What Happens When You Hit A Loose Manhole Cover?

You know what the problem is with the IIHS and the NHTSA? They generally only test probable, commonplace accident scenarios. How does a car hold up to a sideswipe? Can the forward collision avoidance system bring the car to a halt before it hits a motorcyclist? Stuff like that. All very important, but what about the crazy scenarios we only see in cartoons and action movies? Can your Kia Optima dodge a fruit cart while the vendor leaps out of the way? Can it survive plowing through a stack of boxes placed haphazardly in the middle of an alleyway for no reason?

Better yet, how does your car hold up to a loose manhole cover that comes popping up between your wheels like a hundred-pound cast-iron pepperoni pizza? The IIHS might not be interested in exploring this possibility, but the guys at one of our favorite YouTube channels, Garage 54, clearly sit around wondering about the same preposterous nonsense that we do, and they put the question to the test. Let’s see what happens when you let the intrusive thoughts win and drop your front wheel right into the forbidden trapdoor.

Let’s Watch This Car Go Over A Manhole Cover

We definitely recommend watching this video from beginning to end if you have a moment, but to briefly summarize, they run a handful of tests at various speeds in a Lada, a lightweight Soviet-era budget model (sort of the channel’s signature ride, if you’re a regular viewer), and then a Lexus GS 300, which is much heavier than the Lada, and with wider wheels. Here’s how those tests turned out:

Thank God Old Ladas Are Cheap

• In the first few attempts, with the manhole fully closed, the Lada failed to dislodge the manhole at moderate speeds, though the team did see the manhole cover wobbling when reviewing the slow-mo playback, encouraging them to keep going.
• With the manhole cover set an inch or two off the rim, the one-two punch of the right-side front and rear wheel sent the cover airborne, popping several feet out of the hole, roughly equaling the height of the car. In the playback, it’s seen that the car luckily managed to avoid direct contact with the cover.
• The next attempt split the iron cover cleanly into two pieces, which saw the team replacing the lid with a heavier cover.
• The heavier cover barely popped out of place on the first couple attempts, but then flopped over in its hole, spinning in place as if on an axle, catching the rear wheel and jarring the car hard enough to knock over the cabin cam, to which our test driver reports “That was severely unpleasant.”
• The Lada tests eventually end in mutually-assured-destruction when the manhole splits, but not without destroying the tire and the wheel in the impact.

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The Lexus Suffers Even Worse Than The Lada

• The heavier Lexus creates a much more noticeable thumping noise on contact with the closed manhole cover.
• The first test with a loose cover sees the Lexus gliding right through the lid, splitting it into several airborne pieces. The Lexus shoots right over the manhole at high speed, barely registering the bump. The danger here is more to the people behind you than the people in your car.
• The next test sees the iron manhole split neatly in two, dropping the rear wheel into the manhole and damaging the suspension.
• The team gets an “unbreakable” steel cover for the next test, which pops out of the hole upon impact with the first wheel, rattles around under the car, and bounces off the rear wheel. A team member finds a piece of the rim in the road after the test, finding that the steel cover has chopped a few inches right off of the wheel with the precision of a deli slicer.
• The next test busts the tire, ripping a hole right through the rubber.
• At very high speeds, the lid either flips into the air like a coin, or shoots out across the street like a frisbee.
• In the final “very unpleasant and actually quite unsettling” test, the manhole cover rips the rear bumper cover right off of the Lexus. At this point, the poor GS has had enough, and it’s clear that any further tests will be very unsafe.

So, what can we take away from all this? First, don’t hit loose manhole covers. Second, if you must, the iron covers are safer to drive over, as they tend to shatter before they can do any severe damage to the car. The steel cover tests become increasingly tense as the video progresses, eventually rendering the Lexus undriveable.

Why Doesn’t The IIHS Test For This Sort Of Thing?

As we see clearly illustrated in the Garage 54 video, to suffer the worst damages from an open manhole, you have to be actively trying to maximize the potential harm to both your car and the manhole cover.

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It should also be noted that none of the tests resulted in an immediate, direct threat to the occupants of the vehicle, at least not to the extent that a head-on collision or a t-bone accident would pose a serious safety risk. The damage was mostly to the wheels, tires, suspension, and body work. The whole idea of a crashworthy car is that it can absorb the impact with its crumple-zones so that the occupants won’t feel the worst of it, and the Lada and the Lexus both performed admirably in that regard.

Garage 54 Loves To Run Ludicrous Safety Scenarios

We’ve highlighted some of Garage 54’s wild custom builds before, like an attempt at a flying car, and a V16 Lada engine built from sixteen chainsaws (and only producing a piddly 72 horsepower). Of course, it might not be fair to call that a true V16, since it’s actually sixteen full engines running in the compartment. Their safety experiments are just as insane. They’ve construction-foamed a dude to the roof of a car for a leisurely drive around town, and they found out what happens when you forget to strap a car down in the back of a flatbed (spoiler alert: it falls off).

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One of our favorites was an experiment to find out what happens when you slather your brake rotors with lubricant, smearing the brakes in everything from Vaseline to motor oil to WD-40 and dish soap in order to find out exactly how long this extends your braking time. Most of what they do on this channel has very little practical application to any driver, mechanic, or safety technician’s daily life. But, sometimes you just want to rip the band-aid off and indulge in those intrusive thoughts, and that’s why we can’t get enough of these maniacs.

Sources: Garage 54.