ASSESSOR SUMMER 2025 FULL MAGAZINE - Flipbook - Page 26
JOURNAL
CAR CRASH
INSIDE THE
WORLD’S BIGGEST
CRASH TEST
Cran昀椀eld University and Channel 4 stage a groundbreaking motorway pile-up.
ight cars, 94 cameras, a
30-ton HGV, hundreds
of hours of planning
and preparation, and a
team of drivers with no
idea what’s about to happen… Pile Up
– The World’s Biggest Crash Test is the
most ambitious experiment of its kind.
E
Produced by Blink Films for Channel
4, the programme heavily involved
experts from Cran昀椀eld University, who
helped the team construct the scenario
and examine what happens to cars in a
real-life motorway pile up.
Multi-vehicle accidents are poorly
understood, and questions about
vehicle safety, driver behaviour,
and crash dynamics remain largely
unanswered because researchers only
ever arrive post-crash. This experiment
will allow experts to understand how
safety systems fare, how drivers react
and why some people survive while
others don’t.
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Professor of Automotive Engineering
at Cran昀椀eld University, James Brighton,
and his team from the Advanced
Vehicle Engineering Centre worked
closely with the production team to
design a high-speed multi-vehicle pile
up. Expertise from the Cran昀椀eld Impact
Centre was brought in to gather highly
detailed crash data, with motorsport
crash data recorders installed in each
car’s internal structure.
Professor Brighton said: “Creating
a high-speed motorway crash really
was a unique challenge and there
could be no second takes. There was
a lot at stake, and we had to plan
meticulously to get it right 昀椀rst time. It
was a fascinating opportunity to look
at a real-world crash scenario and get
very detailed data from driver reactions
to the events unfolding before them.
That’s something we will now feed
into our teaching materials across all
our Automotive and Motorsport MSc
courses and especially our new MSc
in Virtual Prototyping so that students
taking our courses can help develop
even safer and more ef昀椀cient cars in
the future.”
THE EXPERIMENT
In the west coast of Scotland, a former
RAF base with a taxiway almost two
miles long is transformed into a
stretch of motorway, with white lines,
a hard shoulder, and motorway-grade
THE ASSESSORS JOURNAL | SUMMER 2025 | www.iaea-online.org/news/the-assessor
