Watch This Head-On Crash Test between Two EVs

• Mercedes-Benz staged what it’s calling the first public crash test of two electric vehicles, and you can watch it in the video below.
• The test featured Mercedes’s heaviest EV, the EQS SUV, versus its lightest, the Europe-market EQA.
• Mercedes emphasized that the point of the test was to show that the battery and electrical components are protected as well as the occupants in the event of a crash.

We’re standing in the upstairs gallery in the cavernous Mercedes-Benz crash-test center in Stuttgart, wearing earplugs as suggested. The safety-yellow EQS SUV and the similarly painted Europe-market EQA face each other at the far opposite ends of a long corridor, roughly 140 yards apart, ready to meet their fate.

Each of these two EVs is connected to a cable set into a groove in the floor. It will pull them toward each other at 35 mph, the EQS half into the EQA’s lane. Ultra-bright lights (100,000 lumens) flick on, illuminating the impact zone, which has a glass floor below which cameras stand ready to record the carnage.

“Don’t follow either car or you’ll miss the crash,” we’re advised. The house lights go down, and as the engineers make their final checks, a gasoline engine fires up. What? These are both EVs. The engine is that of the giant-size forklift that stands ready. Should either car catch fire, it will swoop in, scoop it up, and carry it out of the building, and dump it into a pool of water. (An occasion that’s never happened, we’re told.)

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There’s a warning signal, and then the cars are in motion. Under the bright lights, they meet with a tremendous bang that spins both cars sideways and rocks the smaller one backward. It’s the first public crash test between two EVs.

Immediately, there’s an electrical smell, and firefighters approach the vehicles to measure for heat development. Shattered pieces of both cars litter the floor. Given the all-clear, other workers drop mats to absorb pink battery coolant leaking from both cars. Post-crash, the hazard lights illuminate, the door handles pop out, and the doors unlock. (The automatic emergency call system has been reprogrammed ahead of time to dial a different number so that emergency crews don’t respond.)

Engineers check to see that the high-voltage battery system has automatically disconnected, and they begin to collect their data.

The EQS SUV is the largest Mercedes-Benz EV, and the EQA the smallest, and their weight difference is some 1700 pounds. The 35-mph impact speed is greater than that of any government-mandated crash test (the next-closest being the Euro NCAP offset frontal crash at 31 mph).

The cars are largely destroyed: Besides the obvious deformation, the EQA’s windshield has been shattered by the rear edge of the hood, and its left front wheel has broken off.

In both cars, the crash-test dummy in the driver’s seat is a fifth-percentile female (106 pounds, four feet 10 inches). The EQA has a similar dummy riding shotgun; in the EQS, the front passenger dummy is a 50th-percentile male (172 pounds, five feet 10 inches). According to the 150 measuring devices on each dummy, none has suffered major injuries.

The Battery Needs Protecting

Protecting the integrity of the passenger compartment has long been a goal of safety engineers. With EVs comes a second goal. “We need another survival space, for the high-voltage battery,” says Marcel Brodbeck, passive safety engineer at Mercedes-Benz. The batteries are located below the floor between the axles, an area that is least likely to be deformed, and a stout doorsill structure of extruded aluminum protects the pack from side impacts. In the event of a crash, “the high-voltage system will shut down and disconnect from the battery,” explains Julia Hinners, another passive-safety engineer. “We also build in a manual shutdown”—a cable on the driver’s side below the A-pillar that serves as a manual deactivation option for emergency response personnel.

By making this EV-versus-EV crash test public, Mercedes-Benz surely is wanting to deliver a message about the crash safety of its electric vehicles. But watching the violence of that impact in real life also drove home a second message: You really don’t want to be in a car crash.