THE BEST Crashes

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.

While there’s lots of joy to be had in building things from LEGO, it can also be a little bit satisfying to break them apart. In this montage from Custom Bricks & Models by Ren, he recorded 1000 fps slow-motion footage of various LEGO vehicles being smashed to pieces. At least he was kind enough to put helmets on his minifigs.

(PG-13: Language) While walking down the street one morning, Ed Lawson spotted the aftermath of what appears to have been a very intoxicated driver side-swiping parked cars. But this clip is far less about the destruction and more about the Lawson’s genius commentary.

Auto body mechanic Arthur Tussik shows how – with the proper skills, time, tools, and parts – a totaled car can be made to look just like new. Here, he takes a horribly smashed up BMW 7 series, and brings it back to life. We can’t speak to its structural integrity, but it looks good.

In Russia, there’s a dashcam in just about every car these days. Dmitrii Kalashnikov’s intense documentary is assembled entirely from dashcam footage, which captured everything from a meteor crashing to Earth, to gas station fires, to some of the craziest road rage ever.

This amazing remote-controlled model plane was a dead ringer for an Airbus A330-300 jetliner, and it looked absolutely fantastic flying about for the first 3+ minutes of this video. Sadly, something went horribly wrong right before landing, and the plane is no more.

BeamNG.drive is an automotive physics simulator that behaves quite realistically. In this satisfying clip from DestructionNation, watch what happens when cars, trucks, and SUVs are subjected to 100 speed bumps in a row without any effort made to slow down.

One of the cooler LEGO Technic kits out there is the Porsche 911 GT3 RS. It’s simply stunning. But that didn’t stop the guys from c’t Magazine from taking theirs and smashing it into a wall, with the help of the German automotive safety group ADAC and their crash test facility.

Footage from the 2017 Rally Islas Canarias, during which driver Tomasz Kasperczyk overshot the line coming around a bend and could have easily tumbled down a deadly cliff. Thankfully, unlike some rally courses, there’s a guard rail on this course.

If you’ve contemplated using that drone you got for Christmas to shoot action footage of athletes or race cars, DON’T. This short video from last year’s FIS Alpine slalom at Madonna di Campiglio shows skier Marcel Hirscher as he’s nearly taken out by an errant UAV.

When you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. So we don’t fault this guy for stopping his car and hopping out to take a bathroom break in the middle of nature. But if you’re gonna do it on a hill, make sure to set your parking brake.

It’s a well known fact that vehicular safety standards are much higher in the US and Europe than many places. The IIHS conducted a front overlap crash test to illustrate the dramatic difference between Nissan’s cheapest Mexican sedan, and its cheapest US sedan.

If you need something crash or safety tested in Switzerland, you send it to the Dynamic Test Center. In this video, they decided to load up a shopping cart with groceries, then first run it into a car at 11 mph, then really amp things up by smashing it into a wall at more than 73 mph.

During last year’s Porsche Carrera Cup France, a bizarre accident occurred right after the start of the race, as one car spun around in tight traffic, and another drove right up onto its hood. The result: The world’s first double-decker Porsche.

Each year, the town of Glacier View, Alaska celebrates Independence Day with a gathering of friends and family, followed by a parade and food. But instead of capping of the celebration with fireworks, they launch cars off of a cliff – a creative solution to the lack of darkness in July.

Roman Atwood picks up some of his fellow YouTube celebs for a ride in his fancy BMW i8, but as is the case with pretty much everything he does, his passengers end up victims of another one of his pranks.

Footage from a Discovery program which documented the Piasecki PA97 Helistat, an experimental logging blimp, which used an ungainly configuration of four helicopters to lift it off the ground. Just looking at the thing, it seemed like a bad idea… and it was.

This 2009 footage from Consumer Reports shows of just how far automotive safety has progressed in the last 50-odd years, as they rammed a modern Chevy Malibu into a 1959 Chevy Bel Air in a frontal-offset crash test. And car safety just keeps getting better.

Last year, YouTuber TurboFoz gunned it through the tunnels of California’s Angeles Crest Highway in his tuned 2004 Subaru. He didn’t realize there was a sharp curve ahead, and ended up going off a cliff. Fortunately, he was okay, though we’re sure his underwear was not.

This driver in Kemerovo, Russia appears to lack the basic skills required to pull out of even the most basic of parking spaces in the smallest of cars. We can only imagine the carnage he left along the side of the road on his way home. (Thanks Robert!)