by Rachel NaborsUpdate 9/17/2009: Snopes finally debunked this photo after I published this blog post. The picture is real, but the car is a Ford Escape, not a smart car! And the crash only nailed one side of the vehicle so the driver survived and was discharged from the hospital. Myth busted!
I was alarmed when this picture of a “smart car crash” with two trucks started popping up all over Twitter with captions like “can you find the smart car?”
The so-called "smart car wreck" doesn't actually involve a smart car at all!
Momentarily I flinched, imagining myself in my little smart car in the same accident. But upon closer inspection, the image turns out to be a fake… or not of a smart car at all!
First I went back to look for blood around the wreckage. You usually don’t see blood in car crash pictures, but what can I say, I have a morbid curiosity. But there was something missing from the scene: a tell-tale spray of shattered plastic! All the body panels of a smart car are made of plastic, not metal, so when a smart car hits something at high speed, the body panels disintegrate into a spray of chips as this smart car crash test video demonstrates:
(Like watching a piano being hurled by a trebuchet, isnt’ it? Gorgeous.)
As you can see, smart car crashes are very, very messy. The car in the circulated photo is all metal. The only reason it’s being touted as as a picture of a smart car is because of the one small wheel in the wreckage. But as keen observer Soup_Monger pointed out in a forum, “That’s not a smart car in the accident photo… it has 5 bolt wheels…. and a lot more metal. Looks like another email joke.” People at smartcarofamerica.com’s forums concur that the odd wheels and lack of plastic debris mean that the car is not a smart car.
Additionally, the photo looks shopped to me. It looks like someone took a picture of an accident where two gravel trucks that had bumped into each other and pasted in wreckage from a car compacting facility.
- Notice that the edges where the wreck meets the trucks are blurred and darkened (to hide seams), especially on the red truck, and that there is a noticeable lack of debris that you would expect in an accident like this.
- The one visible wheel blurs into the pavement indistinguishably.
- The car looks like it was crushed in a compactor, not at high speed, which would have smashed the it, not folded it neatly.
- The damp spot under the so-called “smart car” is concurrent with fluid leaking from a cracked radiator caused by the red truck slamming into the truck in front of it at moderate speed.
- The minimal damage done to both trucks suggests a slow impact that wouldn’t have had the energy needed to demolish the smart car’s tridion safety cell, the smart’s roll cage. In the video above, even slamming into solid concrete at 70 miles per hour only lightly bent one arm of the cage.
You would be surprised what people with too much time on their hands will do with a copy of Photoshop. (I should know--I work with it every day!)
So, please, look closely before you let someone else tell you what you are seeing. And remember, if this were a real wreck, not even an SUV would have made it out of there unscathed. So drive safely, no matter what size your vehicle is!
If that is a metal car, which it appears so, imagine that wreck with a SMART car. Ouch!
Aug 14 2009 | Permalink
@Phil Mos: The smart car has a roll cage. I don’t think that Ford does. Any car would have been seriously crumpled in that accident, though. All the more reason to drive safely!
Aug 17 2009 | Permalink
Snopes is reporting that the car in question is a Ford Escape, not a Smart and that the driver apparently survived…
http://www.snopes.com/photos/accident/smallcar.asp
Aug 14 2009 | Permalink
Just paste the photo into photoshop and enlarge. It’s obvious where sections have been cut and pasted and blurred.
Compare pixels. A real photo will show uniformity in the pixilation on magnification.
Watched a show on PBS Nova about a whole new discipline emerging in developing software that can tell when a picture has been altered and mostly it involves comparing uniformity of pixels.
What irritates me is not that someone has too much time and makes up these phony photos BUT they get passed around (like to me)as genuine from folks that dislike or resent my little red Smart car.
Cheers
Aug 15 2009 | Permalink
I agree with you that it probably isn’t a smart car…however, that is certainly a very real accident and not faked or doctored. Smart car??? Doubt it…Real car…Definately.
Aug 16 2009 | Permalink
When in doubt snopes it
Not a photoshop aparently but far from what you’d believe and more to your point that even an SUV wouldn’r survive:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/accident/smallcar.asp
Aug 17 2009 | Permalink
@RG: I had in fact gone to Snopes prior to posting this, but finding no article at that time, I felt compelled to write this one to defend the smart’s honor. How delighted I am that Snopes uncovered the truth about the photo and posted it. I’ve included a link to it in the article now. Thanks for the heads up!
