Crashing Cars | MythBusters

it's a platform 120 ft tall just for dropping stuff this is a motorized steel barrel just for strapping down a car and turning it upside down I'm not sure what this one's for but I'm pretty sure I could come up with something cool to do with it where am I I'm in Arizona in the middle of 150 acres of pure awesome this is pretty much what I would design as my ideal playground it's a test facility designed to break things smash things make them fail and analyze the aftermath this is one of the Test Facilities owned by exponent systems and today they're going to help us smash some cars and first up to feel the crash for us is this so this is our car this is our car we're going to smash it at 50 m an hour into a wall well let's get started all right how's all this going to go down this is a 1280 ft long crash rail it has a track embedded in it and a cable that pulls a car along that track towards the impact spot these two V8 engines which have about 800 horsepower between them pull this cable which pulls the car up to the desired speed when the car gets to about here the cable's going to release it so it's traveling only under its own momentum right into this big steel thing it's at this point that we'll have a complete picture of what happens to a car when it's going 50 m an hour and comes to a dead stop by crashing into a wall it's not just a picture they'll be getting Jamie has also added some Hightech trickery to capture the forcea there we go inside the car underneath the back seat is mounted a block of accelerometers that measure deceleration of the impact in three separate axes of movement that information is sent back to a Data Logger that's mounted in the back of the car it records all that information it's kind of like a black box just like in the small scale test they'll gather the stats for a 50 mph wall crash a 100 mph wall crash and then finally a 50 MH head-on collision this crash it's basically a data point one of two that we will obtain in order to correctly analyze our head-on collision careful viewers will know that in the full scale we're following the same experimental procedure as we did with our Hammers and Clay we think it has a nice symmetry shall we log the pre- crash length sure 15 ft all right then all right the cable's ready come on in with the length logged and the blackbox engaged the car is ready to meet its fate slamming into a solid steel wall at 50 mph all right this is one car into one wall at 50 m an hour take it away okay Bob we're ready for all out the V8 engines Roar as they spin the cable and the car gains speed till it's holding at precisely 50 mph and then plows headlong into a wall of Steel oops I hope they're inur yep it's a car crash I think yeah i' say what happened here is this car here hit this wall there it's a spectacular smash the force of the impact crunched the front of the car like a uh like a car hitting a steel wall at50 mph leaving it 3 and 1/2 ft shorter 11 7 in but of course that's not the only impact stack what say we find out what the g-load was these guys are downloading the data about the crash right now okay here's the stats on that crash this car hit that wall at 50.7 m per hour and took an average of 58 G's in the longitudinal Direction I'm going go out on a limb and say that when we smash a car into this wall at 100 mph the g- load is going to be significantly higher

Channel: MythBusters

Views: 8,802

Keywords: conspiracy theories, fact or fiction, internet rumours, mythbusters, mythbusters episodes, mythbusters tv show, myths, rumors, science, science experiments, special effects, my thbusters tv show full episodes, mythbusters full episodes, true conspiracy theories, adam savage, jamie hyneman, adam savage mythbusters, jamie hyneman mythbusters, mythbusters car crash myth, mythbusters car crash myths, exploding car crashes, car related myths

Id: GBATKqQVOIw

Length: 4min 57sec (297 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2024