interestingly enough, the car was not split in half by the accident.

 

hmm... maybe they should make it mandatory to wear full fire resistant racing attire with helmet when driving the enzo...

 

Man breaks me heart!!! Another Enzo down, i mean hell, if i owned a car like that id atelast try to use common sense as to when to open it up and when enough is enough..... 200+ mph is tempting though. LOL, if i had one Tampa PD would have a designated heli to follow me everywhere ^^

 

Worse yet, as I recall the article said it was not his car, it belonged to a friend.

 

Actually, I don't think I've heard of a fatal accident involving the Enzo; I think all these assclowns have walked away. The car essentially sacrifices itself to save you, and is apparently very safe, all things considered.

 

Well, you dont' really decrease momentum since it is conserved (with the exception of energy released as sound and heat). If the car was designed to break apart in half, the other half would fly faster than usual (think of how aircrafts dump gigantic pieces of itself to get an extra grunt towards space).

 

Right but as it tears apart a lot of energy would be lost in the tearing as opposed to being transmitted somewhere else, like say the passenger compartment.

 

Not much into physics are you? You do realize that the rockets are actually accelerating where energy is being used to propel them, right? A car in a crash has a bunch of energy that is dissipated, but generally no new energy is being used to accelerate the car. They are totally different situations. Having the car break in half allows the heavy part that has the most kinetic energy to go do its thing while the front half that weighs much less and has LESS kinetic energy because of that to stop that much faster. There is no way for a piece of the car to break off and then just accelerate to a faster speed unless there's some outside force that is causing that acceleration. It just doesn't work that way.

 

The car is defiantly designed to break up during impact. What the guy above me said is right, the rear of the car has more momentum than the front of the car (when broken at the firewall) due to most of the weight being in the back.

The guy who said momentum is conserved is correct, but applied the principal incorrectly and with a very limited understanding. There are a few things going on during the intentional "destruction" of the car. First, a lot of energy is dissipated as it breaks apart. When the car breaks in half, the momentum isn't split up evenly. The Enzo breaks much the same way an F1 car does in a bad crash.