Crash and Learn: What Happens to a Camper Van in a Collision

foreign but dude the Safety Systems Top Notch yeah it was crazy like I remember seeing the car come in airbags go off we're on our side Nothing Hurt which doesn't mean adrenaline's not doing stuff but like I didn't even I don't know it just everything worked yeah it's just like you okay I was like yeah yeah and then we unbuckled and stood there and it was like Underside the thing and somebody came and kicked him and chilled in uh Hey everybody so this is a video I actually didn't really expect my channel to ever have and not a video I clearly was going to look forward to ever making um a couple of our friends actually were just in a car crash they got sideswiped by a driver who ran a red light um and it's sort of you know I have really mixed feelings about these sorts of videos um I find that the comments just kind of bring out the worst of humanity sometimes where people completely forget that you know these are just normal people that were involved in this and um you know and everybody's an engineer when they're sitting in front of their monitor it turns out and everybody knows how things could have been built better but you know these are a couple great friends of ours and you know their Vans are built the way many Vans are built you know kind of the circles we run in which is you know are rock climbers we just are out there you know for the climbing we don't you know a lot of these people buy their tools they kind of Cobble their way through this and the van serves the purpose they need which is that it's a vessel to travel in they don't have engineering backgrounds and such so um so yeah this kind of sucked they're the van is totaled um it ended up being sideswiped by a truck and being knocked onto its side so this is um I mean it's just fascinating we actually picked them up a couple days ago when they got checked over at the hospital and now we're just here today to um basically clean their stuff out on someone's pulling in today all right so since the day I recorded that video in my truck that day I was basically just waiting it kind of like the Salvage lot uh for my friends to show up and I was basically there to help them uh get some of their stuff out um it's been about a month since then health-wise you know no lasting effects from this accident and in terms of insurance payout my friends are happy they had State Farm Insurance the driver at fall had Geico and they're content with the payout from the insurance they did get some money for like the build components and such so in terms of that you know that's all great news so today you know I would just like to kind of document like what happened to the van what happened to the build out uh do like as a result of this accident now this footage from the clean out process it was hard for me to capture I don't enjoy having a camera in my face especially at times like these which I think can just be kind of vulnerable and raw like everything you had essentially just got kind of crushed um so a lot of the footage you'll see is kind of shaky it's not professional some of it I'm only going to include because the audio actually as we're discussing things I think is of interest but you know so please be patient with the footage sorry it's not some kind of polished Masterpiece work but with that said I think a good place we're all on the same page is to just kind of give a quick little demonstration here on the workbench about what actually happened in this accident this little model van here this will be our friends here traveling in their van and this car here will represent uh the driver at fault and essentially this was a four-way intersection with essentially a turn lane in each direction right so there's two lanes going this way but this is a turn lane we've got turn Lanes I'd off Four Points so our friends were traveling through this they had a green light this driver was just didn't see that that they had a red light they ended up t-boning them right here this flipped their car and they ended up sliding into opposing traffic which thankfully you know nobody was there and kind of coming to rest um this distance I wasn't there sounded it was somewhere between like 50 and 70 feet and they were essentially up against a curb on the opposite side of the road so that's basically what happened in the accident and now let's kind of see kind of the aftermath of that what happened with the van so let's first address how the actual band did the ProMaster and I think our fans were just very happy to be basically more or less unscathed and just looking at the van and how it took the impact is pretty impressive the impact seemed like a definite hit on the B pillar which protected the passenger fantastically and then just like looking at the whole body of the van there's so much deformation but basically that helped to just absorb all that Force you can see the if you stand back a bunch of the camera will capture it almost seems like the entire you know you've got a bow there and this wall is basically looks like it's been straightened out um kind of structurally it seems like the whole thing has been nudged even the hood you can tell like the hood has come over a little bit you can see there's almost no clearance here and over here you've got a slightly wider Gap so it's like the whole van I mean did what it was supposed to you know it's got crumple zones yeah the whole thing kind of shifted you know thankfully everyone's okay damn Eric well I'm just geeking out now yeah check out this oh that must be from when you landed the way this is all compacted over here yep look at how that oh yeah Crush because look this styrofoam block is fine if you go outside you can see the