There's winning and there's crushing the opponents. One shouldn't gloat in the latter case, but this case deserves an exception.
Congratulations Elon and the team on tremendously nice engineering!
There's winning and there's crushing the opponents. One shouldn't gloat in the latter case, but this case deserves an exception.
Congratulations Elon and the team on tremendously nice engineering!
Honda Accord for comparison: http://youtu.be/ycntFFUfGkU?t=30s
A fairer comparison would be to a BMW 5xx or Mercedes E class. Tesla may still fair better but not by as huge a margin.
Having said all that... wow, that is a surprisingly huge difference in results!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4T1BimfUf4
Lexus RX350:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAz6ZMeIC9s
Lexus ES350:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l0o9MTY0JA
BMW 5-Series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r20YfGYhvc
Mercedes C-Class:
Most dimming of LED's is done with this super fast blinking technique because LED's can be either on or off unlike incandesant bulbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation
Crushing the opponents while your car remains uncrushed in the test (or the least crushed).
That's what you get when you ask the rocket scientist to make you a car.
If you're going to win, you might as well reach the destination without noticing that you've had a collision.
Flashbacks of Austin Powers and a steam roller...
EDIT: this one: http://youtu.be/V5R80yUUVNk
A single solid tungsten dump truck would have almost twice the mass of the wall. Even with a completely inelastic collision, the wall's going to shatter and move. For a 35 mph collision, I think you're right, that wall would ultimately bring the truck to a halt from friction with the ground. At higher speeds, I think the truck might make it through.
Tungsten is quite dense (19,300 kg/m^3). Such a truck would have a mass of >400 metric tons (2 x 3 x 4 m x 19 tons/m^3), or >247 Toyota Tacomas (2013 extended cab, curb weight 3560 lb --> 1618 kg).
The truck would be terrifying to drive, once you got it going. I don't know how you'd turn.
Alas, Youtube is short on tungsten dumptrucks, but this may suffice. In a demonstration, a truck uses its brakes to stop after obliterating a few cars. The truck is driven by a real person.
So around the max takeoff weight of a 747, with approximately as heavy duty a wheel setup I assume. That would be quite a truck.
I don't think that is true.
The video is a commercial, so they will have chosen an impact angle and speed that makes the newer car look best). For example, you can see that the newer car is heavier than the old one from the video; its front wheels still move forward when the wheels of the old one already go back. Because of that, the new car has a much longer braking distance than the old one. Things would have looked relatively better for the old car if they had chosen a collision with a concrete wall.
Also, Reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumple_zone, the crumple zone was patented in 1952; chances are this 1959 car doesn't have a good one.
If its crumple zone is bad or absent, chances are that the older car would have survived way better in a frontal collision, where the beam carrying the engine would be elastically compressed without deforming permanently.
That would be just the car, though; those old cars could be lethal at incredibly low speeds, for example by impaling them on their non-collapsible steering column.
Rather, I think this speaks more to Elon Musk's uncanny ability to attract and hire good engineers.
A bmw 3 series (not full frontal): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XG8BQt4sHY
This 2009 vs. 1959 offset crash shows how much things have changed:
I don't mean to diminish the performance of the Tesla Model S. It is, without qualification, an incredible car. I just don't think comparing it to the offset video of a BMW are relevant.