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Zero-sum game

HIGASHI-FUJI, JAPAN — At its simplest level, a crash test is just a matter of smashing a car or two and seeing what happens.

HIGASHI-FUJI, JAPAN — At its simplest level, a crash test is just a matter of smashing a car or two and seeing what happens.

The idea is something that would appeal to a three-year-old, so, needless to say, the child in me could hardly wait to watch Toyota crash a 2.5-tonne trolley into a spanking new Prius.

Japan’s leading car maker (and the world’s number two by volume) had invited TODAY to its top-secret technical centre at the foot of Mount Fuji. Here, 4,500 engineers work on all sorts of technologies. The sprawling facility includes a state-of-the-art crash test centre, and Toyota was eager to show off both the centre and a tough new crash protocol it is using.

 

SYMPHONY OF DESTRUCTION

 

The spectacle did not disappoint. Struck by the trolley at a 15-degree angle, the Prius was sent flying a considerable distance. The crash itself produced a deafening crunch of metal and glass, but it was the airbags that made the loudest sound.

In only a moment, the Prius had been transformed from high-tech hybrid car to scrap metal. And then, the real work of the crash test began.

Car makers that are serious about safety conduct crash tests routinely. At the Higashi-Fuji Technical Centre, Toyota destroys around 600 cars a year, smashing up everything from the tiny i-Road three-wheeler to a Toyota Dyna lorry.

At other Toyota safety labs around the world, another 1,000 vehicles meet their doom every year.

The cars are smashed head-on into barriers, rolled into a larger ditch, flipped upside down, and subjected to all sorts of heartbreaking treatment.

Although they make for spectacular viewing, the crash tests are a way for engineers to find out what might happen during a serious accident.

Every collision is filmed from several angles by a high-speed camera so that researchers can see exactly how the carnage unfolds.

DAMAGE ASSESSMENT

 

After destroying the Prius, the researchers first cleared the area of broken glass and other potentially dangerous debris.

Their first assessment was to check that no voltage was leaking from the hybrid car’s battery pack.

Toyota says there has never been a battery-related injury from any of the nine million hybrid cars it has sold, but that is by design: A mechanism cuts off the current after a serious crash.

Satisfied that the wrecked Prius was not about to give anyone an Einstein-like hairstyle with a jolt of electricity, the engineers next tried to open the front doors.

Modern cars are built to a principle largely pioneered by Volvo in 1944 — the front and tail ends of a car can be made relatively soft to absorb energy from the crash, but passengers should be protected within a strong, rigid cell. If the front doors open freely after a severe crash, it means that the car’s passenger cell has held up well, and that rescuers would have an easier time getting to the occupants. The Prius passed this test, too.

But it is what happens to the crash dummies that matters the most. Dummies are built relatively tough to withstand heavy collisions, but they are wired up with sensors that measure the impact of a crash.

Those in the Prius, Toyota staff would later tell us, would have sustained some injuries, but they would have survived.

 

NO JOB FOR A DUMMY

 

The Prius’ performance is all the more remarkable given the speed of the simulated crash. Standard collision tests are carried out at 64kmh, but Toyota sometimes conducts them at 90kmh. The forces involved are 1.35 times worse than the norm, said Seigo Kuzumaki, the assistant chief of Toyota’s safety tech office.

Toyota wanted to “level up” its safety game, he explained. Yet, even regular crash tests have been highly effective at reducing traffic fatalities.

Japan saw death and injury rates climb throughout the 1980s as the vehicle population grew, so the government introduced tougher collision standards to force car makers to build stronger cars, said Akira Kanatani, a safety researcher for Toyota.

Though the number of cars continued to grow, death rates have fallen steadily and significantly since the early 1990s, after the tougher standards came into force.

But Toyota has a long-term goal to bring traffic fatalities to zero. There is no specific deadline for that achievement, but the next advances in safety could come from an unlikely source: Virtual reality.

Physical crash test dummies have their limitations, like rubber necks that only approximate how the human head moves during a violent collision. They can be hideously expensive, too — Toyota’s priciest dummies cost ¥100 million (S$1.3 million) each, and it has 15 of those at Higashi-Fuji, as part of an army of 80 dummies.

Increasingly, researchers are turning to the THUMS (Total HUman Model for Safety) software written by Toyota engineers. It models the human body so accurately that they can place a THUMS model into a virtual car, subject it to a virtual collision, and see what happens to its brain, ligament and internal organs.

 

SURVIVAL SELLS

 

THUMS is so useful that 25 other car makers pay Toyota for the software to use it for their own virtual crash tests.

The models give accurate results because to build them, coders used data from research papers that studied the effects of impacts on human cadavers.

It sounds grisly, but the fact that THUMS models are loosely based on dead bodies is merely a case of crash testing having come full circle. In early crash tests, researchers would use cadavers wired up with sensors.

Being far less gruesome than tests with dead bodies, and more insightful than tests with dummies, it is unsurprising that virtual crash tests are becoming more common.

But like with real-life accidents, you never know what will happen in an actual collision, or what you might learn as a result. And as the demonstration crash with the Prius showed, nothing beats a crash test for sheer spectacle.

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