Remember when not everything was colour coded?

With a nice big steel girder behind them.

My mk2 polo has a couple of kg of steel behind the plastic. The mk3s had nothing but fresh air. I know which I preferred.

I can recall a time when plastic wasn't involved in the manufacture of bumpers too



Things just looked so much better

I remember how easy it was to make my mk2 XR2 look good, given a wash and a polish and then "back to black" the bumpers, spoilers, grill and skirts...

As it had so much black plastic, it took less time than polishing a whole car, and the red paint contrasted the black to make it look better than the all-red colour coded one I'd learned to drive in a few years earlier

"Oh wow, that car will be a fast one! Its bumpers are the same colour as the car!"

My internal monologue as a kid.


"Ahh, an M/AMG/ST/S. Must be a poverty spec engine."

My assumption these days.


Possibly not of interest. My van (2005, 300k mile Peugeot Expert) has poverty bumpers. I put linseed oil on them and two years later people were remarking that I must have put new ones on due to their blackness.

The satisfaction of bringing them back to life with a heat gun was always good

In one of the rare instances of fading plastic being preferred - unlike my previous Ducato, white with black bumpers, my current van is silver, and with the black plastic having now faded, I've ended up with roughly body coloured bumpers

I like both looks, I mixed it up with the red Micra. I think, as shown in the Op it became a mark of the more powerful/more exclusive version. I also found it opened up colour combinations - I don't think the black bumpered version of my Micra would have worked as well with the gold wheels and stripes, but once the body colour (Super-S, those performance pretentions), bumpers were on it worked.



I'm off to find pics of cool series 1 Renault 5's, pretty sure these are considered the grandaddy of integrated plastic bumpers....