Pardon the dark humor, but it’s not everyday you see a Ferrari separated from a V12 powertrain that puts the ‘super’ in supercar. Especially not outside of Ferrari’s Maranello factory, that is. Unfortunately, that’s the sight that motorists in China were greeted with on a rainy day — a totaled Ferrari Purosangue that split in half in a road accident, with its discarded engine protected from the rain by an umbrella. Details are scarce at the moment, but one can only imagine the sheer force of the impact that sheared the front subframe and engine out of the super SUV.
In a crash of this severity, it’s natural to assume the driver must’ve been speeding in magnitudes higher than the speed limit. While that may be true, modern cars are also designed and engineered to keep the passengers in the reinforced passenger cell safe, allowing other parts of the car to act as impact-absorbing elements, even shearing away to blunt the force of impact.
In several instances, if a car makes contact with a rigid obstacle at just the right angle, it could result in this kind of damage, even at relatively legal speeds. That said, considering the Ferrari Purosangue boasts of a 0-60mph timing of 3.2 seconds, going on to hit 100mph from standstill in just 7.5 seconds, this particular super SUV may have been going very, very fast indeed at the moment the crash happened.
No information has been made available regarding the driver or passengers in the aftermath of this totaled Ferrari Purosangue, but reports say no one was harmed in the crash. That’s remarkable, considering the extent of the damage. The SUV itself hasn’t been tested by the NCAP yet as these testing bodies usually require four test examples to be made available to them for a series of tests to be conducted — something we’re sure most makers of half-a-million dollar supercars are loathe to agree to.
Still, the Ferrari Purosangue boasts of 10 airbags, automated emergency braking, and all of Ferrari’s advancements in chassis technology, including all its learnings from Formula 1.
The Ferrari Purosangue sits on an all-new chassis developed at Maranello, with the V12 engine situated in a mid-front position, along with the clever Power Transfer Unit (PTU) responsible for the 4×4 capabilities, with the gearbox in the rear of the car for a remarkable 49:51% weight distribution front to rear.
What this means is that the gearbox may have escaped taking the brunt of the impact, though with everything else that’s either broken or snapped off, we aren’t taking any bets on how roadworthy the engine itself will be. The lower portion of the chassis has been engineered completely in high-strength aluminum alloys, with extensive use of hollow casings to improve rigidity (by 30% compared to earlier Ferrari four-seaters) and drop weight.
Could the Purosangue’s pathbreaking semi-virtual, high wishbone suspension design have contributed to the front subframe exiting the body? One can only wonder, but the fact of the matter still remains — the driver reportedly walked away unharmed, hopefully to treat his next supercar more carefully on a wet road.
