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-   -   What happens to NCAP cars after they are crash-tested? (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/road-safety/268249-what-happens-ncap-cars-after-they-crash-tested.html)

Hey Friends,

We all know about the NCAP tests and star-rating provided to cars by them..

But one thing has been racking up my mind for the past 2 days: What happens to these cars after they are tested?

I searched on Team-BHP - No answers. I searched on google - No answers. So, I'm opening a new thread for this discussion.

My questions are:

1) Will they be sold off as new cars after they are repaired?
2) Will the non-damaged parts be used in future cars?
3) Will the company have these cars as a reference to make safer cars?

Please throw some light on this BHPians! Any response will be appreciated.

After a crash test, a car may be significantly damaged or even destroyed. The purpose of a crash test is to evaluate the safety of a vehicle in the event of a real-world collision, and the results are used to help improve the design and engineering of cars to make them safer for consumers. After the test, the cars are scrapped.

Even other test cars for that matter (like the camouflaged test mules you see on the road), are scrapped after the test runs are completed.

I don't know if they do, but the remains would be useful for the engineering team to compare how close their virtual crash model and analysis is compared to the real world.

There's no way manufacturers will bother fixing the car and selling it because that would require even more labour compared to what can be created in the factory.

Thanks for the information man, definitely makes sense.

Was pondering over this a couple weeks ago when I visited a car scrap yard in UK during my business trip, and found crashed cars with NCAP stickering in one of the cars. Was very shocked to see, as I was thinking that either the car company of the NCAP organization would retain it.

I then asked the manager of the yard if they had more cars like that. He responded that they receive these kind of cars once a month. He showed me various cars which had no NCAP stickering (guess NCAP forgot to take it off one one car) and were in various states of crash - rollover, T-Bone, rear impact, frontal impact. They also received seats, which were tested in whiplash.

The manager told me that they take out the working and non-damaged parts of these cars and sell it to customers. The seats would be kept for sitting area for workers, or repaired and sold off. Now I understand everything that happens.

Pretty sure that you wont believe it, but I even saw a tested BMW X1 lying over there! :Shockked:

Cheers

On an extremely light note:

VW, Tata & M&M cars get their bumpers changed and are given to NCAP employees for daily use.

Maruti cars are rolled and sent back to the factory where they would be used as raw material to make new cars again rl:rl:

Forget about NCAP testing, OEs build Prototype and production trial cars for several other testing and validation. Some are marked as saleable (when the car is made as per the final production spec, and used as a display vehicle or meeting certain protocols) and only those will be sold to market. These cars are just another brand-new production car that reaches the dealership after a small detour (like display during launch events, journalist drives, etc)

Anything other than the saleable lot, will be scrapped as per their internal policy and retention period.

Repairing or salvaging parts from these cars are not worthy for OEs for below reasons.
- Not their nature of business (repair / resale)
- Performance couldn't be guaranteed (can't risk the brand image)
- Laborious job, consumes more time and cost than building and selling a new car

Global NCAP once said it costs them more to ship Indian cars to the test lab in Germany than it does to buy and test them. There is no way they are shipped back to India and sold to customers.

Euro NCAP collects all post-test cars and presents them to industry representatives at an annual Manufacturers’ Viewing event in Brussels. Latin NCAP also sometimes joins them. After this they are scrapped.

Here is a picture from their latest one:

Source

EDIT:
Appetite for destruction: how cars are crash tested - Autocar UK

Thanks dude, surely helped me to understand the basics of scrapping. :thumbs up

I have seen many scrapyards at Chennai, but only metal parts of the cars are scrapped. So possibly, the plastic parts are salvaged and used. But this might not be the case in other countries.

Summarising it should read as:-

The car

- Gets to the designated site

- Gets smashed and mashed

- Gets stars or no stars (latter especially for some of the lower end brands in India)

- Gets studied and researched (no research in many cases by some hidebound carmakers in India) by respective automaker, post smashing and mashing

- Gets scrapped as a sacrificial goat

- Gets lots and lots of media publicity that none of its siblings can ever dream of

I had an opportunity to go for a short consulting assignment at Honda R&D in Ohio, USA long back. I was surprised to see thousands of workers from top to bottom at cafeteria wearing all white dress. They are very committed to their work and may be white signifies that they are actually doing surgeries to cars like humans. Basically the R&D facility does hundreds of tests before finally doing the last crash test. The people involved in hand building these future cars get emotional during the crash test as they treat them like their babies. It seems these test futuristic cars cost millions of dollars each as they are hand built.

No way that is going to be repaired and sold back to anyone because in most cases the condition of cars is seen in a 'Total Loss' state.

Either they are scrapped or I hope that the manufacturer brings their car back to their facility for R&D to study the damage.

Except in the case of Hyundai /Kia /Maruti, where I suppose the engineers won't really want to bother analysing how to make it safer

Indeed an interesting thread.

Could anyone please confirm if the test car really has a proper engine or just a dummy in terms of weight and shape? If at all this is a valid question.

I somehow remember the car being pushed upto the test speeds. Could be a naive observation of mine :D

Very valid question.. I guess that to meet real simulations and scenarios of a crash, a dummy engine would not do justice. But I guess the real engine, if implied, will have reduced functionality and only the ability to front.. Easy coding mate! :D

Hope that's the way it is. I was just curious.

With a dummy it would save decent amount for the manufacturer with the remains basically meant for some post mortem kind of analysis if any followed by scrapping.