Bull Bars

[littlewaywelt]

You guys are being overly dramatic-chicken little style.

The forces necessary to injure someone with the front end of car traveling through space become overwhemingly unmanageable at speeds over about 10 mph. At those speeds a two inch diameter piece of aluminum tubing will have little or no difference on the injuries sustained by someone unfortunate enough to be standing in front of the moving car.

Your needs are different than mine. My ways aren't right for you but yours aren't right for me. I need a stable place to mount driving lights.

So, while opinions are great, evangelists tend to get on my nerves.

You could think that, but you'd be wrong. It's simple physics, re the speed, impact distribution over surface area, deformation of the object, etc.

With a bar you're transmitting energy completely into the thing you're impacting because the bar doesn't deform. Add to that you forcing the energy into a much smaller area and now you have higher psi. It's the same reason a knife goes through kevlar, but a bullet won't. Don't think so? Let someone take a swing at your tibia with an aluminum baseball bat and then a 2x4 flat bat made out of plastic with foam behind it that weighs the same. The fact is that the shape and material of the bar will absolutely increase the likelihood of injury.

Aside from the impact physics, you also have the fact that the front end is designed to llift someone up and onto the car which further reduces those forces. The bars' very nature reduces that.

Chicken little style? Over dramatic? When you've been hit by a car your opinion might be a little different. It has nothing to do with evangelism. It has to do with 800 cyclists being killed every year by cars in the US alone. I have no idea re pedestrian fatalities, but they are there too. It has to do with your need to mount lights in such a way as to prioritize that over other people's safety. It's that simple, but feel free to rationalize it anyway you want. If you need to mount a light you could create a small platform to do it on. I did it on one of my jeeps with a simple L bracket piece of aluminum.