Bumper heights

["Brian Shorey" <bshorey@domain.elided>]

> And before I get a tirade of hate mail, ever think that SUV owners hate
> little sportscar types zipping around them? If you directed half the
energy
> to teen-age drivers-ed that some of you do to bitching you would reduce
bad
> driver by half...

My only SUV complaint is really not an SUV complaint, it's a DOT complaint -
why aren't there universal bumper height laws?

Cars all have to have bumpers that line up with each other, so if they hit
each other the bumpers will absorb most of the energy.  However trucks seem
to sit a lot higher.  Makes it kind of dangerous, especially for the car, if
it hits a truck.  Furthermore, as a car owner, I'm prohibited from raising
my bumpers to line up with trucks and SUV's, because then I pose a greater
danger to other cars.

Go figure.  All those Dateline programs that crash cars and trucks into
concrete walls, what they should really do is crash them into each other.

Anyhow, I have a funny (to me) truck height story.

Last year I bought a Ram (diesel, fuel efficient!), for the purpose of
towing my Italian cars around and commuting in foul weather (so as to
preserve the Italian cars).  The damn thing sits so high you need a step
ladder to climb up into it.  There's a solid foot between the top of the
tire and the fender lip.  The thing barely fits into my garage (less than an
inch between the roof of the truck and the edge of the garage door), and
when I tow my trailer, even with the load distributing hitch dropped all the
way, the trailer still sits too high in the front (and sometimes scrapes the
ground in the rear).

I figured I'd go out and find a suspension kit to lower the truck to a
somewhat normal height, right?

Well if anybody knows how to do this, please drop me a line.  I did a web
search on "Dodge Ram", "suspension", "ride height", etc, and found a zillion
kits to *raise* the height of the truck 3", 5", or more.

I finally found a kit to lower the truck a little bit (haven't tried it
yet), but found it curious that most people seemed interested in taking a
truck where the bumpers were already upper grill height to most cars and
raising it so they were lower windshield height.

bs

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