Can't work out if this is really bad design or fantastic design as they all survived with scratches!

bbc crash

Looks like a subaru

[Edited on 23/11/14 by ian locostzx9rc2]

looks like an impreza to me

Subaru here as well looking at the size of that exhaust and rear wheel drive pinion.

Makes you wonder if it has had a poor repair in the past.

As above, looks like an early shape Subaru Impreza



Most important thing is they're all ok

Yep, early scoob.

Previous cut and shut?

I agree with the consensus got to be a pair of Scoobys welded together either that or he hit something very hard

Hadn't thought about it being a cut and shut. The break all looks very clean...

that's what makes me think it's a cut and shut if that was metal breaking under impact I wouldn't have thought it would be a clean break

I think i see a lampost lying near the front part, going at high speed wouldnt it go through like a wire through cheese?

Definitely an old Subaru. Maybe it had had a new front end at some point!!!!

I cant see a lamppost in the picture if you look at were the bits broke off it looks as though it is level with the bulkhead. if you were going to use a lamppost to cut a car in half you would need to be going well over the speed limit, personaly I cant see it

More than possible the car is a weld up but an Impreza went into a lampost a mile down the road from my house with fatal consequences for driver and passenger.

doesn't take much to split a car if it hits a seam, the spot welds fail one by one and just unzip the shell. It's quite common for cars to be split apart, just look on the web and you'll see loads. Tree's and posts seem to do a good job at it as do large 4x4 on small cars. If you think about it cars are very very flimsy, if you scaled one down to say a foot long with the correct scale panel thickness you'll barely be able to pick it up without damaging it and given the lame test speed they crashed test too, shouldn't be driven more than 40mph max.

[Edited on 24/11/14 by Mr Whippy]

Looking at the photos, I can't see how it could be anything other than a cut and shut. The forces involved in ripping the front clean off a sound car would be very high and cause a lot more damage. Look at the A pillar, it looks undamaged from roof to floor pan, as is the door. The scuttle panel below the windscreen is also pretty much untouched. Also notice the little white bits all over the wiring loom. I'd bet they are choc-blocs where the loom has been chopped and spliced from two vehicles.

10+ years ago I came across the back half of a 2 year old Audi A4 sat on the verge. When I say back half, I mean literally the back half, completely intact and barely scratched. After pulling over and looking around I found the front half down the bank and wedged in between the trees. A woman was trapped in the front, thankfully unhurt although very confused. She had not long purchased the car from the local Audi dealer!

The car was a cut and shut, with the two halves joggled and spot welded together across the roof, down the B pillars and across the floorpan. The wiring loom each side had been choc bloc'd together. It had literally come apart whilst being driven at 40-50mph down and straight road.

A tree is one of the worst things to hit - 5th Gear once towed a saloon car into one head-on at 30 or 40mph, and the engine ended up in the back seats... the tree was barely damaged (or the sake of the tree-huggers - this was an old dead tree that was on the perimeter of the test track they used). On another program they towed a truck into a similar tree - the truck suffered tremendous damage and, again, the old tree was still upright.

On a sadder note, my neighbour's wife was killed when her husband slid their Mondeo sideways into a tree... he suffered little harm, but she was killed immediately.

[Edited on 24/11/14 by David Jenkins]

That shape of subaru is quite old. Could have been rust that caused the weakness.

Reminds me of this:
http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=16259

That certinaly wasnt cut and shut, and a lot new (safer?) design of car.
Trees are VERY strong.

Perfectly possible that the car was somehow weakened due to previous work, but I wouldn't read too much into the photos.

I've been to a few accidents where the cars were split in two (one split bizarrely lengthways!). None had any hint of previous chassis alterations.

its peeled the whole front off including the bulkhead! if you look at the engine part on the left are the pedals!

Full res photo:

https://officialwmas.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/car-splits-in-two-in-coventry.jpg

I owned one of those age Scoobies and mine was fully caged (welded in) Looked great but not very practical. It did seem to make the car a lot more rigid, and I wondered perhaps this may have been the case to this one?

ok. my error, not a lampost but the exhaust, now that i view it on a big screen

Just putting it out there (And probably not the case) but could this arrangement be a result of intervention rather than just the crash?

If you look at the famous RS6 sequence of pictures there is a huge amount of damage to the car from the impact with the tree. The Impreza looks like you could put it back together again which suggest this a failure in the car rather than an impact.