Face Paint and 750,000 watts
Face paint - go figure. Yet with all the technology built into the Institute's testing facility, the most dramatic and visually conclusive evidence of how a car performs in a test is face paint, applied to the face and head of the high-tech dummies placed inside a car. The technicians who apply the face paint do so carefully, as if the dummy were sitting inside a green room just off stage, instead of in the middle of what is surely one of the whitest, brightest rooms ever built. Measuring 21,600 square feet, the Institute's "crash hall" is illuminated by 750,000 watts of glare-free light and is used for barrier tests, vehicle-to-vehicle head-on, frontal offset, and front-to-side impacts while vehicles are in motion. At the center of the hall is the crash area, flanked by concrete barriers, and a black galvanized steel observation balcony hangs off the south wall. The engineers and automaker reps stand outside the circle of concrete, and in the case of a barrier test, the vehicle to be tested is placed in the center of the hall and hooked up to cables, computers and cameras, each meant to measure intrusion into the vehicle and passenger movement inside the cabin. When it comes to frontal offset crash tests, the Institute's evaluation is based on three measurements: occupant compartment intrusion, injury from a crash test dummy in the driver seat, and study of slow-motion film examining how well the restraint system controlled dummy movement.
To reach that collection of data, absolutely nothing can go wrong. The vehicle must start; dummies must be painted, connected and in place; everything must exactly replicate the proper accident scenario. This is where Brian O'Neil, president of the Institute and passionate advocate of crash testing, gets serious: the money and time invested in conducting a test is significant and not easily brushed aside. But if the test is flawed in any way, so then are the results - and the outcome must contain no flaws. Once all systems go green, the small roll door opens under the balcony and the barrier begins to growl, shake and gallop, gaining speed with each passing yard until it reaches 40 mph and slams into the vehicle. At the moment of impact, everything is fluid; test dummies flail and bounce around the cabin, the car undulates and lifts, landing perhaps 50 feet from the impact spot.
