And now for your viewing pleasure, Subarus crashing into walls. When we started JNC in 2006, you couldn’t get a Japanese automaker to cough up some vintage footage if your threatened the CEO’s grandchildren at gunpoint. Nowadays, they’re more than happy to promote their histories, even if it’s a cringe-inducing montage of old cars getting destroyed for the greater good. It’s interesting to note that Fuji Heavy was conducting pedestrian safety tests as far back as the first-generation Leone.
AHHHH! WHY DID YOU POST AN FF-1 CRASHING INTO A WALL CAUSE YOU KNEW THAT WOULD MAKE ME SO SAD OMG!!!
🙁 🙁 🙁
Seeing them crash that STi and BRZ gave me a sad. I hope that they do it with a vehicle that had a defect or flaw, but not a street ready vehicle. Oh well…
The whole point of crash testing is to use a 100% customer representative car. If you used a defective vehicl you would invalidate the test.
Most of the ones crashed by the manufacturers themselves are development mules of some sort.
I knew watching that was a bad idea. I think you broke my soul Ben.
Anyone else notice the net thing deploy from the car in the pedestrian crash safety test?
That is really quite interesting. I wonder if it was purely experimental, or perhaps had some hope of production?
The FF-1 doesn’t look too bad. Compare it to a contemporary Saab 99 which was billed as a “safe” car, and you’ll see Subaru was not far off. Pay attention to the A pillar and the footwells.
http://insidesaab.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/dsc_0555.jpg
I can’t quickly find any late 60’s American crash testing, but the NHTSA was established in 1970 after five years of finger twiddling so there probably wasn’t much done to begin with. For sure, the early 60’s posted terrible results.