German Car Zone

Impressive to see how much resists the cell of emergency of the Smart well, in this video of crash a test in which barrier in reinforced concrete comes hurled to beyond 110 km/h against one. The vital space is intact. Quite, the doors still open without problems (the right richiude also) [ Via Jalopnik]

translated from italian by babelfish

amazing!!! the vital cell is solid as a rock!

Yep, that car is really strong not to get completely smashed. Impressive.

That's video is quite cool. I actually watched that episode at my gym. I was walking to the entres for a glass of water when the TV caught my attention after eyeballing it and spotting a car.

More impressively is it didn't flip over and landed on all four or whatever many wheels were left. That reporter/photographer is lucky the car swerved right and not left. It would have been quite a scare for him otherwise. Moving twenty tons of concrete is also a task for such a little car. WOW

I have seen that episode of Fifth Gear. How impressive it may seem, it's useless. Person would still be dead just because of the impact.

Likely but not necc. true. Properly seatbelted in and air bag might have prevented severe injury. But, again anything is possible.

i think the whole point of making this is to show that despite crashing into something at 70mph, a smart car would still be able to keep its shape. i'd be interested to see the footwell though from the inside, which would indicate leg injury if it was pushed in too much. all things considered, the smart car did perform well.

of course though, this was a crash between a stationary object and a moving object. what would happen if a smart car and another vehicle is travelling at both 70mph? also imagine if that other vehicle was a semi. i don't think the smart car would survive.

Decelerating in any car from 110 km/h to 0 in less than a second is fatal; so the point about the Smarts' safety cell being useless regardless of how rigid it is is moot. Certainly it gives you more of a chance in survival rather than the cell collapsing under its' own weight crushing the victim. So I honestly don't see the rigidity of the cell being as "useless" as some people seem to be depicting.

We can speculate if anyone would have survived that crash, but one thing isn't up for debate. Everything MB has done to try and make such a small car that safe/strong certainly does increase your chances of surviving. Properly belted in a car built with such high safety engineering certainly doesn't hurt if you have to be in a crash like that!

One thing that has remained constant I think throughout Mercedes quality troubles is their safety engineering.

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