Gadgetory

it's part of the automotive landscape new cars crashed intentionally with great precision and measurement to determine how they'll behave when you do the same thing to them with far less precision and intention but the setup is exacting and tedious a given car can only be crashed once and there isn't time to crash every model of every year of every make of car enter virtual crash testing which stands to perhaps revolutionize this spectacle of auto crash worthiness cars and their parts are all designed on computers these days via CAD computer-aided design the design is just a file of data that same data which exists about every part every panel every rivet screw and weld and even the amount of gas in the tank along with any crash you can imagine can be fed into a computer a serious computer running 10,000 cores across 200 or so cpus and gpus turn off the lights come back in 10 or 20 hours and see the crash that never happened it's amazing to look at the realism but more important are these three gains its repeatable no cars were harmed in this collision that means you can run it over and over with the cost and set-up time of real tests remove its peelable you can peel back or make invisible any portion of the car to see how a given sub assembly performs in real time can't do that with a real crash test and it's variable find a weakness redesign that area via CAD upload the new design data run the crash again see if it's now fixed no need to retool and create a new part for another crash test so why are we still crashing cars for real well virtual crash tests aren't complete they're about 90 plus percent accurate and data full a gap that should be closeable risk does move slowly car makers insurers and regulators aren't the types to jump overnight to a new method where our lives are involved it still takes too long that half a day to a day of data processing per crash test needs to come down and widespread adoption is needed not every car maker uses this technology nor are they using a standardized version of it nonetheless virtual crash testing looks like it may due to the of crashworthiness what the computer did to photography more car tech demystified right now at scene at on cars comm click on car tech 101