We'd Like To Congratulate This Limousine's Builder [with Video]
At TTAC, we typically don’t run whatever video is making its way around the Internet during whatever particular day. Today, well, we have a reason to break with that tradition.
The clip above, shot this past weekend, features a stretched Chrysler 300 beached on a railway crossing and unable to move as a train barrels down the tracks in its direction.
Instead of saying “You won’t believe what happens next!!!” like BuzzFeed Autos, I’d like to congratulate the builder of that stretched gangster mobile.
Why?
For starters, when you stretch a vehicle, you typically do it at the expense of its structural integrity. Secondly, if that train’s weight is likely measured in millions of pounds. While the train might not be moving incredibly fast, that’s a lot of force going into the side of a limo, a vehicle that should have less structural integrity than on the car it’s based.
Yet, this limo, against all odds, still looks like a limo at the end of its long trip down the tracks in front of the train’s cow catcher.
For comparison, here’s a Top Gear clip where the show ran a train into a much smaller car at a much higher speed, but you get the idea.
The coachbuilder responsible for this particular limousine should get a medal in doing it right.
[Source: CarScoops]
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Based on the fact that the A pillar is almost directly in the line of fire for the locomotive and the windshield, though shattered, is still intact; I will go out on a limb and say that this was a very low speed impact. So congratulations to the coachbuilder for creating a limo that does not snap in half with an impact strong enough to fracture, but not smash glass.
So what poked through to punch out a dent behind the front passenger door?
It never gets old.
Side impact safety is critical in limousine building, as noted by the fatal car accident when a (much smaller than a freight train) pickup struck a stretch limo making a u-turn on the east end of Long Island just a few days before. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/nyregion/4-reported-dead-in-limousine-crash-on-long-island.html?_r=0 Commenter Kyree Williams had noted that the reason the limo did so well was the fact that it didn't have any wheels on the ground, I wonder if that had something to do with it.