Originally Posted by
no1mad
To be honest, I'm not really sure. It's just (to me, anyway) that those racks were probably designed to behave a certain way in case of a catastrophic failure/accident/collision, either in use or not.
Most likely, they help to dissipate energy by impaling the driver and/or a few of the passengers as they come through the front end. Never overestimate engineers' forethought.