Off-road vehicles like the Ford Bronco are designed to drive over things, but that poses a safety challenge in the city.
Maximizing the front clearance angle requires a high, narrow bumper that could be more harmful to a pedestrian upon impact than blunter front end.
The relatively small contact area concentrates more energy when it contacts a leg bone, making it more likely to break. Ford recently filed for a patent on a technology that would address this issue.
The “Movable Guard for Vehicle Front End” is depicted on a sketch of a Bronco-type. vehicle and looks like the underride guards used on the back of semi truck trailers. It’s just a simple bar filling the gap below the bumper.
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The difference is that it is connected to actuators that can move it to a higher position up in front of the bumper, where it sits more like a brush guard, to reclaim the ground clearance when needed. The basic mechanism is similar to those used for power side steps on trucks.
When lowered, it would help distribute the impact force across a leg to reduce the likelihood of injury and potentially help prevent a person from getting caught underneath the vehicle, although the patent doesn’t mention the latter aspect.
It does note that the guard could be employed on either a body-on-frame or unibody vehicle to improve both the aesthetics and airflow to the cooling systems when it is lowered.
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Beyond the mechanical aspects, the patent discusses how it could be tied to a GPS system that could be set to automatically raise and lower it depending on the type of road on which the vehicle is being driven.
The United States doesn’t currently have pedestrian impact requirements for automobile design, but they have been proposed and are common in other countries. Safety features often go beyond government regulations, however, and the guard could be offered as just a styling feature.
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As with many patents, there are no guarantees that this one will ever make it to production, but it does offer an insight into what Ford’s engineers are thinking about when it comes to safety.
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