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Old 10-24-2011, 09:46 PM  
Jon Oso
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Quote:
Originally Posted by seeric View Post
That host is clearly not a physics major.

Worst case scenario he says "Two cars colliding head on at 120mph".

Physically speaking the test they did is nothing close to two cars colliding into each other with BOTH of the cars moving at 120 MPH.

By crashing the car into a stationary object, to get the impact that two cars traveling at 120 mph would generate you'd have to get the sole car up to 240 mph, wouldn't you?

Speaking from a pure linear momentum perspective, what the host said they were going to demostrate is not what they did with that test.

Also, the mass of the wall is completely different than the mass of a vehicle, not to mention stationary and immovable. Changes everything.
You beat me to it. To simulate what the host is talking about you'd have to either have a similar stationary vehicle in place of the block and drag the crash car at 120mph, or have two cars head towards each other at 60mph.

What they did is prove that if you drive your focus into an immobile object at high speed, you're going to have a really bad day. It doesn't in any way simulate the effect of a head on collision of 2 cars traveling at 120mph each.

Still cool to watch though.
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