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
Somebody from the 6th gen Civic community actually experienced it himself. He was driving through LA I belive and the pothloe was so deep that the airbags went off
When i said old i more so meant 80’s.
Never mind, my question has been taken out of context.
the front tire at 2:14 was going like…