09 Jul 07
The best-protected adults in the world
On a recent visit to Nissan's European technical centre at Cranfield in Bedfordshire, Kimiyasu Nakamura, Nissan senior vice-president for product development, said: 'This result was achieved not by chance but as a sum-up of our knowledge of crash safety.'
That knowledge has grown hugely in recent years thanks to the huge strides made in software. A car's strength can now be tested to a remarkably accurate degree by computer, long before physical prototypes exist. Nissan can carry out thousands of virtual crash tests to eliminate most of the weak spots, meaning far fewer real tests need conducting, essentially to confirm the digital results.
Frontal impact energy is dispersed through three paths
'The digital process reduced development time and improved quality,' said Nakamura. Getting the car's essentials sorted out quickly gives you more time to fine-tune the details, he explained.
Nissan's real-world crash testing is mostly done at its vast new research and development base in Japan, where accidents are reconstructed and prototypes tested. R&D teams around the world are in constant communication via email and videoconferencing, pooling their knowledge about the overlapping but not identical demands of the European, Japanese and US crash tests.
In the case of the Qashqai, the key elements are crushable zones at the front and the back, and a robust cabin - not a new idea, but executed near-perfectly. The engine compartment has been designed with a triple load path - the route taken by the impact energy - and constructed using two different strengths of steel to make sure the correct bit collapses first, once it's absorbed all the energy it can cope with.
