rocksteady530

Saw this on a post somewhere....

My link

sahiljain22

Not cool. Hopefully no one got hurt, esp on the back seat of the front car.

pcy

not much damage to the offending car... wow.

mmitev

This must be an armoured X6.

The black car is a Mercedes E or C-class. There is no way there is so much damage on the MB without even the bonnet of the X6 getting bent.

The country looks like one of the central Asian ex-USSR republics, so an armoured X6 would not be something that unusual.

dingolfing

Wow, the driver didn't even slow down.

But the minimal damage isn't surprising. It's all physics and not BMW build quality. The moving car just transfers the majority of that force into smashing the car at rest and some force to pushing it forward. Just imagine that stopped car to be an immobile wall used in crash testing. The engineered crumple zones would make that front end look a lot different.

jcantanixon

Semi-correct, but just because the car at rest isn't an immovable wall, doesn't mean it doesn't have mass. It still weighs several thousand pounds. Originally I had typed up this long post, going into all the nerdy details, but I'm going to condense it to just a few sentences. Third law states that during a collision, both objects experience forces that are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. From observation, we can see that the forward force was enough to dramatically distort the rear of that vehicle, as well as accelerate it forward violently. The force applied backward was equal, and we can see that it dramatically decelerated the X6 from the high rate of speed to almost a dead stop. So whether it's due to design or some unknown factor (armoring?), it seems reasonable to state that the structure of the front of the X6 was more rigid than the rear of the car it hit.

Here's another way to look at it: Using two identical cars, if you parked one and drove the other one into it head on, the damage to both would theoretically equal..regardless of the speed of the impact.

dingolfing

Well we are talking about an X6 that stock already weighs possibly half-a-ton more than that possible C-Class MB. And being an SUV and raised more than the car, the X6 front bumper contacts not the MB rear bumper but the crumple friendly trunklid. Bumper 1 - Trunklid 0

Once the X6 bumper starts to crumple that empty trunk cavity, and starts pushing the car forward, you can see there is not much left pushing back on the X6. In essence, the X6 is basically slamming into a spring. Again, if that X6 were to slam into say a dump truck, it'll be a different story.

AchtungE60

Or it could be some other 'law' that we haven't figured out. Not everything has an answer. I personally think the thing you guys refer to as an "X6" is a space ship made of superbalistuical and is therefore not bound the laws or theories of this universe! Prove me wrong!!!!