First I have seen of this, so I have no idea of the various theories. As I understand it, the car crashed at the front and blew up? Correct? If so...
I find it very, very hard to believe a modern Mercedes would do that. Merc are very safety conscious, they sell to well off people who expect not to blow up, and that is on top of strict EU safety rules and testing. I assume the US also has it's standards to comply with too. This is a luxury car manufacturer which prides its self on safety above and beyond legislation or international standards, and sells to customer who fully expect that.
So, is there no public Merc statement or full on internal investigation? A Merc blowing up like that publicly should be a massive PR disaster for them. Who wants a luxury car that blows up in a front impact? If it is as simple as a front impact causing the car to blow up, I would have thought Merc would be very, publicly, concerned about that.
If I were some one interested in investigating this, I'd be perusing Mercedes to see what they have to say.
But post-crash fires are, in fact, depressingly typical, especially in high-speed scenarios, says Philadelphia attorney Max Kennerly, whose firm represents plaintiffs in car fires.
“If someone is driving at high speed and hits a very solid object, yeah, you’ll get a fire out of that,” Kennerly says. “It wouldn’t be an underestimation to say that every day, a lawsuit is filed over a car fire right after an accident. There are every year 300,000 vehicle fires...”
Frank Markus, technical director of Motor Trend, points out that “any impact at speeds high enough to rip the drive train out of a car is highly likely to force some object to rupture the fuel tank. There is a lot of potential chemical energy in a gas tank that's even a quarter full...
So while the casual evidence might suggest otherwise, the prosaic reality is that cars involved in high-speed crashes often go up in flames
edit: boo, beaten to the punch by 2 minutes with the same cite.
I'll just say that you, Steko and jlgreco seem pretty invested in presenting the same case, ad nauseum. With that, I have some projects to head off to work on.
Curiously, if you read our histories you will see that tptacek and I could not possibly disagree more on most of the other aspects of this continuum of stories.
But hey, if I were a government shill in Virginia I wouldn't want to make it too obvious right? Gotta keep it mixed up a bit.
A 1.75 ton car wrapping itself around a tree at 80+ mph is an exceedingly chaotic situation. It really should not be surprising that some of the times that happens a fire will occur.
The whole point to gas is the wide set of "specific circumstances" in which it is flammable. It is most flammable in its gaseous form so any fuel tank leak at all during the accident could have spilled gas all around the car which (due to its volatility) would quickly flash into a vapor form.
At that point it needs only to find 1 hot-enough part of the car to ignite and spread throughout the vapor cloud to start burning all around the car.
Major crashes are one of those circumstances. I can't even believe this is being contested, it's like something out of Zoolander... Michael Hastings framed in freak gasoline fight accident
Mythbusters is not science, and gasoline is quite easy to ignite. The catalytic converter could have done it, so could an electrical short (possibly caused by the crash).
“It wouldn’t be an underestimation to say that every day, a lawsuit is filed over a car fire right after an accident. There are every year 300,000 vehicle fires and a couple hundred deaths and a couple thousand injuries.”
Yeah well, the hole in the Pentagon on 9/11 was too small for the airplace too, and the engines magically disappeared. Regardless, today's "truth" is the official version.
I find it very, very hard to believe a modern Mercedes would do that. Merc are very safety conscious, they sell to well off people who expect not to blow up, and that is on top of strict EU safety rules and testing. I assume the US also has it's standards to comply with too. This is a luxury car manufacturer which prides its self on safety above and beyond legislation or international standards, and sells to customer who fully expect that.
So, is there no public Merc statement or full on internal investigation? A Merc blowing up like that publicly should be a massive PR disaster for them. Who wants a luxury car that blows up in a front impact? If it is as simple as a front impact causing the car to blow up, I would have thought Merc would be very, publicly, concerned about that.
If I were some one interested in investigating this, I'd be perusing Mercedes to see what they have to say.