The high costs of fixing fuel economy.

Thinking of buying a small car to save on fuel costs? Well, we all get that-but did you know that a small car may end up costing you hundreds more in insurance costs? Investigating before you leap into that state of bliss known as fuel efficient transportation makes more than financial sense. Here’s why.

There’s a mismatch in vehicle bumper heights, especially in the case of collisions between smaller vehicles and high profile vehicles-like SUV’s.

The difference between bumper height on an Cadillac Escalade, Ford F-250 a pickup and a Honda Civic or similar small car can be as much as foot and a half! The importance of this becomes clear when you realize that the protection built into cars today depends on activation of sensors housed in the front and rear bumpers. The structures designed to absorb the forces of a crash may never be affected inasmuch as they are simply below the point of impact.

Frontal crashes cause expensive repairs and a disproportionate number of total losses in smaller vehicles because the sensors in the front areas of cars are causes for increased severity of damage and repair costs,

The way cars are manufactured today includes the placement of sensors and computerized components in the front areas of cars. It’s simply less expensive to make them this way, but it is more expensive to repair them. Given the severity of damage done to a small cars front structure in a collision it is inevitable that the delicate sensors and onboard computers will need to be replaced, reset, etc. This can take more time than other kinds of body repair since the nature of these repairs is electronic, requiring synergistic procedures and subsequent testing.

Considering the foregoing, it only makes sense to get an insurance quote on the vehicle your’re considering as part of your buying decision. And while you’re at it, visit the National Transportation Safety (NTSB) website and check out the results of their collision studies.

So now thanks for plowing through a rather technical discussion. If you’ve gotten this far, you have a more sound basis for thinking about your next car purchase and what It may cost you.

Addendum: Recently we were contacted by Channel 10 News to supply some commentary for a consumer segment on the higher cost of insuring smaller cars these days (Watch the video now). No one spends a lot of time thinking on these things until an accident happens and it occurred to me that we in the collision industry know a lot about issues that affect the driving public, which are rather scantily covered in the general press. It can be of significant benefit to know beforehand that your car is more expensive to insure because statistics say it's going to suffer more severe damage in the case of a collision. See you down the road!

Questions? Email me at sandra@elitecustomauto.com