Road safety is very important not only for the regular passenger vehicles, but for the big rigs too, like Scania’s new electric truck, which was recently subjected to a crash test.
Normally, these tests are carried out using barriers and poles designed to replicate the impact with another car. However, in this instance, the side barrier was replaced by an actual car: a Volkswagen Golf.
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The Mk7 Golf was chosen because the engineers wanted “the crash test to be as authentic as possible”, said Scania’s chief of Mechanical Testing, Mikael Littmann. “We use a real car for the impact, as that puts a lot more stress on the structure than if we’d used a barrier.”
Despite being over in less than a second, the test took months of precision planning. They got all the details just right and then ran numerous computer simulations at different speeds and angles. “The actual crash test is ultimately only to confirm that our calculations were accurate”, Scania’s Research and Development test engineer Jakob Leygraf explained.
In this scenario, they replicated what happens to the battery when a vehicle hits it head-on. The impact energy has to be distributed and spread throughout the structure that surrounds the battery. Firefighters stood by just in case, but ultimately, everything went on as planned, there were no fires and the battery emerged unscathed.