Translate from metric to standard at your leisure, but 30 meters in the air is roughly 100 feet. 100 feet in the air, dangling from a guide wire, with some schmoe hanging on to the emergency release cable, just waiting for the go-ahead to pop the clip and send at least two tons of super-strong, super-safe Swedish brick down onto the asphalt in the least graceful way possible. Other than the best day at work possible for some engineers and safety analyst types, what’s the point of the wanton destruction? Wouldn’t hooking a cable u to the front subframe and dragging the vehicle towards it’s date with destiny bring about the same results?
Well…no. You see, the effects of a staged crash at a certain basic angle is easy to deal with. You know that the front, or the offset, or the T-bone damage will be predictable and easy to work around. If your job is to cut people out of vehicles as part of rescue operations, you don’t need predictable results. You need to start with a mangled mess of a vehicle and get the poor soul out of there and to the hospital safely and swiftly. This is where tools like the Jaws of Life come into play, but before the accident scene actually happens, practice is needed. Volvo gets crash test data, rescuers get training, and we get to see what happens when a late-model Volvo gets dropped like a rock.