Aug 17 2009 | Permalink
This falsehood is going rampant in SoCal, and I’m trying to put a stop to it by replying to everyone who sends it to me this letter: “I disagree. Look closer. That wheel that seems to have escaped any damage (below the red truck’s bumper) is not a match to any SMART ever produced. It is very close to the TOYOTA Celica GT and MR2, however, and is pretty close to a Pontiac Grand Am. Besides, SMART cars have only 3 lugs, and that one has five. This email was probably originated by someone who doesn’t want us to buy SMART for unknown reasons. Don’t believe everything you read.” Thanks to SNOPES for bringing to truth to wildfire internet lies.
-Kevin
Aug 17 2009 | Permalink
There is a quick and easy way to know this isn’t a Smart Car… all smart cars have 3 wheel lugs on their rims… the crushed tin-can in this photo clearly has 5.
Sep 2 2009 | Permalink
I can’t believe how blind or stupid you people are about protecting the “image” of the Smart car. Listen, you can love it all you want, but if you had any brains you would KNOW the damn thing is a death trap. And the mileage sucks for its size. Drive carefully! Oh, and keep watching the Emperor’s New Clothes!
Dec 30 2009 | Permalink
And I’m astonished that you would go trolling someone’s blog before doing your homework. The smart has a roll cage. It’s safer than my old Ford Escort. Read the literature and the reviews. It does better than larger cars in its price range as far as safety ratings go.
Dec 30 2009 | Permalink
Rachel I read your post above referring to the Smart car’s “honor”. Vehicles don’t have honor, you are obviously emotionally attached to your car, and I respect that, but I wouldn’t let my children drive one. I bought a Honda Civic for my daughter, I didn’t dare go any smaller for her safety’s sake. It’s just plain physics, velocity and mass, the roll cage won’t do much in a serious head-on frontal impact, or rear-ended impact, there’s just not enough steel there. I know a fellow who does accident investigations for a large car insurance company, and he has unfortunatelty witnessed several Smart car accidents. His assessment was to “stay away from it.”
Dec 30 2009 | Permalink
Nice try in the video to prove the Smart car is safe in a front end crash. How many jersey barriers or concrete blocks will the average driver hit at 70mph? I challenge someone to drive their Smart car into the back of a vehicle like my pickup truck at speed. We’ll see what a windshield level impact does for your belief that this little sardine can is safe for our highways!
Apr 24 2010 | Permalink
I am not sure about the veracity of the photo. That is not germane to my point now. On July 31, 1993, I responded to an accident on Elmendorf AFB involving a Chevy Suburban and a crash firetruck. The results of this accident have left me scared ever since. The teenager driving the Suburban was making a left turn at a controlled intersection and the crash truck was running code. Now on base, running code typically involved a speed of no more than 45-55 miles an hour due to rules and regulations imposed by the Base Commander. The result of the accident, the Suburban’s right side passengers would have both been killed by the front bumper of the crash truck. One passenger would have been decapitated and the other passenger would have had massive blunt force trauma to the head resulting in death. Fortunately there were no passengers in the Suburban.
The point being, the large mass of the crash truck totally demolished the Suburban SUV. Size matters
Feb 4 2010 | Permalink
Bruce, the photo turned out to be of a different car, not a smart. Size does matter, but in your example we can see that even SUVs are not immune to demolition by a larger vehicle. There’s no reason to “safe” just because you have a large vehicle, but a lot of people do and will drive more recklessly because of a flase sense of security.
Having been driving my smart for as long as I have, I can attest to the number of times my small size and manuverability has gotten me out of harm’s way. There’s more room in my lane for avoiding other drivers’ mistakes and I can drive on the highway shoulder if forced off the road by a careless driver. I’ve no doubt that a smart car would not be happy to meet a semi head on, but I don’t think an SUV would survive if they had to scoot out of the way of the same truck cutting them off in high-speed traffic.
When there’s enough data, I’d love to see a comparison between the type, severity and number of accidents in smarts versus larger cars. I think you will find that smarts get into few accidents because of their agility and advanced stabilizing features (more on that in my next post about driving on ice), but that when they do have accidents involving larger vehicles that the accidents will be more severe, like in that old statistics story. In World War I, there were many head injuries from shrapnel, so the army designed new protective helmets for the troops. Surprisingly, after implementation the percentage of fatalities from shrapnel injuries went up! Upon investigation, what had happened was that the helmet was protecting people from all but the most severe of shrapnel blasts, and that far fewer people were getting injured at all. Of those few who were injured, the damage was so severe, to the entire body and vital organs, that the helmet was no protection at all.
Feb 4 2010 | Permalink