whole clock right there as a question yeah yeah just the driver's side of the van that's that point that impacted when they got flipped bunch of skid marks um yeah in the front seats the you know steering wheels airbag and such didn't go off but all the like curtain airbags and seat airbags did go off and then when you see that the window is a broken it sounds like right after the accident when they were laying there there was some concern that you know maybe the lithium batteries would short or you know fire it is just kind of a panicky moment so it sounds like with the help of some bystander they actually ended up kicking out the windshield so they could get out of the vehicle it was the only way to get out so that is basically why the windshield is broken but besides that um you know they're fine I mean that is fantastic engineering thank you Dodge thank you Ram ProMaster Fiat I think owns them but whatever you know thank you all right and then after the Safety Systems Let's uh move on to actually how the conversion handled this accident now this is not a professional conversion and I think it might be best to just let our friend describe her conversion uh in her own words so sorry about the audio on this one it's a little quiet but I think I think you'll get the gist of it the build on looks like a bad or a project you brought to your mom and she's like oh honey it looks great because I didn't really know what I was doing for any of it and so a lot of it I was gonna have to like kind of rip out and redo and like really overhaul it so there you have it not a professionally built out van you know the first time doing it not super familiar with the tools or like the methods but honestly there's tons of Vans out there like this and I think they are often built by the people that are actually the most enthusiastic to get out there and use their vans so I think that's all I'd like to say about like what kind of build this is It's just basically a homemade build out buy a first timer which is where most of us who are building our own Vans start now as we look at some of the footage in this van the white powder or like there's going to be some brown powder as well in the kitchen that might come into play that is actually spices and then actually a big thing of sugar that exploded everywhere so at first we were wondering what this white powder was and it turns out it's just sugar but anyways in case you're wondering what that is in the footage just looking at the van after the crash you know the van was tipped on its side and then when it was tipped back upright you know that's almost like two kind of jarring forces but overall there were overhead cabinets all along the driver's side of the van and um when the van was tilted back upright those Came Crashing to the ground below that the kitchen actually stayed attached to the wall the wall there is pretty dented the sheet metal but it actually stayed fixed against the wall over here this whole kitchen is now kind of got a little wait but there it is uh the electrical cabinet with the batteries it like kind of partially came detached you can see it's kind of leaned away from the wall and the batteries did come free which is pretty dangerous but everything stayed like in its General location as for the bed platform we'll talk about that in just a little bit but that totally came detached as well good wait so hold on so so these cabinets were on the wall still when you guys were on your side yeah okay all of the even that one too and everything yeah so this one right here was never actually attached to the wall it was just attached to cabinets on either side of it um so you can see where the front one the wood ripped off the wall where it was bracketed to the wall oh yeah it's like a two bar four oh no it's like a one by eight something you just split yeah anyway oh wow so that didn't actually fall off the wall until you guys got rocked back over yeah wow I think that one ripping off for profit yeah yeah now first thing I'd like to talk about is things that didn't break and it has to be understood that you know a system will fail at its weakest point so the things that didn't break I don't actually know how much stronger they were I would just like to say that so when I identify this one thing that didn't break I don't actually know how much stronger it is I just know that it was stronger than the breaking point and the thing that didn't seem to break anywhere seemed to be glued joints there was adhesive used to glue furring strips through the walls those stayed and then inside the actual cabinets when there were joints that were glued and screwed instead of just screweds those also didn't break so I think glue joints as a whole one out so these two are just combined together yeah this was into the wall and there's one on this side of the wall and this one so then on the wall there's that piece of wood that split and that's this part so that's funny that actually didn't fail because of the screw failure the wood cracked um and then you had another bracket through the roof I think I saw him one still up there yep damn it's kind of funny that uh is this just screwed or screwed and glued the cabinet screwed and glue okay yeah so that's pretty cool every glue joint survived yeah that said what did break we have multiple kind of failure systems first off we had screws that just pulled through this includes like these short little screws on the wall as well as some like really long pocket hole screws into two by fours those also were failure points hey Amanda so behind these is there like wood framing behind the panels so I took one by fours I think is what it was uh-huh yeah yeah um and then screwed up all of this on top of it well it's crazy to