Anyone see the 5th gear car crash?

http://youtu.be/6dI5ewOmHPQ
 
 Haunting? shocking more like!

I don't see the point of the test?
 
I mean seriously how many 3 m thick solid concrete walls are there out there??

i dont see the point either, what were they expecting to happen ? 

1) cos the tests are usually 40mph
2) what happens if you crash when speeding

For someone like me, who doesn't watch crash tests - that is pretty fcuking goddamn shocking.
 
I don't drive recklessly anyway, but I think I will be that little bit more cautious after seeing that.

Ouch!

Not a bad test to show. Not far off a realistic scenario. Down here in Cornwall, most roads are 60mph limits even the long country roads. You should see how many lorries come the other way on your side of the road round corners etc doing 60.
 
Wouldn't want to hit the front end of one of them with me and them both doing 60.

Maybe i am being dense here but the chap said if two cars collide doing 120 surely they need to make the car move at 240 then for get the same force. Either way pointless test I mean no was in a real world would a a focus be doing 120 and b it crash head on without a slight deviation in direction. Waste of a car imo.

Other way mate 60mph + 60mph = 120mph!
EDIT WRONG!
Its 120mph.  Makes no difference what the other car is doing.
 
EDIT 2
The mass of the object will have effect on damage based on mass however

^^^^ it does say "both going at 120mph"
 
 

Big D


^^^^ it does say "both going at 120mph"

Yes it does, I spotted it too - the bloke is obviously wrong.

120mph was supposed to relate to 2 cars each doing 60mph, which of course would be a combined impact speed of 120mph.
 
Obviously in a real world scenario the outcome for an articulated lorry colliding with a reliant robin (if it can even do 60mph) will conclude different degrees of damage to each vehicle however, most cars on the road are roughly a bit over a ton.

You don't add the speeds together guys - I thought you did, its wrong - the force you hit something is the force pushed back on to you.  

Damn it folded like ****! I would like to see the same test with a bmw or merc.

john_cappa


Damn it folded like ****! I would like to see the same test with a bmw or merc.

 
chilling viewing. I think the bmw or merc would react almost identically... sure they are probably better engineered for safety but at that speed all bets will be off, it will be simply too much force for crumple zones etc to dissipate. 

Awesome - in honesty, I'm pretty impressed it faired that well - and handy for chavs - as your mate in the boot actually had a fighting chance of pulling through
 
Regarding the speed, as above, 120mph into a solid object is the same as 120mph into another vehicle doing 120mph. To save me explaining it badly, read here - http://warp.povusers.org/grrr/collisionmath.html
 
So it is a VERY unlikely end result for a crash - 2 cars hitting each other perfectly square both doing 120mph (or a complete cretin hitting a solid concrete wall at 120!). As soon as you add in any mis-alignment, the cars 'slip' around each other, smashing the living crap out of one side on each, but spreading the energy very differently.
 
I guess the closest thing is the crashes in fog where people just slam into stationary traffic @70mph+ - but as the energy involed is propertional to the square of the speed, an awful lot less damage will be observed even then.
 
Nice video though, always love seeing stuff like that

Papa Lazarou


You don't add the speeds together guys - I thought you did, its wrong - the force you hit something is the force pushed back on to you.  

Youre right, its all to do with momentum and mass.
 
If you're going 60 mph and you pass someone in the next lane going 60 mph, it will appear that you will pass them at 120 mph.

However, when talking about collisions, it's all about the momentum. If a cargo van going 60 mph hits a smart car going 60 mph head on, they won't feel the same thing. Obviously the smart car will lose. This is because momentum must be conserved first, then velocity can be calculated.

 So let's associate mass with the vehicles. The cargo van weighs 10,000 kg and the smart car weighs 1,000 kg. When the collision occurs at those speeds, the cargo van will have 600,000 kgm/s of momentum while the smart car has only 60,000 kgm/s of momentum. At the moment of the collision, the momentum will become the larger momentum (600,000 kgm/s) minus the smaller momentum (60,000 kgm/s). We can do this calculation because the collision is head on and has 1 dimensional vector quantities, meaning that we do the calculation in a straight line. So the total momentum of the system will become 540,000 kgm/s in the direction of the cargo van, because it had the larger original momentum. If those two cars were to stick together and move off in the same direction, we can find the velocity by dividing the new momentum by the sum of the masses (10,000 kg + 1,000 kg = 11,000 kg). This turns out to be roughly 50 mph. (540,000/11,000=49.0909...) Using that information, you can figure out about the speed that the car would hit the wall to achieve the same force. If we start with the cargo van, it started out going 60 mph and ended going 50 mph in the same direction. If you subtract the two, it's similar to if that van were to hit a wall going 10 mph. As for the smart car, it started at 60 mph and ended at 50 mph in the opposite direction. Meaning it might as well have hit a wall going 110 mph.

He did say both doing 120mph. I take it the wall compensates for another car dong 120mph i.e. the solid mass represents a much lighter object travelling at 120mph?

Bookerman


He did say both doing 120mph. I take it the wall compensates for another car dong 120mph i.e. the solid mass represents a much lighter object travelling at 120mph?

 
Doesn't matter which speed either are doing, they will on punch back at the same speed they were travelling.  Its the mass that does the damage.

Shocking. 
 
As someone who commutes down the M23 on a daily basis i regularly see people doing 100mph+. There have been 2 recent incidents of cars losing control and going through the barrier, colliding with cars going in the opposite direction. These are obviously usually multi-vehicle accidents with lives lost. 
 
There really is no need to drive that fast and guess the message is really to make viewers understand the impact (pardon the pun!) of high speed collisions, though in a rather dramatic fashion!