The crash test at TÜV SÜD was carried out in accordance with ECE-R16 with a force of 25g. An example will help to make you aware of the effect such a force can have on people and vehicles: when an Airbus A320 takes off, a force of 2.5g is exerted. Passengers feel this force when they are pressed into their seats during take-off. The force in the crash test - and correspondingly the force in serious accidents - was ten times as high.
A steel frame was specially made for the test in advance. In addition, an SCA roof 290 was glued onto an original vehicle chassis. The chassis was welded to the steel frame and this in turn was mounted on a sled. The actual test then began. In order to simulate the effects of an accident, the TÜV test engineers first accelerated the sled and then braked it abruptly to simulate a collision at 70 km/h. This created conditions similar to those in the real world. This created conditions similar to those in practice when a vehicle crashes into a tree or the end of a traffic jam, for example. The result of the crash test was consistently positive: the SCA roof remained stable and would not have led to any personal injury in an emergency.
A roof rack fastening system with a roof box was then mounted on the roof. This was loaded with the maximum permissible roof load of 50 kg. The test carried out in this case was a "city crash". This test setup is intended to simulate rear-end collisions in built-up areas. A force of 12 g was applied. The construction consisting of the pop-up roof, roof rack system and roof box also survived the test without sustaining any damage.
The wind tunnel test of the Research Institute for Automotive Engineering and Vehicle Engines simulates the negative pressure conditions acting at high speeds on the highway and the resulting load on a pop-up roof (in this case also an SCA 290 on a VW T6), especially in the area of the pop-up scissors, gas struts and closures. To test the stability of these, three load cells were attached to the inside of the roof shell using a specially mounted aluminum frame and then connected to the research institute's computer system. This was used to measure the forces acting on the roof as the inflow velocity increased.
In the first test run, the SCA roof was tested with a frontal inflow. The speed was gradually increased in cycles of 20 km/h until a maximum speed of 240 km/h was reached. The pop-up roof withstood the load without any problems - there were no signs of damage or impairment of stability. As crosswind conditions are more critical in practice than a frontal inflow, the vehicle was then tilted by 20° and the speed was also increased to 240 km/h. Here, too, no defects were found. Here too, no defects were found - on the contrary, the measured forces were far below the maximum load that an SCA roof can withstand.
The measurement data confirms the quality of SCA products, but it also helps to make further improvements and thus optimize the safety and functionality of SCA roofs. Overall, both the crash test and the wind tunnel were a complete success for SCA.
