Fifth Gear's Motorway Pile-up | Fifth Gear Classic

Man, props to them for actually showing us the unedited clips of the impact — rather than overdoing it with ten different camera angles and not a single undisturbed shot of the crash from beginning to end.

This is horrifying. Sadly a realistic occurence due to way too many idiots on the roads.

Cars are designed for some frontal impact protection but, so it seems, not so much for rear impact.

2 years ago damn

I used to drive an Uno when I was a teenager, I always thought that if I had a crash I would have been fucked!

This was informative. I bought that Mercedes.

Tiff is a amazing driver, abile to drive fast & skilfully.
However even he knows when to drive slow. & that’s why he’s a Good driver.

I remember watching this when it was first broadcast and it stuck with me ever since.

No surprise that the Mercedes-Benz remained pretty much intact. The safety cell really does give occupants a high chance of survival in a front end or rear end crash.

Winter white-out and glare ice one day on the expressway one evening... I'd slowed to 25~30 MPH, hazards on. Suddenly I was overtaken by a large herd of SUVs (this was in America btw, SE corner of Lake Michigan/known bad spot) all plowing along at 70 MPH+ or so. Got a couple of looks from the windows of those 4wd behemoths as they flew by... "lol look at Mr. Slow" was written on their faces as they all but pointed and laughed at the little borrowed Toyota.
Time passed and we (wife and baby son were in the car too) continued on at our happy snail's pace, warm, dry and making steady if glacial progress. Then in the distance... lights. Not on the roadway, but in the median. One of the big 4x4s had spun off the road. A minute or so later there was another, and another, and another and... you get the picture. Most of the nearly dozen or so managed to at least stay on their wheels... a few did not.
Even though I had time to take it all in at my leisurely pace I was mostly focusing on the road, and I couldn't see their faces... but something tells me their expressions had changed. It's a fairly remote stretch of highway, and recovery there is slow and expensive, especially in blizzard conditions.
Eventually I came upon a State Trooper stopped under an underpass near one of the last (first?) wrecks, and pulled over to have a chat... told him what I'd seen spread out behind us all down the median and ditch, and how they'd gotten there. "Roger" he said, "then they're all getting tickets, too" and he called for backup.
We plodded on, eventually broke out of the worst of it to better conditions and made it to our destination... tired, late and hungry but fully intact.

It was on the news the next day... not everyone had survived.

TLDR: Slow down. The life you save might be that of someone you love.

Top gear is a British comedy ,fifth gear is the British horror 😆😆

Not gonna lie, that old s class was an absolute TANK

The person who went to prison as a result of the 1997 pile up was David Fairclough who was 46 at the time. He was acquitted for death by dangerous driving. And his driving license was suspended for 4 years.

Burnout crash mode in real life

Shame about them Vauxhall Nova's

I like the homer bobble head

Then add a semi

mercedes W126 SEL the best & the strongest car ever made

I don't think toni can fix that uno.

Speeds need to be decreased gradually, otherwise, if you have a bunch of traffic doing 70, and you slow the speed down to 40 just a few hundred yards ahead in low visibility conditions, then an accident like this is inevitable.

These are all classics now.

We learnt today that Fiat Uno’s are death traps.

I want to see tests like this done with modern cars like Tesla and Volvo so bad, but they would be so expensive lol.

Having been a passenger in a car that was at the back of the pack and did indeed get hit. I can tell you this is a terrifying experience. Luckily for us though, it wasn't in fog, just at night and the guy did eventually notice and break, but not in time and hit us doing a good 40 to 50 mph.

the wrangler can probably start but the driver will be dead

This is another reason why they're going to take driving away from us

after this episode im paying attention to road signals speed limitation like never before . saw it 2 years ago still remember .

going 50+ in fog is suicide

Real life beaming N
G pile up

ÕMĞ é PôWéŘ-PhÛľĽ Orrrsé-Strâylêans
😲 😲 😲 😳 😵 😳 😵 😵 😶 😶 😶 😶 😵 😳 😵 😳 😵 😶 😳 😲 😲 😲 😱 😨 😨 😨 😧 😥 😦 😧 😧 😨 😨 😨 😧 😥 😦 😧 😧 😨

Some nice cars trashed there

😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬🛑🛑🛑🛑🚧🚧🚧🚦⚠️⚠️⚠️

If its truck no drivers of any car would stay alive or have injuries

I see homer in one of the cars doing a face palm

Still to the day, this scares me. Yes the Merc was unscathed internally but only until the next lunatic comes barreling through. Then comes a lorry or two.

Testing with a metro isn't a great example. It's like being hit by a sheet of paper

My reaction to the video: Pay attention to your driving and your surroundings all the time. Also, whenever fog comes on the motorway, SLOW DOWN, YOU DONKEYS.

lesson learned: drive a merc

Seeing all these fifth gear crash tests just makes me think the show is just run by stunt choreographers hiding their budget behind a tv show.

Poor Bluebird 😢

Holy shit, that Uno! and what if a HGV went into the pile, God forbid a tanker or explosive chemicals truck. *Shudders

Why do they keep giving them cars!?!???!

Fiat is the number Uno

I remember watching this as a teenager back when it was broadcast and the sight of that Fiat UNO, with front and rear wheels basically touching has stuck with me vividly all these years. I watched shows like Fifth Gear for entertainment but it says something about Fifth Gear that it actually had (and still does) a positive impact on my driving habits.

Pink goo. 🥩 It could be you.😔

Sadly, modern peeps saying that their 2024-built vehicle would fare much better than the flattened Uno are kidding themselves. No regular road car (parked in a queue) will survive a direct 70 mph rear impact. Can't be done. Forget about your airbags, your crumple zones and your 5-Star ratings. Any car will be utterly demolished.

I appreciate the enormous effort required to stage an incident like this, but it would have been even more interesting if all the cars had a tankful of fuel and their engines running. Would there have been fires?

And what if there had been EVs involved? (I know they didn't exist at the time; I'm just hypothesising). Crushed lithium propulsion batteries are even more scary than petrol and diesel spillages.

Having the big Mercedes run last was unfortunate and highly misleading. It ran into and crushed smaller cars, yes, but those cars were already one big crumple zone, so the Merc came to a relatively gentle stop. Of course its occupants would have survived.

But if the Merc had been hit in turn - by anything - it, too, would be toast.

Likewise, if the Merc had been rear-ended first (by the red Metro) it would have crumpled. Yes it would. That's just physics. No car ever built will survive that kind of impact. And let's not forget that many drivers regard the 70 mph national limit as a suggested acceptable minimum; they cruise at 90.

And then there are the 40-ton lorries and coaches to consider...