The discussion revolves around the amount of force required for one car to damage another car of the same model, focusing on scenarios such as head-on collisions and the factors influencing damage. Participants explore various aspects including theoretical calculations, practical observations, and engineering considerations.
Participants express multiple competing views on the factors influencing car damage, including the role of force, pressure, and the specifics of collision scenarios. The discussion remains unresolved with no consensus reached.
Participants highlight limitations in predicting damage due to the complexity of variables involved, such as unknown material properties and the dynamic nature of collisions.
Professionals do this with crash tests. You cannot do it with physics. There are too many unknowns. It is an engineering problem. After a head-on crash that appears to result in no damage, energy absorbing bumpers may, in fact, have suffered irreversible changes. The next crash may not be as pretty.Alexander Baine said:I am working on a science project, just in my spare time, and for this project I needed to know the amount of force it would take one car to damage another car, but the same model (so same weight, strength etc.) thanks for you help
"Damaged" is a bit of understatement here.Hesch said:If the lengths of the cars are compressed 2 m, the cars are damaged.
This is pretty much the same thing bcrowell said in post #7 and is also similar to what I said in post #6 when I talked about "keying" a car.Svein said:I expect the pressure at a given point of the car is more important than the force. I know (I have seen it) that it is possible to drive an awl through the bodywork by force of hand alone. The same force applied to a large object (say the hand itself) does almost no damage.
Sorry. Sloppy reading.Chestermiller said:This is pretty much the same thing bcrowell said in post #7 and is also similar to what I said in post #6 when I talked about "keying" a car.