How on earth do new cars like the Peugeot 407 and Daihatsu Copen get away with, legally and morally, having no bumpers at all? I remember some years ago that a few of the cars we had in the UK (with bumpers) were required to have them replaced with more solid ones in the States.
Regardless of the safety aspect of having front and rear protection, the enormous cost of repairing bodywork in a frontal collision compared to replacing a bumper basically allows the repairers and parts manufacturers also to make a killing every time all the lights, grille and other parts have to be changed every time a car has a minor accident.

My own intuiton tells me this is yet another European rule that allows poorer countries to compete by manufacturing cheaper cars with fewer regulations, meaning the Trabant and Wartburg, complete with fibreglass bodies and 6 volt batteries etc will soon be making a return to European roads.
Despite this, Japanese cars in the UK still undergo stringent tests before the far cheaper versions are individually allowed in on import, thus strengthening the protection of European cars. This is my theory, but I'd like to know the true reason. I'd like to paste a little image here, but you know the rules...

Please do not post an image, post a link to one if you wish but not an actual image.

Please remember that this particular forum is not really for speculation nor opinion, it is really for questions to which it ought to be possible to get a definitive answer. Yes, we do take guesses (provided we say that it is a guess) but the quesitons do need to be answerable.

Don't worry about the image Sue, I was only joking, as I did say I do know the rules (ie we can't do it!).
But I'm sure there is a legal answer why this has happened (as well as an industry excuse for lowering their build specifications)- all I did was to offer my own guess as well, but that shouldn't spoil the chances of getting a definitive answer?

Customers, manufacturers and regulators are much more aware of safety issues than they were in the past. I hope the following quote from www.honestjohn.co.uk dispels your fears.

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The 407 has an awful lot of front, protruding way ahead of the transverse engine and radiator. The reason for this is Euro NCAP. It provides an easily repaired crushbox, so minor collisions don’t mean removing the engine to fix the damage. But increasingly important to NCAP, the front is also designed to be ‘pedestrian friendly’ so anyone fortunate enough to be hit by a 407 should have a happy landing on its soft bonnet. These measures are expected to land the car with five stars for crash and three for pedestrian safety

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I suspect that there are two reasons that cars can be sold and produced without bumpers. Cost reduction is certainly one factor and the styling aspect is another. The cheaper cars have been mentioned but there are many cars at the other end that have no bumpers either. The european produced Lotus Elise is one and the Ferrari 575M Maranello another. The fact that neither of these vehicles have bumpers can only be attributed to styling I think. From this page the following.

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"No bumper rating sticker on new vehicles...? No deal...!!!" (2.5 miles per hour rating, you call that a bumper?) Hell no, no bumper, no deal! (Pick-ups are often sold without bumpers, although they likely will be presented for test driving fitted with bumpers. Is this mis-representation or just the industry's idea of customer service? What are bumpers for anyway? Cheap bumpers are another way for manufacturers to pass hidden costs downhill to consumers. A little extra in bumper reinforcement and protection would save consumers considerably in lower insurance premiums and deductible expenditures for major damage caused from minor impacts. Ding, ding, ding...

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From here the following.

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It will soon be completely forgotten: the situation that obtained before the ISO standard for bumpers was generallyaccepted throughout the world, and byalmost all automobile manufacturers. The car's bumpers - front and rear - cannot really absorb a strong impact. The idea behind the bumper is rather to reducethe effects of minor accidents, parking accidents, etc. How it used to beWithout bumpers we would have a lot of expensive minor damage to the body,lights, licence plates, etc. That was the theory - but what was it like in practice? Well, since bumpers were placed at different levels, they did not meet in a collision. They ended up above and below each other, so that there was just as much minor damage as if there were no bumpers at all. Actually it was worse than that. In many models of cars, the front bumpers and rear bumpers were at different heights - in Swedish cars too. Thus you could collide with a car of the same make and both bumpers would still “miss“ by a few centimetres. The result, of course, was that car owners had to pay millions of kronor every year- in Sweden alone - for minor damage that was really unnecessary

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Well, Roos and Biggles, I think we have a very good explanation here from all fronts. The only point I'd add against the industry view is that most accidents aren't head on or up the back of another car, but many side impacts and other objects like bollards and trees. Therefore having a good bumper on ones own car will still mean that if you hit anything except the front or back of another car it'll protect your bodywork, so would still be an improvement over none.

On the whole, when it comes to major industry, the cynical view is nearly always the right one (my father was once asked by the one he worked for to find ways as a lawyer to avoid exactly these sort of laws. He walked out.) This is the standard attitude of most companies, damn the customer as long as they can make a bigger profit, and then employ PR agencies to make their retrograde step look like an improvement. So from smaller chocolate bars at the same price to cars without bumpers because 'customers don't really need them', to clothing and bin bags much thinner than they used to be to compete with cheap imports, even to little things like spraying on the colour on mobile phones rather than having coloured plastic so sooner or later it rubs off. It's a shame companies who are already doing quite well feel they have to cut literally every corner to please shareholders etc., and have so little pride in the actual products.

I will just add as a little balance my Grandpa sold guitars for 40 years, and would never sell one he wouldn't play himself as one of the world's top guitarists. He travelled round the world, and put his name on many new products from Spain and Japan which he imported exclusively, and had people from all over the world who would wait till they were in London before buying a guitar as everyone in the business trusted him. I also have a friend from school that did the same with hi-fi equipment, and is now the 3rd biggest retailer of it in the country as he refuses to sell anything that's not the best, and buys in bulk and sells it very cheaply. He also has some of the best working conditions for his staff I've seen. And if he manufactured cars, I know he's put big composite bumpers on them whatever the PR people tell us to the contrary.