You might think working in a crash test lab would be one of the most fun jobs in the world. You get paid to crash vehicles into walls day after day using a variety of crashes and measuring the results. While this data driven destruction job is certainly one that can be a lot of fun for some people, the monotony of crashing vehicles constantly can get boring after a while and cause a person to want to crash something else. For the most part this may mean looking for nearly anything you can with four wheels to crash into a wall.
Does this sound like a bit of a sadistic profession? It certainly is. Your job is to crash vehicles and test their safety systems with the crash test dummies in the seats of the vehicle. Whether you’re performing a head on collision with another vehicle or your job for the day is to see how much damage is caused by crashing a car into a wall or even the offset test with a wall corner there’s massive amounts of data available for you to record and see what the results are.
It can be fun and interesting to see which vehicles actually pass the crash test and show up as the leaders in the industry for safety of the passengers in the vehicle. Because crash test facilities have been used for years to test the safety of vehicles most automakers have their own versions of the crash test facility to help test their own vehicles before they’re sent off for the testing. This gives most companies a better chance of being on top of the charts when it comes to the safety ratings of the vehicles they produce on an annual basis.
One of the tests that is performed at many crash tests sites which is more likely to happen to you in a store parking lot is having a runaway shopping car run into your vehicle. Using this test with several groceries in the basket the crash test site is able to determine how much damage a shopping cart can cause which helps automakers create stronger body panels and better paint to help avoid these collisions that can leave ugly marks and dents in your vehicle that you would have to pay for on your own.
What happens when a team of crash test professionals get bored and need something new to crash test. The team at Sweden’s Dynamic Test Center show us what happens when this occurs and unfortunately they’ve already crash tested their golf cart earlier in the year to the point of disrepair, but now they have something else with four wheels on the bottom that hasn’t been damaged at all, even though it’s been used in plenty of crash tests with nearly every vehicle that’s come through the facility. Yes, I’m talking about the shopping car which has been damaging car doors and quarter panels for several months without so much as a bent piece of metal on it.
We can’t have a shopping cart that’s outlasting the vehicles that come through the facility, so this cart must be crashed in the proper manner. Of course we don’t want to put our crash test dummies in the cart, if the car were to runaway down a steep hill of a city such as San Francisco it might reach some high speeds, but this team certainly takes the test to the max and fills the cart full of groceries before it heads off to run into the wall.
How fast is this cart full of groceries travelling when it hits the wall? A full 73 mph is how fast this car is moving and you can easily see from this video that the cart and every content inside are completely destroyed in the crash. While the real world application may be used to deter youngsters from racing shopping carts, although few of them will ever get up to this type of speed this crash test served a different purpose altogether. This test was all about the fun for the team at DTC, and I’m sure it was a lot of fun, I just wouldn’t want to be the person who drew the short straw and had to clean up this mess.
This post may contain affiliate links. Meaning a commission is given should you decide to make a purchase through these links, at no cost to you. All products shown are researched and tested to give an accurate review for you.