10 Crash Test Videos of Luxury Cars

We look at the best (and worst) videos of scientists destroying our favorite cars.

Ben Keeshin

Jan 6, 2015

Crash tests are fantastic. For one thing, they’re crucial to making safer cars. Also, they are righteous fun to watch: all the drama, crunching steel and shattering glass, without anyone getting hurt. Though most people don’t know this, both the IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) and the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) make the majority of their videos publicly available.

For your benefit, we’ve excavated the best videos (a Maserati! A McLaren F1!) from NHTSA’s archive. While it’s fun to cringe as a Mercedes gets obliterated, sometimes it’s cooler to see what kind of beating more modest or more experimental cars can take. So, we included Volvo and Tesla’s (frankly amazing) crash results, as well as one cautionary tale.

Enjoy, because for once, gawking at crash scene isn’t gruesome

schadenfreude—

it’s good clean fun.

Maserati Ghibli