The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety was established in 1959 as a non-profit organization, which focuses on safety reviews of new models in the automotive market. The agency has been crash-testing cars for decades in an attempt to evaluate their structural integrity and safety systems during a collision. We stumbled upon an old crash test video showing a Ford F-150 and a Mitsubishi 3000GT in a head-on collision. It’s painful to watch but there are some lessons to be learned, too.
We don’t know whether this crash test was conducted by the IIHS but from the video’s description, we know it was filmed at Exponent in Phoenix, Arizona. It is very difficult to determine how fast the vehicles were going before the crash, but reading through the comments under the video, it seems that somewhere between 45 miles per hour and 60 miles per hour could be an accurate guess.
And what about the year this video was shot? Again, this is information that is not available but our quick investigation shows the F-150 is from the ninth generation of the truck produced between 1992 and 1997. As for the Mitsubishi, the sports car seems to be from either the 1994 or 1995 model years but honestly, the video’s quality isn’t great and our estimation could be wrong.
The second half of the video shows the condition of the truck after the crash and it looks absolutely horrible. As far as we are aware, the F-150 didn’t get dual front airbags until the 1997 model year and this probably means both the driver and the passenger would have died in such an accident. As you can see, there’s literally zero survival space at the front. The situation doesn’t look much better for the Mitsubishi, though.
