Looks like it used to be an Acura...
http://www.trtribune.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4804:vehicle-torn-in-half-in-geer-highway-accident&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=316
How does this happen? Accident with a giant rolling blade? A truck full of chop saws? A guillotine?
Salvage car pieced together?
A previously-repaired collision would be my first guess. Wishing a speedy recovery to those injured. Glad to see no child seats back there.
The ends of a unibody car are pretty stout because they are boxed, leaving the center kinda weak. (If you want to crush a beer can, you squeeze in the middle, not the ends right?) A good shunt to the side of the engine or trunk can easily pop a car in half.
Looks like it tore pretty clean along a seam in the floorboard and at the c pillars.
Looking at the full-screen pics, i personally dont think that has anything to do with a repair. Seems to have more to do with the junction between the end of the floorpan and the the upright part at front of rear seat/gas tank.
Same thing happened near Detroit over the weekend.
Wow. Sure hope no one was in the back seat. Judging by the lack of blood there wasn't.
Eerily similar to the outcome of a 50+mph meeting between an SVT Contour and a 6" wide Maple tree trunk that killed my friend.
The tree still stands, 12 years later - cant even see a scar in the bark anymore. The 2 halves of the car were about 20 yards apart
Cars... aren't really held together by much.
My brother very nearly had that happen to him. He was pulling out of the driveway, and got hit in the B pillar at somewhere north of 55mph. It pulled the 91 626 in half. Not a single light was broken, but it ripped the floor pan and roof about 3/4 of the way through.
My 911 pistons,cylinders, crank and rods were in the back seat.
At all of these cars!
nervousdog wrote: Same thing happened near Detroit over the weekend. Cadillac split in half
^^^ Dude in the interview seems smarter than the reporter. Sheesh!
Am I the only one thinking that there may be a loop hole in the NTSB mandated crash testing of cars here?
Dean, stop trying to make cars heavier! 
I guess it depends on the frequency of this sort of damage and related injuries. They're spectacular when they happen, but how often? Apparently, 2009 had 33,963 automobile deaths in the US. The small number of cars being ripped in half - with or without a rear seat passenger - likely disappears into statistical insignificance.
You are rite what was I thinking. 
Gearheadotaku wrote: Salvage car pieced together?
This is what I'm thinking. It's probably an older sectioned job. It looks like the rear was hit hard, but it still shouldn't have ripped apart so cleanly across the floor.
as long as the VIN plate stayed intact...
If you guys want to park any car you own on the street, and let me hit it at the B pillar on about a 45 degree angle from the front, I'll betcha I can tear it in half too. Just gotta be going fast enough.
SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote:Gearheadotaku wrote: Salvage car pieced together?This is what I'm thinking. It's probably an older sectioned job. It looks like the rear was hit hard, but it still shouldn't have ripped apart so cleanly across the floor.
yah
I had a buddy with a Dodge Omni in HS. He spun out on some black ice and wrapped it around a telephone pole. The front and rear bumpers were touching, and the engine ripped out of the bay and ended up IN the hatchback. He couldn't walk for 5 months.
Of course, that was a Dodge Omni, not a modern Acura.
A friend died while we were in college when he flipped his Integra and the bottom hit a tree. It damn near ripped his car in half.
Streetwiseguy wrote: If you guys want to park any car you own on the street, and let me hit it at the B pillar on about a 45 degree angle from the front, I'll betcha I can tear it in half too. Just gotta be going fast enough.
It's all about the angle.
Really, if you could hit with enough force that you nose into the pillar instead of glancing off of it, there's the leverage you need to tear the back half of the car off. Especially if you hit a 4-door right in front of the rear wheelwell, you have that nice hole already in the car in front of a reinforced section. The floor isn't much more than 22-gauge sheet with some flimsy box sections on the sides and maybe a couple tacked-on box sections underneath. You don't even have to tear the roof apart.
Heh, took another look at the car in question. The car is a 2-door, but if you look carefully, only one of the rear pillars is detached. The roof is essentially intact, and the floor separated at the spot welds where the footwell floor is attached to the kicked-up area where the fuel tank and rear suspension nestle into. You can see the seam sealer still attached to the main part of the car.
It wasn't "torn in half"... the rear third of the car was broken off partway.
And also, if you notice in the background, it was hit by a big Toyota truck. Given where the two vehicles are stopped, it appears that it was an angled blow, or exactly as Streetwiseguy theorized.
In the pics, that looks like a clean cut. I'd say that it was 2 salvage cars welded together and sold to some poor shmuck.
It's actually common to see a car cut open like that. It all depends on vehicle speed and point of contact. Of course my personal experience is purely anecdotal but when I was doing DWIs I would see a vehicle broken like that a couple times a month.
Surprisingly enough full size pickups are especially prone to breaking apart like that.
From what I have heard from body-shop guys, it's shockingly easy to pop spotwelds apart when trying to straighten a body.
And then there's my friend who (and there is video of this) used a truck and chain to try to straighten the nose of an Acura after someone hit it in an enduro, and they separated most of the spotwelds in the nose.
Keep in mind, some of that may have very well been the fire & rescue guys cutting the back half the rest of the way off, if that was the easiest way to get the driver out.
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