Fifth Gear Slams a Ford Focus into a Wall at 120 MPH

I think I need a new car. Maybe a Grand Marquis or H1 or M1 Abrams.

Ummmm I never want to be described as having a "dickey ticker"....but thats just me. :)

I think the person speaking in the video was a bit too dramatic but it is a good point to show that no matter how safe a car is, physics cannot be mitigated.

Nothing was going to survive that crash test. An F1 car, Indy car, or Nascar car would have had similar non-survivable results.

It's entertaining to watch a car hit a wall at 120mph, but there are so many things wrong with the announcer that I don't know where to begin.

I'm guessing similar results if 2 cars hit head on at 60mph...

a shame they wasted a perfectly good set of wheels though

@sniperruff:

Actually, two cars both doing 60mph hitting head on is no different than a car doing 60mph into a stationary wall. In either case, the car is being dropped from 60-0 in a fraction of a section.

Your comment and this vid remind me of a Mythbusters episode where they tested that notion- two cars at 50mph vs one at 100mph. Like this video, they ended up with some gruesomely mangled cars.

sniperruff, fizzump04 is correct, but here's another way to think of it.

You're hitting a brick wall. If you were doing 60mph and the brick wall were doing 60mph (and impacted by the inertia of you hitting it) that would be similar.

The key is the mass difference. The brick wall has effectively infinite mass, making the collision that much worse.

Another way to think of it is if instead of a wall, they ran the Focus head on into a stationary, yet movable, Focus. The resulting impact would be MUCH less than we see here. In that case, you'd have the equivalent of two Foci hitting head on at 60mph each.

This is why when cars get an XX star rating for a crash test, they append the rating with "in it's class". The star rating is good to judge against an equivalent vehicle, but not vs a vehicle with significantly more (or less) mass.