[Auto] Watch Mercedes crash test an EQS SUV into an EQA

[El Máster Edwin]

It’s the first time the public gets to witness a safety test betwixt two electric cars

 

Mercedes-Benz performs three crash tests every single day, and up to 900 each year. The most recent one has now, for the first time, been made available for public consumption: a crash test involving a big, heavy car and a small, still quite heavy car.

It’s a test to prove the strength of Merc’s new generation of electric cars, leaning on the brand’s well-earned history in safety (we haven’t got the internet space to list all of Benz’s pioneering moments here, but you’ll know of them) and adapting it for the EV age.

It’s also Mercedes showing how it went above and beyond to build cars stronger than required. For this test, for example, Euro NCAP requires a frontal impact using a 1,400kg ‘trolley’ fitted with an aluminium honeycomb barrier to replicate the front of another car. Merc used a three-tonne EQS SUV and slammed it at 56kmh – faster than Euro NCAP’s required 50kmh – at a 2.2-tonne EQA also doing 56kmh.

So it’s a proper ‘live’ test in a real-life scenario: a common type of smash, according to Mercedes’s data and proper field research of real accidents, involving a failed overtake and thus a crash with a 50 per cent ‘frontal overlap’.

 

The result? “The car will look like hell, but the occupants will be safe,” Merc’s director of vehicle safety Paul Dick told TopGear.com. And it’s an alarming thing to witness: much louder than you’d expect, debris showering the controlled air and environment, coolant fluid everywhere, shattered wheel rims and completely deformed car bodies. It’s quite grim.

And yet, Merc’s data from the cars and the dummies (each dummy carrying 150 sensors) showed the doors could still be opened after the crash, which means the passenger ‘safety cell’ worked as intended. The four dummies – three females and one male – returned data to suggest a “low risk of serious to fatal injury”. The airbags and belt tensioners all worked as designed.

And the eight-stage high voltage safety net incorporating a battery protection zone, better stiffness for housings, reinforced cables and even self-monitoring, also did what it was supposed to. The HV system was automatically switched off and made safe the instant both cars made contact.

“Protecting human lives is not a question of drive system,” said Merc’s technology boss Markus Schäfer. “The recent crash test involving two fully electric vehicles demonstrates this. It proves that all our vehicles have an equally high level of safety, no matter what technology drives them.”

 

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