I'm no engineer or scientist and I may be showing my ignorance but this has smoke coming out of my ears. Am I off base? Or can I state that you can say all you want about the crush cans controlling when the air bags deploy but it's rather silly to even worry about because no matter what the crush cans do about timing, and no matter how many G's (or at what deacceleration) the air bags are supposed to pop, none of this takes into account what you're hitting and how fast and how much it crushes and nothing is going to be the same. If you set it up to work properly when you hit something solid like a brick wall the cans will crush faster than if you hit something less solid like another car, that's going to crush when you hit it, making your crush cans take longer to crush. I don't think there's any way you could ever factor all the variables in so it's really kind of a moot point whether you have crush cans or not, isn't it? Also I'd think that you'd want to factor in the frame and how fast or not it would crush in a collision, I'm sure not all frames are created equal, some may crush faster or slower than others, adding to the confusion.
This is why I watch these crash test where they run them into a solid peice of cement and declare the car safe or not. In my pea-brain it only means the car is safe if you run into the specific object at the specific speed and the specific angle they did in the test and that in the real world there are going to be tons of variables that mean in some situations your car may be worse or better, which again renders all this to be a bunch of BS testing in my mind. But that's the way I think.
Frankly I feel much better with the almost indisctructible RTE bumper and no crush cans than I would with the 10 pound front Disco bumper that will practially fold up if it it's a piece of paper at speed.
Anyway let the flaming begin because I'm sure someone will have a major disagreement with my thinking. Hehe.
