Courtesy: Popular Mechanics
News cars already get smashed in the front and the back, sideways and from above, in a battery of tests that has made vehicles safer than ever. But people still die in crashes even in these very safe new cars, so the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has cooked up another way to demolish cars to test an overlooked type of crash that catches just the front edge of a car.
The IIHS already employs an offset frontal crash test, a side-impact test, a rear-impact test, and a roof-crush test to determine its Top Safety Pick award. These are not the U.S. government’s official tests; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration does those. But scoring an "acceptable" or a "good" on the IIHS tests is necessary to earn a recommendation from the influential Consumer Reports (and to boast in commercials of being a top safety pick), so carmakers take these tests very seriously.
The new test is called a small offset frontal crash test. Currently, NHTSA does a frontal crash test that effectively rams a car into a wall at 35 mph to test head-on hits. This offset front crash test is more realistic because few head-on crashes see the cars perfectly lined up with each another. When they are offset, which is what happens when drivers swerve to avoid the impact, the crash force gets concentrated in just the part of the car that’s hit.
The IIHS’s existing offset frontal crash test sees a car plow straight into a crushable barrier (designed to replicate a collision with another car) at 40 mph, with the force concentrated on 40 percent of the front end. For the new test, that impact strikes just the corner of the car, concentrating all the force on only 25 percent of the front end. That focuses all the energy in a part of the car where there is typically no frame structure to absorb the blow, making it a tougher safety challenge for new cars.
News cars already get smashed in the front and the back, sideways and from above, in a battery of tests that has made vehicles safer than ever. But people still die in crashes even in these very safe new cars, so the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has cooked up another way to demolish cars to test an overlooked type of crash that catches just the front edge of a car.
The IIHS already employs an offset frontal crash test, a side-impact test, a rear-impact test, and a roof-crush test to determine its Top Safety Pick award. These are not the U.S. government’s official tests; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration does those. But scoring an "acceptable" or a "good" on the IIHS tests is necessary to earn a recommendation from the influential Consumer Reports (and to boast in commercials of being a top safety pick), so carmakers take these tests very seriously.
The new test is called a small offset frontal crash test. Currently, NHTSA does a frontal crash test that effectively rams a car into a wall at 35 mph to test head-on hits. This offset front crash test is more realistic because few head-on crashes see the cars perfectly lined up with each another. When they are offset, which is what happens when drivers swerve to avoid the impact, the crash force gets concentrated in just the part of the car that’s hit.
The IIHS’s existing offset frontal crash test sees a car plow straight into a crushable barrier (designed to replicate a collision with another car) at 40 mph, with the force concentrated on 40 percent of the front end. For the new test, that impact strikes just the corner of the car, concentrating all the force on only 25 percent of the front end. That focuses all the energy in a part of the car where there is typically no frame structure to absorb the blow, making it a tougher safety challenge for new cars.
