Bouncing back

If you have looked on enviously as Mercedes A-class drivers crunch car park bollards at low speed without incurring body damage, here is some good news. The same memory-retentive plastic that car makers have been using to magic away low-speed dents is now being utilised to construct garage doors.

The NovEra Prestige range is made from the impact-resistant plastic ABS, used mostly to construct car bumpers. ABS has a degree of memory retention which allows it to flex back into shape when impacted.

The NovEra doors are largely the work of engineer and designer Steve Hobbs who has inadvertently responded to Sir John Egan's directives by using materials from car manufacturing.

One advantage is that the garage doors look like any other white garage door [a drawback when trying to illustrate the product's unique characteristic in print].

There are currently 10 door styles available including four with fielded panelling, although white is the only colour currently available. However, it has a UV-resistant low-gloss finish which matches PVCU windows and entrance doors. As a fully finished material ABS needs no maintenance other than an occasional wash with warm water.

NovEra, is now part of the Cardale group which handles sales and marketing. The garage doors are priced midway between steel and GRP.

ABS may well turn out to conclude the long debate over what material is best for fabricating garage doors - until now a compromise between damage-resistance and price. Timber looks good but is prone to twist. Steel is durable but dents easily and tends to look industrial.

The biggest breakthrough in the past twenty years had been the arrival of GRP (glass re-inforced plastic), first popularised in the UK by Wessex doors. Good GRP doors are visually indistinguishable from timber ones and come with the promise of no maintenance. They are also lightweight, making them an ideal choice for double doors. But GRP is not without its drawbacks. It cracks if hit hard and it is difficult to clean-off paint or stain marks that might inadvertently find their way onto the face. It is also regarded as being too expensive for anything other than top of the market homes. Manufacturing in GRP is a fairly labour intensive operation and it is hard to achieve economies of scale.

Enter ABS. NovEra may not yet be adding much to the palette of door styles available to the housebuilder, but its ability to flex back into shape should make it attractive both as a way of reducing site-damage and as an obvious sales bullet to those who see dents as an occupational hazard of parking.