TG's life skills: how to crash test a car

Every new car is checked by the authorities to ensure it meets minimum rules in all sorts of areas, including crash safety. After that there’s Euro NCAP, putting cars through punishing tests to see what they’re made of. Programme manager Aled Williams has seen a few crashes in his time. Intentional ones, of course.

First up is deciding which cars to smash. “We test as many as we can within our budgets,” explains Williams. “We tend to select the ones that sell best, more recently we’ve tried to test some of the newcomers, like the Chinese brands coming to market.” It’s an arduous process, too. “We normally require six or seven cars, depending on what’s being done. Of those, two might survive relatively intact, but the others will be destroyed,” says Aled. Sometimes Euro NCAP buys the cars, sometimes they’re selected randomly from the line.

And the tests take ages to set up. “It sounds exciting when you see the finished thing, but the test days take hours of preparation. The dummies have to be in the right place, the car has to be temperature soaked. There’s a lot that goes into making sure the car hits at the right speed and alignment, the barriers are at the right height, that the data acquisition is working, the cameras are in the right place and the lights working. The test is over in less than a second. Ultimately it’s down to the press of a button with everyone standing well back.”

Then the arduous process of gathering and analysing the data. Lots of information, but from a very short span. “Anything interesting is finished within 250 milliseconds of impact,” he explains. “The airbags give off fumes, so you can’t get in straight away. We’ll get the data from the car and analyse the footage. The labs will check to make sure everything looks in order – looking at the vehicle structure might tell you things the dummy didn’t see. They’re very sophisticated but they can still miss things.”

The dummies are the biggest complication, with hundreds of sensors. “They’re repairable, with replaceable parts, and recalibrated every three tests,” explains Aled. “Some dummies go back years, but the latest we use, the Thor dummy, is very expensive, about a million quid all in.” Does he ever feel bad for them, putting them in danger on a daily basis? “I don’t, they’re just bits of metal and rubber. What’s really important is what’s happening on the road. It’s an expensive business, but if it makes the roads safer that’s what really counts.”