Car Crash Physics

My first thought when I heard about this accident was how could that much mass get airborne. I heard that the car hit a median divider. Would that encounter have launched it?

Don’t know the physics of the boxter, if it’s anything like the older 911’s, they are very light cars, and if air would get under it, ie, leave the ground with the nose up and at that rate of speed, it will in a way ‘fly’. I can see it happening. But to this extent, ... they were going beyond their skills set.

the problem I see is, just because the ‘kids’ can afford a fast car,... doesn’t mean they know how to drive it.

I know of an incident in Savannah, Ga a few years back where the driver of a Subaru WRX STI hit the curb of an island and the car ended up into the windshield of another car on the other side of the road headed into the opposite direction. Fortunately, no one was killed, so yes, I believe it could have launched it, but to travel that far they must have been going quite a rate of speed.

In excess of 100 mph says it all....convertible, landed in an inverted position, says the rest...

https://www.boston.com/news/national-news/2019/11/10/2-dead-after-porsche-crashes-into-buildings-2nd-floor

Fasten your helmet it's going to be a bumpy ride....

This rocket almost surely has a "black box" in it.

That should take any guesswork out of the equation.

What do black boxes record ?

Does My Car Have a Black Box ? | What Does the Black Box Record ?

From a physics point of view, the car had considerable horizontal momentum when it hit an immovable object (the ditch) which exerted a force on the car, redirecting the car's momentum in an upward direction, (or in other words, it bounced).

Just an observation that we do not know the actions of the passenger - who may well be an innocent victim.

As for the physics we would likely be limited by not knowing where on the parabola of flight the impact point occurs i.e. was the car still increasing in elevation or descending

There is an input energy and the car bounces this can be resolved into an almost infinite variety of angles of take off some of which would just send the car vertical. So there are a whole set of options from one in which the car just reaches the house to ones where it has barely lost any energy.

Trying to figure the the impact energy of crashing through that wall is for the birds!

Then there is the hysteresis of the compression and bounce from the tyres and shocks.

It feels like one one of those A level questions (an exam Brits take at 18 which are the basis for University entrance) where getting the right answer is not so important as the process. In my mock A level the question was about the energy of a tennis ball at serve. Some of my colleagues just went with - fastest serve Roscoe Tanner (its a few years ago) 140 mph and KE = 1/2 mv2

I'd figured the basis for the question and included momentum of arm and shoulder elasticity of strigs etc ad nauseum and then jigged my calcs so that i got about 120mph!

~75 joules...

Did the survivors get prosecuted?

If Evel Knievel can do it with a motorcycle and a ramp, there's no reason a Porsche moving fast enough hitting a ditch could not get airborne.