The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety recently conducted damage tests on the bumpers of luxury cars at three and six miles per hour and found that in many collisions, bumpers do not line up vertically or stay in position during the impact.

According to the Institute, the four new tests used a barrier designed to mimic the front or back bumper on another vehicle plus front and rear corner impacts run at three miles per hour and the full-width impacts were conducted at six miles per hour.

This system of tests replaces the five mph flat-barrier and pole tests the Institute conducted for decades to evaluate bumper performance. The new tests are designed to imitate the damage patterns of low-speed collisions that are common today.

A release by the IIHS stated that the tests revealed that The Saab 9-3 was the best, sustaining $5,243 damage. There were only three cars that sustained less than $6,000 damage, while four would cost more than $10,000 to fix. The Infiniti G35 was the ranked the worst, sustaining nearly $14,000 in damages.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Senior Vice President Joe Nolan summarized the results in a release saying, “Luxury cars don't perform any better than cheaper cars. There's nothing luxurious about shelling out thousands of dollars to fix damage from a bump at a speed about like a brisk walk.”

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Special Reports /

Luxury Car Bumpers Not Up to Par

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