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The growing demands placed on car safety make testing a bigger challenge as well. ŠKODA has its own state-of-the-art crash test lab. Take a look inside.
Crash testing has come a long way in the fifty years since it was first done in the Czech Republic. And ŠKODA has played a major part in this. Crash testing is now carried out in a state-of-the-art, modern laboratory at the test polygon in Úhelnice near Mladá Boleslav.
In the almost 200-metre-long hall ŠKODA can carry out an amazingly wide range of tests, from frontal crashes into solid obstacles, impacts when a barrier or pillar hits the side of a car and various rear impacts, to head-on collisions between two cars.
The cars are propelled by a 600 kW Messring drive system, which can accelerate two vehicles weighing up to 3.5 tonnes towards each other up to a speed of 65 km/h, or accelerate one vehicle to 120 km/h. In the first case a track of 80 metres is sufficient, in the second case the entire track is needed.
While the high power of the propulsion system is probably no great surprise, the power of the lighting system probably is. In fact, the array of lights illuminating the collision area above the filming pit has a power output of 250 kW and can generate a light output of up to 120 kilolux on the car itself. The reason for such intense lighting is obvious: the high-speed cameras really need to capture everything in the highest possible quality. There are up to twenty cameras in various positions in each test (some for photogrammetric reasons - these cameras track points on the vehicle). The lighting system only ramps up to full power when the vehicle is in motion, just before the actual crash.
“Today, of course, it’s all controlled automatically, but when I started here we still had conventional cine cameras and the start of the test and the activation of the cameras had to be coordinated manually. That was my job back in those days,” says Rudolf Tesárek, who witnessed huge progress in crash test filming technology as an employee and later coordinator of ŠKODA’s crash laboratory. The test itself is always really loud. “The airbag explosions are the most deafening noises, of course,” Tesárek explains.
Incidentally, crashed cars are stored, and not scrapped until much later, either when they lose their relevance because the model has entered a new development phase, so a new version of the prototype has been made, or after the stipulated length of time for which the car has to be preserved for homologation purposes (this period is longer). Simply put, a car company can scrap cars from its “working” crash tests at its discretion, but cars from homologation tests have to be stored so that the results can be confirmed. Of course, all the data collected during the tests is also stored – whether that is camera footage or data collected from the dozens of sensors that the car and crash test dummies are fitted with.
Needless to say, an advanced laboratory tests not only according to homologation requirements, but also according to the far more demanding conditions of various organisations such as the various NCAP associations (Euro, China, US?…) or the North American NHTSA. “We can perform virtually all the demanding modern tests here,” says Tesárek.
ŠKODA carries out a number of crash tests in its crash laboratory, most of them during the development of a car to verify the functionality of its design. However, it also carries out tests for homologation purposes and to verify crash tests according to Euro NCAP parameters. Here are some examples of the tests they carry out in the laboratory.
• “Homologation” frontal impact of 40% of the car’s width into a deformable obstacle at 56 km/h (ECE Regulation 94)
• Frontal impact of 40% of the car’s width into a deformable obstacle at 64 km/h, Euro NCAP
• Frontal impact of 100 % of the car’s width into a rigid obstacle at 50 km/h with a pair of female dummies
• Tests at lower speeds to verify the correct airbag deployment threshold (“must fire” and “no fire” tests)
• Side impact at 32 km/h into a pillar
• Impact with a deformable barrier (trolley, 1,400 kg) into the side of a car at 60 km/h
• Rear impact with a trolley into a stationary car at 30, 50 or 80 km/h, 70% displacement
