This is the place new cars come to die… to give you a better chance of living through a car crash
Higashi-Fuji, Japan — There’s a huge car crash here every day. But because there are no horrifying injuries involved, each smash isn’t terrifying but actually kinda awesome.
Welcome to Toyota’s Higashi-Fuji Technical Center. 4,500 people toil here on future cars, artificial intelligence, technology we haven’t heard of yet and of course, safety. They must all be Secret Squirrels, because the whole time we were here we never saw more than a dozen or so people.
Toyota spent more than one trillion Yen (S$13.1 billion) last year on R&D, so the work at Higashi-Fuji is obviously dead serious.
The facility is literally at the foot of Mount Fuji, and is the kind of place where they confiscate your mobile phone before they let you in. They don’t want you snooping, let alone capturing an image of a self-driving Corolla rolling past a flying Camry.
Toyota let CarBuyer in to let us watch them crash a spanking new Toyota Prius. That might sound like an exercise in heart pain (and it is) but crash-testing is literally an everyday affair. Around 600 cars are smashed up by Toyota here every year.
Every kind of vehicle comes here to meet its demise, from the tiny i-Road to Toyota’s biggest models, like the US-only Tundra or Sequoia monsters. Even lorries like the Toyota Dyna end up against the barrier here.
Standard testing calls for a frontal smash into a deformable barrier that overlaps with 40 percent of the width of the car, at 64km/h.
Toyota showed us a new crash with the Prius that’s 1.35 times worse than that.
It involves a 2.5-tonne trolley at 90km/h being launched into the test car at a 15-degree angle. That’s like being rammed into by a Bentley cruising down the ECP.
It turns out the crash test dummies who were in the Prius registered impact forces that would have resulted in injury, but not death.
What’s more impressive is that the Prius didn’t show any electrical leakage from the high-voltage battery in its hybrid system (there’s never actually been a recorded injury caused by batteries from any of the 9 million hybrids Toyota has sold) — we watched engineers check for electric voltage between the plus and minus terminals of the wiring harness.
Having sussed out that they weren’t about to have their eyebrows singed by a nasty electrical jolt, the engineers next opened the car’s front doors as a simple check of cabin integrity. That’s important because the first thing you want to do after a wreck is to get out of it. If only so you can argue with the other driver about whose fault it was.
If the first TNGA car holds up this well under a 90km/h crash, then the next generation of Toyotas is likely to be just as sturdy.
That’s something to keep in mind when you’re driving in Singapore. It might seem like mayhem out on the roads sometimes, but your chances of surviving it are much better than ever thanks to what goes on behind the closed doors of places like Higashi-Fuji.
Toyota’s THUMS up approach to crash testing Crash test dummies are now the norm, but they’re expensive. The models made by a company called Humanetics can cost up to a hundred million Yen (S$1.32m) for one called THOR, purpose-built for side-impact testing. There are 15 of those in the Higashi-Fuji R&D centre’s crash test building. Essentially, you can put a THUMS person into a virtual car, subject it to a virtual crash test, and end up with an accurate reading of what would happen to a real person, right down to brain, ligament and internal organ injury. Officials from NASCAR, the most popular racing series in America, were stumped by why its race drivers suffered a high number of rib fractures even though they were well-protected in the cars. So they used a THUMS model to investigate a new chest support system. |
READ MORE
TNGA — Four letters that encode Toyota's future
Our Toyota Prius review (no, we didn't crash test it)
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