Discussion
hoyin said:
But hitting a brick wall is surely worse than two cars colliding at 120mph? Is it not?
Generally they don't hit square on and so you get some huge side vectors in the maths which helps.However, 120 isn't the critical factor. As reported quite widely in the press an unfortunate teenager hit one of the large oaks outside my house at around 50 and the effect was identical for his side of the car that hit the tree. Fortunately Newton's law also means that the car 'divides' into tw0 halves if that happens and the passenger survived with a few small injuries as the oak tree was only around 80cm wide and hence the de-acceleration on the passenger side was survivable (basically the passenger side ended up about 2 meters further forward than the passenger side).
As they say, it's not the crash that kills you, it's what can't move around you that does. Brought very much to life by the last 8 days events in the world of Motorsport.
J
F.C. said:
Surely two cars would need to be traveling at 60 MPH to achieve a 120 MPH equivalent?
The guy in the vid says two cars traveling at 120 mph in a head on collision, that would be akin to 240 Mph into a stationary object, No?
No - both would need to be the same mass and each doing 120mph. Each car would then slow down from 120mph to zero - just as would happen if they hit a stationary barrier.The guy in the vid says two cars traveling at 120 mph in a head on collision, that would be akin to 240 Mph into a stationary object, No?
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