Watch Gordon Murray Automotive Abuse a T.33 Supercar for Safety

England-based Gordon Murray Automotive is putting the final touches on a V12-powered supercar named T.33. Offered as a coupe and a convertible, the T.33 is a low-volume street-legal car, so it needs to offer a full suite of safety features for homologation. It’s not a stripped-out track machine. The brand is highlighting some of the torturous tests it’s putting the car through to ensure it’s ready for the real world.

Gordon Murray Automotive published a video that details how its engineers teach the airbags when to fire (and, crucially, when not to fire), and the process is a lot more complicated than you might assume. It’s not merely a matter of writing a few lines of code and uploading it all to one of the car’s computers. It involves real-world track testing in rough conditions that the average T.33 will hopefully never encounter.

First, the basics. The airbag control unit is the electronic part that triggers the airbags when it detects a crash. It relies partly on data sent by accelerometers, which identify sudden changes in the car’s speed. But, the airbags obviously shouldn’t blast out every time the car decelerates. If you hit a truck on the highway, you’ll want the airbags to protect you. If you hit a curb around town, you can probably get by without them.

The best way to teach the car the difference between a truck and a curb is to drive into a curb—and the footage of a sleek-looking supercar getting deliberately rammed into an obstacle might make you cringe. It gets worse. In addition to driving over rough roads, such as the cobblestones often found in European cities and a washboard-style surface at 55 mph, the T.33 mule lands a ramp jump after sailing 26 feet through the air, hits a 176-pound duffel bag at 45 mph to simulate an impact with a boar, and drives straight into (and, surprisingly, right over) a big pile of gravel.

It doesn’t drive away unscathed. The impact with the boar-like bag, which engineers named Ian, breaks the front bumper and punctures one of the radiators. Hitting a curb shatters a brake rotor, and the scratches on the various body and underbody panels are too numerous to list. Gordon Murray Automotive repaired the damage, and the rebuilt car will live on as a powertrain calibration mule for engine testing.

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