Toronto, Ontario — Tesla recently released a video of its vice president of vehicle engineering, Lars Moravy, delivering a crash course on—well, crashes, of course, and how the popular EV automaker designs its vehicles to account for all impact scenarios.
In the debut edition of “Lars Explains” on Tesla’s Youtube channel, Lars Moravy walked viewers through the design of the various crash absorption components on its lineup of vehicles.
The collision expert opened the video with a note on Tesla’s philosophy around safety, saying “At Tesla, It’s so we always like to think we have two rules. Number one, protect the occupant. Number two, protect the battery. See rule number one: protect the occupant. The way we do that is in a progressive nature of crash structure.”
Using a stripped down Tesla vehicle to demonstrate, Moravy explained how Tesla uses two bumper beams on its front-end; one standard upper bumper beam to meet the load path of vehicles of comparable size, and one lower, slightly wider bumper beam to protect against striking objects from below or outside the reach of the main beam.
He explained how that secondary bumper beam creates another load path for lower objects to be absorbed by the crush rail and subframe.
“Your main crush rail is great if you hit something up front, but if you hit a pole or a tree just outside that crush rail there’s nothing there to absorb the energy in most cars,” said Moravy.
“We put our lower load path just outside that crush rail, and we actually angle it so that if you hit something [there] we start to absorb the energy and then we push the car away from whatever object you hit to make sure that you’re not getting crushed into that object.”
As many EV advocates tend to point out, which Moravy did, the battery itself plays a key role in the safety performance of Tesla vehicles.
“One of the things that’s unique about all of Tesla’s is the battery is super low,” he said. “The lower center of gravity in addition to our suspension means our vehicles are less likely to rollover.”
Check out Tesla’s video below.
One Response
Love this video and will be showing it to my techs. I would like to see more informative videos like it. I believe it would go a long way to changing the mindset of “same ole same ole” thaat seems to be so rampant in my area.