, protecting the (usually) chrome bumper itself from getting damaged or dented or scratched. They’re almost always made of a tough, pretty hard and resilient black rubber. They could be found on so many cars built in the 1970s and 1980s. So, so many. Almost everything with bumpers had some form of black rubber protection strips on them or on their bumper guards or overriders.

Very rarely – which is what makes this fetish so special – a company would decide to up its game and make color matching rubber impact strips. I think Ford and their brands (Lincoln, Mercury) were the most avid practitioners of this under-appreciated art form, using it to add some extra presence and refinement to cars like the Diamond Edition Lincoln Continental Mark V:

Dear lord, look at that butterscotchian vision! Just imagine how you’d feel if you, like beardy over there, got all dressed up in your matching butterscotch coat and went out to your Diamond Jubilee Edition Continental Mark V, also a completely in butterscotch beige, and found that your bumper impact strips were the same color as roofing tar? You’d be livid! What are you, a coal miner? Did you buy tractor or a fucking Lincoln?

Ford also used it on the Thunderbird, and I feel like there’s other Fords that were treated to this as well. GM, of course, is not going to be left out of any gaudy, overdone accessorizing fight, and they had colored rubber impact strips, too, perhaps most notably on the Chevy Chevelle Laguna, which offered multiple colors:

Those white ones must have been a nightmare to keep clean, but they sure do look classy, right? I think I like the orange ones on the left better, as they keep the orange stripes going over the bumper. It’s all so good.

Chrysler came into the color-coded rubber impact strip game a bit late, in the 1980s, and used the colored impact rubber strips on plastic bumper caps instead of the more traditional chrome bumpers, making for an even more monochrome look. Chrysler did this on the K-Cars and their more premium siblings, and had a really intense matchy-matchy thing going on with matching hubcaps as well. They got really, really into it.

These plastic-covered bumpers were a harbinger of things to come, as chrome bumpers with bumper guards and impact strips soon faded away, lost to painted plastic bumper covers that cost an assload to fix and look like crap after even the slightest bumps or scrapes.

Rubber impact strips, whether the color of carbon or a robin’s egg, would never have let that happen.

You’re all welcome to join me in my new fetish! In fact if you can think of other members of the color-coordinated impact strip family, I urge you to tell me about them in the comments! Let’s obsess together!