Awesome Crashes

Gnuk Animations has an obsession with LEGO trains, and likes to see what it will take to stop one from rolling down the tracks. On their TikTok channel, you’ll find videos of a LEGO train taking on spaghetti, Q-tips, Pokémon cards, paper straws, tin foil, and more.

The vehicle physics simulator BeamNG.drive has given us countless hours of entertainment. In this crazy video from wecrashgames, they pitted various cars, trucks, and vans against a trio of massive baseball bats. Side impacts appear to be easier to escape. Play ball!

There are lots of things you could crash your vehicle into, but a giant medieval flail isn’t likely to be one of them. In this entertaining Beam.NG Drive simulation posted by TG22110, we see what might happen if you drove an old Ford Econoline van into a spiked wrecking ball at speeds up to 300 MPH. BeamNG Nation had some fun flailing about too.

Modern crash test dummies are shockingly expensive to buy. Engineer James Bruton didn’t have a spare million bucks lying around, so he decided to build his own. He made his dummy from wood, metal, 3D-printed plastic, and rubber. While it isn’t quite as refined as the industry-standard units, it’s fully outfitted with sensors like the real deal.

Crash.enabled uses the vehicle physics simulator BeamNG.drive to see how cars and trucks might behave in various collisions. In this brief clip, they test rear-ending a small hatchback into a semi-trailer at progressively less plausible speeds. Things get really bad over 60 mph, but we suppose it could be worse.

MetaBallStudios is known for its infographic-style comparison videos. This time they took a slightly different approach, showing off the relative heights of different cliffs by driving a simulated car off of each one and watching how long it took to fall all the way to the bottom.

From Titanic to The Perfect Storm to Finding Nemo, Hollywood has been depicting shipwrecks for decades. Insider asked maritime archeologist and historian James Delgado to evaluate the realism of on-screen disasters and the wreckage left behind. While they’re not always accurate, a few of the films are surprisingly spot-on.

This insane iOS and Android game puts you in control of gigantic ocean vessels that you float down a ramp and send flying into structures with the goal of crash landing into buildings and cities. It kind of reminds us of the addictive Burnout crash modes.

If there’s one thing you can rely on action movies and TV shows for, it’s car crashes. While some filmmakers have moved on to using CGI for crash effects, practical vehicle stunt work is still the most convincing. Insider got together with J.E.M. FX to explain the tricks required to create controlled vehicular mayhem on screen.

YouTube channel Handmade features models of cars that were individually hand-built out of Plasticine clay. The artist behind the camera uses a plastic model as his form, then painstakingly traces and cuts out each piece of its body to create impressively accurate miniatures. And then he crash-tests them.

We’ve always enjoyed watching videos generated using the vehicle physics simulator BeamNG.Drive. This clip showcases various vehicles driving over a square-edged pit in the middle of the road. Place your bets now: which cars will make it over, and which will fall in? Need more car vs. pit action? You’ve got it.

The S has a thing for building matchstick-powered rocket engines. This time, their goal was to create two flame-shooting vehicles out of cardboard, then crash them head-on into each other to view the fiery wreckage. It took a few attempts to get them to launch at the same time, but the money shot was worth it.

YouTuber Renbricks put together this hypnotic 8-minute compilation of Hot Wheels cars crashing through a miniature rally course. We enjoyed seeing the tiny crowd of spectators as each car whizzed by and came to a crash landing in the dirt.

There’s a series of videos making the rounds that shows vehicles being launched off of a disproportionately tall bulge in the road, and they’re quite entertaining. The clips were made using the soft-body vehicle simulator BeamNG.drive, and these ones were posted by BeamNG Nation. That Cybertruck aced the landing.

In anticipation of its upcoming release, the producers of F9 (aka Fast & Furious 9) released this short, but jam-packed reel featuring behind-the-scenes footage of some of the movie’s most epic and explosive automotive stunts. F9 hits theaters 6.25.2021.

Among its many services, European auto club ADAC performs car safety testing. In this video, they took a break from crash-testing real-world cars to see how a LEGO Technic Porsche 911 GT3 RS would hold up in a T-bone crash with a Bugatti Chiron. The narration is in German, but it’s easy to tell you wouldn’t want to be in either car.

During the 2020 Portuguese MotoGP race, championship rider Aron Canet had a crazy close call that could have ended up much worse. Not only did he fall off of his bike at speed, but he also slid down the track for what seemed like forever, and narrowly avoided being run over by multiple racers. This guy should play the lottery.

Rally races can be incredibly dangerous. They require precise coordination between driver and co-driver to negotiate countless twists and turns along the way. One wrong move and you’re off the course or worse. In the case of this rally in Russia, it seems nobody got this corner radius right. Isn’t this the point of recce before a race?

During a police chase in McLoud, Oklahoma a cop attempted a PIT maneuver on a fleeing pickup truck, causing the vehicle to lose control and flip. But rather than stopping the criminals in their tracks, the truck righted itself and kept on driving. The cops eventually got the scofflaws though.

Plane crashes are a staple of action movies. But how realistic are the crashes depicted on screen? Insider sat down with Stephen Moss, a former investigator at the UK’s Air Accident Investigation Branch and asked for his opinion on a dozen movie air disasters. As expected, some are far more accurate than others.

Being in a car crash can be quite terrifying. But what might crashes be like if other cars were invisible? With a little visual effects trickery, Donato Sansone created this surreal sequence of car crash footage, in which one of the involved vehicles was digitally removed from the scene.

Crash testing cars has saved countless lives, but with the forces that race cars regularly face, they need to be built very differently. Safety testing center IMMI shows off their Center for Advanced Product Evaluation with the tubular chassis of a sprint car. The tests include various wall crashes, and even a ceiling drop.

Rider Johannes Fischbach hopes to someday break the record for the world’s longest mountain bike jump. He recently made an attempt off of a 140-meter (459 ft) ski jump, but unfortunately couldn’t stick the landing. Amazingly, he got up and walked away from this terrifying stunt.