[jyl]

This new test involves an extraordinarily severe crash. The car is going 40 mph. The barrier does not deform at all, making it roughly like a head on with another vehicle of equal mass also going 40 mph. The barrier overlaps only the left 25% of the car, so all the kinetic energy is being concentrated into a very small area - for mid-sized cars, an area appx 15" wide. If the car isn't designed for this kind of crash, it'll be hard to perform well. I guess the engineers will have to design the next generation of cars for this test, if it becomes a standard test.