me that this many little screws you know it's funny how like these screws had no problem folding but this was obviously the weak point and there's way more of them so yeah screwed on this was part of the cabinet oh okay yeah and then so that ripped away from the cabinet yeah so this is just like part of the cabinet okay yeah this is what the cabinet was this is part of the cabinet too screwed up into the ceiling yeah yeah damn look at that more split like these screws look these uh pocket hole screws also crack this piece of wood these are just straight tear Outlet an interesting and then in some of those failure points with involving screws it was actually that the wood cracked it doesn't look like the threads pulled out but I think just like the prying force of the screws on the wood just cause these like long essentially board length cracks across the whole thing interesting failure mode this piece of wood split on the back here these screws that we taught as we said earlier pulled out of the cabinet this was a part of the cabinet that was screwed to it along with this screws are the failure point on this one on this one I don't know exactly how this was built there's one tiny little bracket left up there um but here there's actually wood craft you can see there was some screws right there but otherwise it just rips this piece of wood or you know it basically cracked the wood it's a different failure modes now there is very little plywood used in this van so it would have been interesting to see if you know I don't think plywood would have cracked like this but depending on what kind of plywood you use it doesn't really have much better you know like pull out strength for screw threads but that would have been something interesting would be if you did use plywood in the next iteration or you could somehow uh recreate a equivalent test if it would have had similar results or if it would have moved the failure Point somewhere else now another thing I'd like to point out is that this bed platform was made using those IKEA bed brackets this is a pretty common hack to essentially buy these little wall mount brackets and then you put these big horizontal rails in made out of metal and they hold your bed platform now these just went everywhere when the van rolled they are not designed for this sort of application Ikea brackets for the bed common hack did not stay in the track when it rolled turns out these are designed for households that tend not to invert so perhaps if you're using these kind of brackets in your van just some forethought perhaps there's a way to you know add a couple of screws or you know modify the bracket somehow so you can actually kind of hard bolt them into the wall instead of having them just kind of rest there and then just a couple tiny small details I thought were really interesting uh it cannot be overstated like how lucky they were that there was no shorting in the battery system and in the electrical system period I think there was a lot of Breakers and fuses and such but none of them were actually tripped the batteries did come detached essentially from they were buckled down and then the whole electrical cabinet kind of tilted away from the wall but nothing shorted and I think that's just you know great luck um so anyways we'll leave it at that that was very lucky this is the bottom of that oh yeah oh yeah it's a breaker it's meant to work that way and then I just wanted to give a little shout out to motion Windows uh I thought it was pretty humorous that you can see this little side window it just got ground against the concrete or against the pavement as this van was sliding and this window still worked flawlessly and I thought that was pretty humorous I always enjoy motion windows in their products this thing uh quite the slide still fully functional that's pretty badass see that's good marks and then the last thing I wanted to say is just more on like the kind of sentimental value you know this entire van of stuff but at the end of the day it all really boiled down to like what could have been fit within a shoe box you know a lot of stuff like climbing gear clothes all of that can be you know replaced but we ended up spending some time towards the end really just hunting for some earrings that had uh some sentimental value okay relieve some tension okay I like anger management you know yeah oh wait we got something right here what is it I don't know it looks like some kind of it's another earrings keep pontoon yay and some of them just weren't found they were either tucked behind some wall panels or they actually just fell out during the accident so I think just kind of that um just kind of the reality that in an entire van just full of stuff it all comes down to just a very small amount of it that's like truly sentimental and really has a lot of meaning so uh that's just like something you know perhaps you find you'll find interesting to reflect upon as well because that's kind of just the that's kind of how our day ended and that was kind of the Lasting Impression in my mind is just like kind of really thinking about what matters you know and what has kind of value to you anyways um sorry thanks for watching this video um you know please if you're gonna leave a comment please be respectful if you're just being a jerk I'll just delete it but anyways hopefully you found something in this interesting you got something you learned out of it that will maybe help you design your van differently or just food for thought as you are designing your van so thanks for watching everybody

Channel: Project of Science

Views: 56,692

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Id: iANPQBhP4yk

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023