We switched from a sedan with a very sloped windshield, to an SUV with a suprisingly upright windshield (one of the cartoonishly offroad mall crawlers). I've never had to scrape bugs off my windshield in my life before we bought the SUV but we go through a lot more windshield wiper fluid now than we did a couple months ago despite keeping the same driving patterns.
Some of that design is about keeping pedestrians from going head-first through your windshield if you hit them. With the SUV the top of the hood is above the center of mass of the hypothetical pedestrian, whereas the sedan is below, and so they have to encourage the flying human to slide over the roof instead of go teeth first into your back seat.
That it helps with bugs is more of a happy coincidence.
The worse case with the sedan, of going teeth first through the windshield and into the back seat, sounds a lot better than the SUV alternative for pedestrians!
I know you're not making a comment either way regarding pedestrian safety with sedans/SUVs in your post, but there's something that caught my attention about the graphic description for the sedan, with just a hint hanging there that the SUV would be worse.
Full disclosure: I'm biased against SUVs. Something about the sheer size seems wasteful. They also make more sense to be common in some places than others, and I haven't lived anywhere recently that I think they make sense.
People do not go "teeth first through the windshield into the back seat" when hit by a sedan. They go up the hood and up the windshield.
Euro-NCAP crash standards are specifically designed to "help" this by means of hoods which crumple and/or shift position in such a case.
That is infinitely preferable to hitting the flat face of most American and Japanese SUVs and specially pickup trucks, which are designd primarily to look "aggressive" and "angry" because that's what pickup truck buyers want.
There are old vehicle designs were the grill causes the pedestrian to rotate 90° into the windshield. Your assertion of how collisions work is predicated on changes to hood and front design that already account for pedestrian collision physics. But you’re implying this has always been the case and it has not.
This is, for instance, a big part of why the Mini Cooper is no longer mini. They had to lift the hood profile to reduce angular momentum.
Also why the forward raked grill designs of the seventies are gone never to return. Those suck pedestrians under the car, which is almost always fatal.