Can You Hit A Pot Hole Hard Enough To Deploy A Car's Airbags?
That sickening bang that shudders through the cabin of your car when you hit a pot hole at speed is one of the worst things a driver can experience. But could you ever hit one hard enough to make an airbag deploy?
That’s the idea of this experiment, which involved repeatedly smashing a naked E-Class into a crater-like holes in the tarmac. The first few runs were actually too fast, the door-less Mercedes merely skipping over the imperfection as a result.
Switching to a series of holes to unsettle the suspension did the trick, and yes, the passenger-side curtain airbag does eventually go bang. Our favourite bit though is seeing the front-left wheel wildly smash back into its arch - there’s something weirdly satisfying about the violence of it.
Unsurprisingly, a chunk is eventually knocked out of said wheel during run number four, which also burst the tyre. Dramatic stuff, but we can’t help wonder what this test might be like if repeated with bigger rims on lower profile tyres…
Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.
Comments
Someone’s got to do it. As in test the airbags by driving into a pole. What could possibly go wrong?
Didn’t Top Gear already prove this in the Africa special?
Everyone already knows that they do.
this is why rally cars run 15” with big sidewalls.
He’s picked possibly the worst car to try that with. The springs are far too soft on that Benz. If you had Clarkson’s BMW, as has already been noted, or an old Impreza, I don’t doubt it’s possible.
I could never do this to an old Mercedes. On a side note, doesnt Mercedes have testing rigs that simulate 1,000,000 km and unforgiving potholes?
Ive been watching this recently!
He should have slammed on the brakes as he got to the potholes. First, it would have compressed the front suspension, making the hit harder, second, the accelerometers in the airbag system would sense hard braking, and last, hitting the brakes is exactly what a lot of people do when they see a big pothole.
“But apparently this thing is built like a tank” … b!tch, please, that thing has softer springs than my grandma’s car and is heavy as f#ck keeping a lot of horizontal momentum over holes with minimum suspension travel…
I hope this Mercedes was a wreck due to be sent to the crusher anyway. Otherwise, its the waste of a very nice car.