I’ll bet some of you folks check the outdates at the grocery store too. Others live dangerously and pull straight in to a stall. Right after This Old House and the Woodworkers show came vintage cars and roads. Old cars in jolly old England with old guys driving them. Thing is these cars are from the 40’s but they have shoulder harnesses? Probably driving a max of 40 mph.
Our car beeps if there is approaching traffic while backing up, also beeps if I am about to back into something, auto stops if I am going to run into something going forward, I don’t depend on it, but I think the pedestrians are safe without backup beepers on cars.
Problem solved (though not with this particular vehicle). We traded it in for a 2021 Toyota RAV4, equipped with black bumpers and a backup camera!
Those black things are still Bumper covers .
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The mark will only show if hit by a white car though.
Sometime in the mid-90’s the federal requirements changed allowing a much less robust bumper on USA sold vehicles. Both my 30 year old Corolla and 50 year old truck have very robust bumpers, nothing at all like vehicles today. I’ve bumped those vehicle’s bumpers into stuff many times, still have the original bumpers, good as new. I expect I get insurance premium discounts b/c of the robust bumper design. I rented a 2019 Corolla a while back, and noticed this flimsy bumper problem you encountered, especially in front. It’s made worse b/c to increase mpg, they lower that front bumper as much as possible to improve airflow at higher speeds. I found I had to be very careful to avoid damaging the front bumper on the rental car. Bumping it into curbs etc. was very easy to do.
Not sure who exactly was in favor of eliminating the prior robust bumper requirement. Somebody must have been the winner in that discussion. Certainly wasn’t the consumer. Glad you solved it by purchasing a vehicle with a more sturdy bumper. Your dollars spent are like votes for returning to vehicles w/robust bumpers.
Lots of plastic on a Rav4
I guess one of the bumper-advantages of the Rav 4 is the bumpers are higher off the ground.
I used to stock green pearl paint and bumper repair bondo for my son’s car. Constantly getting hit while parked. The last time I told him that was it and one more hit and we’d have to get a new cover. Car was hit from behind and totaled so no more problem. Just have a surplus of green paint.
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Fair enough. They still look sturdier than the Fusion’s bumper covers.
Got an accord few yrs ago with big split/crack in bumper. Took it off and used straps to close crack and used mesh tape/epoxy to patch inside of cover. Ended up with a very slight crack. Very hard to see.
The very same people who wanted the 5 mph bumpers in the first place lobbied to drop the standard to 2.5 mph… The insurance industry! Why? Turns out repairing the 5 mph bumpers was expensive and by far most accidents happened at higher than 5 mph.
Perhaps, but a little Googling shows not everyone concurs with the merits of the 5 to 2.5 mph bumper change.
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I like the use of local resources. Yeah I like substantial bumpers too like I had on my Rivs. Hit deer, cayote, and even a flying turkey and never hurt it.
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We have a 2008 Honda Civic with bumper covers that look very similar to those on what was our 2012 Ford Fusion. It’s my husband’s work car, and gets treated accordingly. He is certain he has bumped curbs, yet the bumper covers look mostly untouched, and certainly not cracked the way the Fusion’s were. Similar story with its predecessor, a 2000 Oldsmobile Alero. That car had many problems … but cracked bumper covers was not one of them. So it was a shock to drive the Fusion the way we’ve driven all our cars (carefully, but with the occasional light contact with inanimate objects), yet see so much more damage to the Fusion’s bumper covers.
There will always be people who use the “park by braille” method (my late mother) and, of course, the victims of those people! 
Those people want big chrome bumpers to hide their lack of ability to judge the corners of their cars.
I get my exercise by parking way the heck out in the parking lots to avoid such people… OR … I take the 18 year old Avalanche I call my “Publix Assault Vehicle” because I no longer have any concern about its minor dings and dents.
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When I refer to bumping “inanimate” objects, for us that has never been other cars. It usually involves something like a curb, or the occasional snow bank, that is just beyond our field of vision.
The curb-bumping problem is another problem entirely and has nothing to do with the bumper cover. It has everything to do with the ride height of the car and the undertray and aero parts attached. Many cars will damage the undertray or leave parts behind if you drive forward until the front tires bump the parking blocks! I drive a lowered Mustang with parts hanging low below the car. I stop before the front spoiler hits the parking block.
Recognize that some cars have NO visibility to the front bumper, snow banks or anything else… Corvettes. I owned one for a few years and learned to judge where the nose of the car was because I could not see it at all.
The solution is the same; you must learn the to judge the location of those vulnerable parts of the car instead of waiting until you touch.
Speaking only for us, I think most times we were able to judge where the car ended and park accordingly. It was in more unusual parking situations (in our case, involving two different snow banks), where the snow bank (an ice bank, really) was not a straight vertical edge, but angled out unpredictably, and below our field of vision, that caused this particular problem.
But having made similar curb and parking-stop mistakes with our other cars, all sedans with the same ground clearance, it was shocking to see so much damage done to the Fusion bumper covers, when that had not been our experience ever before. Earlier in this thread, someone mentioned the possibility that a thinner plastic was used for the Fusion bumper covers, and that made all the difference.