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I watched the episode, and found one flaw....cars are soft, walls are not. What they SHOULD have tested is a PARKED car being hit head on at 100mph, and two MOVING cars, hitting each other head on at 50mph EACH....this would have proved the theory. The wall itself is a variable.
But this is not the matter in question. Everything so far has been about immovable object vs head on. If we now throw in parked car, it changes the entire discussion. Parked car at 100mph SHOULD be about the same as two cars head on at 50. But the forces on each car would be different because now one of the cars is decelerating, and the other is accelerating. Plus we are no longer talking about a stationary collision point. In all of our previous scenarios the point of impact is not moving. with car vs parked car the point of impact now becomes mobile changing everything. Now instead of a nearly instantaneous deceleration, we have one that takes place over a much longer period of time, and takes place over a longer distance. Plus, not we are looking at different shock values in each vehicle. The car being hit is going to experience much worse acceleration forces than the moving car's deceleration forces. I don't know how to do the specific math to tell you exactly what each car is going to experience, but this new scenario is much more complicated, and very different from the other two.
It all depends on how you set it up. If the two cars are the same, it shouldn't make a difference (theoretically). The crash structure of both should be equally strong so the impact should accelerate one at the same rate the other is decelerated (equal and opposite action and reaction and all that jazz).
Of course, in the real world, a parked car is going to move slightly, not quite absorb all the impact, etc, etc, but I believe it would still be a closer approximation to a car-on-car impact than hitting a wall at double the "travelling" speed... The wall has virtually no give, it absorbs virtually all of the energy and it certainly causes a far more rapid deceleration because of it.
11-25-2011, 02:28 PM
