Skip to main content

Impact resistance

A British woman discovered that her sturdy little Toyota Yaris was not quite sturdy enough to cope with an impact from a large boulder. The woman had parked her car by the roadside and returned to find it squashed flat under the weight of the 5tonne lump of rock, which had fallen from a quarry industry vehicle as it drove past.
February 22, 2012 Read time: 1 min
A British woman discovered that her sturdy little Toyota Yaris was not quite sturdy enough to cope with an impact from a large boulder. The woman had parked her car by the roadside and returned to find it squashed flat under the weight of the 5tonne lump of rock, which had fallen from a quarry industry vehicle as it drove past. The boulder was so large that it initially proved too heavy for the truck loader crane brought in to remove it. When she returned from her shopping trip to discover her vehicle had been squashed as easily as a soft drink can by the lump of rock, the woman was comparatively unperturbed by the incident and explained that she has had an eventful life.

Related Content

  • Divine intervention?
    February 24, 2012
    An American man rammed his vehicle into a car being driven by a woman and later claimed he had done so under express instructions from God. The man crashed his pick-up truck into the woman's car while he was travelling at over 160km/h. His vehicle hit the rear of the car and both vehicles spun across a median then came to a stop along a barrier in the opposite lanes. Luckily the drivers suffered only minor injuries and police commented that this could have been a sign of divine intervention given the high s
  • Tampere road tunnel - a strategic link for central Finland
    April 4, 2016
    Progress has been good for an important underground road link in Finland reports Adrian Greeman. Assuming all goes well, the new Ranta, or Lakeside, tunnel in Tampere will open in full six months early; traffic could be running by the end of this year. Work on transforming the rundown city centre with new developments will get a major boost. It is a major achievement on a four-year-long project bringing significant benefits to one of Finland's largest cities. From the government's point of view the scheme w
  • Booming Chinese aggregate demand
    February 22, 2013
    Global demand for construction aggregates is set to increase 5.2% a year until 2015 to 48.3 billion tonnes, according to research by The Freedonia Group in the United States. The same source tips China alone to account for half of all new aggregate demand worldwide in the period 2010-2015. Guy Woodford reports on the growing importance of the Asian aggregates market. China is already the biggest nation for aggregate production and use in the world, and the competition among the giants of aggregate productio
  • Rebuilding better gravel roads more efficiently
    October 15, 2015
    Using a linear road crusher can rebuild gravel roads using material onsite at a fraction of the cost of conventional methods. Gravel roads are common in many rural areas in the US to provide access to temporary work sites and are also used widely in developing countries. Maintaining and repairing these roads can pose challenges and new methods may offer improvements in efficiency.