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Crashing for a cause

What happens inside a car in an accident?

If you ever have experienced the answer to this question first-hand, the odds are that your won't have lived to share you new-found knowledge. Car crashes can kill and that is the reason why automobile manufacturers today subject cars to intense crash tests.

Nissan recently invited journalists to watch one of their crash tests at close range. The cars used as guinea pigs were ones that have not yet made it to Indian roads - a large saloon, the Fuga, and a medium-sized hatch, the Tiida. The test we witnessed was called an offset crash, where the cars hit each other head-on with a small percentage of overlap, the kind of accident scenario that regularly has fatal consequences in India.

Nissan's new, aircraft hangar-like car-to-car indoor crash test facility is housed at a 40,000 square-metre laboratory in Yokosuka, outside Tokyo. Ground Zero, where all the shattering action happens is an area illuminated by bright lights and the actual area is crowned by a battery of lights that literally re-create daylight. The floor of Nissan's car-to-car crash test facility is however, unlike anything you'll ever see. It is the tracks that give away the real intent of this place and the purpose it is used for - the tracks all run into each other at the centre.

The test we witnessed was conducted with both the cars coming at each other at 50 kph, which means a 100 kph combined speed of impact. Incidentally, the cars were not powered by their own engines but were motivated by a sophisticated system of pulleys from under the floor. As they got closer, the lights glowed brighter to help the high-speed cameras capture it all. They collided in a spew of broken perspex, flying glass, dislodged bumpers, broken leaking hoses, deflated airbags and jammed wipers. The larger, heavier silver-coloured Fuga had pushed the lighter hatch back by a considerable distance and flipped it around. Viewing the high-speed video later revealed that the impact was so severe that at one point in time, only one tyre on the larger Fuga was on the ground, while all four of the Tiida's tyres were airborne as the cars pirouetted around in a death dance.

Yet after the impact, Nissan engineers could amazingly open the doors of both cars as there was very little deformation or misalignment to the pillars and doors of even the Tiida, despite the crash having almost completely wiped off the car's nose. However, the telltale signs of the serious nature of the crash remained to be seen. The roof of the Tiida had a flex mark where it was bent during the crash, the driver's seat was still tethered but rested against the door of the car and the front wheel was so seriously bent that it looked like a crumpled ball of paper.

The conclusions are simple.

Lesson 1) Don't crash.

Lesson 2) If you do, make sure you are in a safe car with seatbelts on. Worth remembering is that the test cars were doing only 50 kph - on highways in India, crashes happen at much higher speeds. And with 80,000 deaths a year on Indian roads, you'd think safety would be an issue, and car makers here would be bending over backwards to give us safer cars.

Lesson 3) Always look for crash test ratings, ask about the safety features of a car when you go shopping. Above all, think of safety when buying a car. Unless each customer thinks and intensely demands safety, these kinds of safety measure will be found only on high-end cars.

RISHAD SAAM MEHTA

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