Pile Up: World’s Biggest Crash Test review – this destructive motoring experiment is a literal TV disaster

Four unwitting drivers are forced to smash into a lorry to solve the problems with road safety. Except the test conditions are so flawed it does no such thing…Hundreds of people die on British roads every year, with tens of thousands injured – and the multi-vehicle motorway crash is the most terrifyingly lethal way a car journey can go wrong. But the good news is, reality TV is on the case. Welcome to the car-crash telly that is Pile Up: World’s Biggest Crash Test, a programme that, suitably enough, hurls several different documentary genres together with messy results.The problem that needs addressing is this. Experts studying road safety have long been able to propel cars into one other under laboratory conditions, but controlled tests lack the crucial element of flawed humans with unpredictable reactions; actual crashes obviously do involve fickle drivers, but we don’t know when they’ll happen, so nobody’s there to capture high-quality footage from every angle. Continue reading...

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