Grisly Car Crash Tests

Morbid curiosity is a strange thing. If you’ve ever passed a crash on a motorway, you’ll see literally hundreds of ‘rubberneckers’ trying to catch a glimpse of whatever carnage has been holding them up.

Hollywood frequently appeases this unquenchable thirst for unfortunate drama and carnage by packing their latest blockbusters with bigger explosions and more devastation than whatever came before.

And that’s probably why you clicked on this link: because you want to see numerous helpless automobiles crumple face-first into a wall. We don’t blame you, it’s fairly awesome.

Rover 100

One of the first thoughts seeing a particularly violent crash test is probably “I don’t think I’d be buying one of those”, and that’s exactly what happened when the Rover 100’s crash test went public in 1997.

The supermini scored a record low in the adult occupant category, prompting sales to nosedive so dramatically that the car was dropped shortly after.

Chrysler Ypsilon

This dinky city car, which shares much of its DNA with the Fiat 500 and Ford Ka, was the lowest scoring car in safety assessors Euro NCAP in 2015.

It could be argued that had the two-star Ypsilon been tested under less strict guidelines from a few years earlier, it would have doubled its score. That’s entirely possible, the 500 managed a five star rating in 2007.

However, that argument doesn’t mask the fact that the Ypsilon’s engine burst into flames moments after the front offset barrier crash test. ‘A coffin on four wheels’ was how one YouTuber so elegantly described this car.

Meanwhile in India…

Euro NCAP’s Indian counterpart – NCAP India – has witnessed some ghastly crash tests in its time, with cars from some high profile mainstream brands scoring precisely zero stars.

We’re talking about the Volkswagen Polo and Hyundai i10 here – two nameplates you’ll spot everyday on UK roads – not tiny obscure carmakers who don’t have the money or resources to develop a safe car. Any parent will wince when they see the child test dummies hurtle around the i10’s rear seats.

Tata Nano

It’s perhaps unsurprising that the world’s cheapest car is also a zero star car. The Tato Nano was an exercise in cost-cutting with no power steering, no air conditioning, just one wing mirror but most tellingly, no airbags.

When it launched in 2008, prices started from under £1,200. We can give you a list of 1,200 things you should spend your money on instead.

Quadricycles

All the clips we’ve shown you so far have been crash tests of cars but Euro NCAP has also highlighted the safety shortcomings of quadricycles – four wheeled vehicles too light, small or unsafe to be properly categorised as ‘cars’.

Euro NCAP submitted some of the higher profile names in the quadricycle market and the results weren’t pretty.

Pushing safety forward

Today’s new cars are massively safer than what was coming to market ten or twenty years ago. Emergency self-braking, lane-keeping assistance and fatigue detection systems have all raised the standard for new car safety in recent years, coupled with frequently revised testing criteria to make it harder for cars to achieve that sought-after five star rating.

Volvo – notorious for its emphasis on safety – has a self imposed target that no-one will die as a result of a crash in one of its vehicles by 2020. As ambitious and unrealistic as it may seem, they’re doing well; nobody has died in one of its XC90 SUVs in four years.

Its V40 hatchback was named the safest car in the world in 2013, before the XC90 stole that title two years later. We’ll leave you with this portrait of how safe a car can actually be…

 

Image Credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2apWN173D4A