It would depend on what your van is running into. If your van with a bullbar hit a cat or rabbit then it would probably help protect your van. If your van had a head on with a prime mover where both vehicles were doing 100 km/h then a bullbar wouldn't make much difference as you'd be dead either way.

There's a theory that the bar folds back comes through the sheet metal and chops you at the knees. A bit like the steel caps in safety shoes cutting your toes off. Probably both myths. Progressive crumple is what slows down the peak deceleration. Bullbars being mounted down below probably bend fairly easily until the chassis rails take up the strain. So probably not much.

What bullbars do do is make it much worse for pedestrians. A flat deformable panel is much better to collide with than a cheese grater..

I have a bull bar on my van and it sucks.. It's anti-social, ugly, heavy, I feel like Mr Plow.

Sounds like a decent monster truck would be the way to go!

Ian K said...

There's a theory that the bar folds back comes through the sheet metal and chops you at the knees. A bit like the steel caps in safety shoes cutting your toes off. Probably both myths. Progressive crumple is what slows down the peak deceleration. Bullbars being mounted down below probably bend fairly easily until the chassis rails take up the strain. So probably not much.

What bullbars do do is make it much worse for pedestrians. A flat deformable panel is much better to collide with than a cheese grater..

.. done on myth busters .. what cuts ya toes off is what eva is droped hits the steel toe and either slides of the front or slides of the back and into your unprotected foot althou that said if it was farge enough and flat it would just squash the steel insert flat anny who

I fitted a kn huge bullbar on my old hiace commuter when I was travelling into melbourne regularly.
Once I got the bar, everybody gave me room ,very few cars cutting off the slow old bus.
the only scratches it ever got were from pushing the occasional little firewood tree.
If I bought another van I wouldnt hesitate to put one on

landyacht said...

I fitted a kn huge bullbar on my old hiace commuter when I was travelling into melbourne regularly.
Once I got the bar, everybody gave me room ,very few cars cutting off the slow old bus.
the only scratches it ever got were from pushing the occasional little firewood tree.
If I bought another van I wouldnt hesitate to put one on

Why stop at the bullbar, how bout some hubcaps with swords so those mortals will give you more room..


It's for reasons like this that roads are a lot more dangerous than they could be.. It's as if it's a farking arms race crossed with small mans syndrome..

I used to work in the damaged vehicle industry and we had one Hilux that was involved in a fatality. A girl was in the passenger seat of a Laser that got T-boned at medium speed by this hilux equipped with a 'kn huge bullbar'.. The owner of the hilux came in to my work to collect his belongings from it, and gloated at how little damage his truck received.. Then he told me how the Boyfriend driving the laser ran a light, and that the girl had hit her head on the bullbar, he felt zero remorse that his 'death trap' killed someone... Then he was asking about buying the truck back at auction, so I farked the driveshaft and doors up with my forklift..

Would any of us like to be hit by a bullbar? no, so return the favor..

ikw777 said...

Does anyone know if fitting a bull bar or Roo bar to the front of a van improve it's frontal impact resistance or would it just make things worse?

In the case below it wouldn't have made any difference.

If this VW T3 doesn't put you off van's I dunno what would! Admittedly it's load exceeded its carrying capacity, 2 tonne.

ikw777 said...

Does anyone know if fitting a bull bar or Roo bar to the front of a van improve it's frontal impact resistance or would it just make things worse?

Driving any van and avoiding serious injury when involved in a head on collision is unlikely due to driver position. I'd only recommend a bullbar if you do a lot of country driving and even then limiting driving around dawn and dusk times to reduce fauna strikes. For city or suburban driving there really is no need to be equipping a van or any vehicle with that kind of protection.

There are all sorts of collisions. In a T bone collision the wheel and axle on an old style van probably acts as a better side intrusion bar than the one in the door of a ford laser. And your head might be above the top rung of that bullbar on the ubiquitous Hilux.

Any car with curtain airbags should be better still. Curtain airbags are a great invention, make sure your next car has them.

ikw777 said...

Looks like bullbars are a bad idea. Maybe forward control vans too...

Might have to settle for euro style dodgy reliability...

Seriously, look at the iLoad.
I needed to build $5K of lease payout from my previous vehicle , plus a bunch of after market add-ons into my current car, which would have made the balloon too big on a Hyundai, or I'd have got one. Plus there was a huge tax break at the time, so the more expensive car was actually a better option. Vito's are great, but fixing them gets very expensive once the warranty expires. Swings and roundabouts, as usual.
There should be heaps of decent used iLoads on the market by now.

ikw777 said...

Looks like bullbars are a bad idea. Maybe forward control vans too...

Might have to settle for euro style dodgy reliability...

Mate, the only van you should get is a Holden Panel Van.
Lots of steel, reliable and friggin' cooool.
Never late with a 308

easty said...

If you drive a van (and I did for about 15 years) you should be thinking about driving slow enough to (hopefully) avoid having to use the bullbar - chill out, cruise, and enjoy the scenery. Actually, do this whatever you drive!

I have a 2000 model Ford Ecovan (Mazda 2200??) that had a windscreen wiper motor problem which meant I had to remove the dash to fix it.

Ever since then I drive a lot more cautiously in it !!

The only thing between your knees and whatever you hit up front is a flimsy front panel, a heap of wiring harness, a dash that is a mix of light steel and plastic crap - all mounted on a 50ish mm steel tube which attaches to the door pillar section with a couple of bolts each side.

The only thing a bull-bar would do in a front on is help push the whole front end and steering column into you knees and lower body..... ZERO crash rating I would think.

Next van for me is most likely an Iload.

ginger pom said...

I put one on my hiace.

I figured the most likely crash where I lived the time (wanky suburb called Brighton in Melbourne) was getting hit by a mum in a big 4wd at low speed while she was on her phone, sipping latte and talking to her kid in the back.

Almoooost hit one of these bimbos yesterday. Coming the opposite way to me she turned right on a roundabout without indicating and of course was on the kn phone. Briefly locked up but I was going fairly slow luckily. Dopey woman didn't hear or see a thing, totally oblivious.