It must be really tricky to get the whole thing right ! You want deformation of the car to help absorb the forces involved in the crash, but you want that deformation to stop just before it knocks points off your NCAP rating.Mandrake wrote:
It seems that side pole intrusion is really hard to get right, and that the battery pack structure in the floor in the Tesla reinforces the body against side impacts like nothing else...putting all that extra structure in the floor in an ICE car would just be dead weight that couldn't be justified, but in a battery powered car that requires that structure to protect the battery better side impact results is a very nice "free" benefit!
Fifth Gear (TV motoring program) illustrated the point quite nicely a few years ago. They set up (along with European counterparts) a test where they drove (I think) a Smart car at about 70mph obliquely into some Armco barrier. The passenger compartment survived brilliantly as the car effectively bounced off the barrier due to its low mass - the problem was that the occupants could never have survived that impact due to the deceleration and deflection forces involved.