No, that is incredibly incorrect.
In a 35 mph collision, the failure of the front crash beam results in the passenger cabin receiving 40% more energy than it would otherwise.
Winner winner chicken dinner. I posted a link to a paper by Toyota on this very topic back on page 3. I'll just go ahead and unpack the whole thing here, so gather round the campfire, put a wienie over the fire, and listen to the terrible tale of the ghost of Crash Beam hollow.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv.../07-0105-O.pdf This is a paper by Toyota, published by the NHTSA. It discusses how crash energy is absorbed in a small car v big car collision as compared to a small car v SUV collision. Specifically, often a small car's front crash beam will be lower than the SUV's front crash beam and the resulting collision will occur as if the crash beam was not present at all (or, for our purposes, replaced with a worthless piece of steel tube).
First, let me just address Mike's comment that the crash beam does not seem to be doing anything in the video. This is a good observation, but I think what you meant is that the crash beam
appears to be smashed like a worthless pancake. Being smashed like a pancake is actually one of the two major roles performed by the front crash beam!
So the front "crash member" has two jobs: carry crash loads and dissipate kinetic energy.
There were a lot of math-y terms in there, so I bolded the easy-to-read summary at the end. The long and short of it is that when your FR-S is going down the street it has a bunch of kinetic energy and when it runs into something then all that kinetic energy has to go somewhere, and when it goes into the car it deforms the car. This is non-negotiable, we can not change this.
What we
can change is
where the energy goes and
what gets deformed.
No kidding! Ideally it is not your face or your femur doing the deforming!
So this is pretty basic. When you are in a frontal collision in the FR-S, there are three or four feet between your knees and the point of impact. If you don't want your knees to absorb "deformation energy" then you want as much of that energy to be absorbed in those three or four feet as possible, right?
When a small car hits an SUV, there is about 210 kJ of energy to dispense between the two of them. Kilojoules are an odd measurement for us, if you convert it to a gear-head measurement, you get 154,896 ft/lbs. That's a lot of energy :)
That's where the job of dissipating crash energy comes into play. In the videos, yes, you can see the crash beam getting smushed. It is called a "crumple zone" because its job is to absorb energy by being crumpled in an energy-draining method. This absorbs energy that is not felt in the rest of the car.
In a 35mph collision, the energy absorption of the front crash beam is exhausted in about 20ms, but its job is not done yet! It still has about 80ms where it performs its other job to "carry crash loads."
A Frontal Offset crash means that the impact is focused on one side of the car. But guess what, your FR-S is not designed to absorb 154,896 ft/lbs of energy on one side of the car, so some of it has to be
carried to the other side.
See the blue pieces here? These are the structural members to distribute load in a frontal crash.
http://i.imgur.com/PQu9hwY.png
The "bumper reinforcement" is the structural piece that connects the driver's side rails to the passenger's side rails. It needs to be strong so that even after it crumples, it can still distribute the energy of a crash across both structural rails of your car. When the "bumper reinforcement" front beam fails, the energy is carried into the power train instead of the structural members.
Where do you think the power train is going to go? Yes, it is going to go into your lap or your passenger's lap.
Front beam doing its job:
http://i.imgur.com/ieFR9UW.png
Front beam failing at its job:
http://i.imgur.com/fCjFCxx.png
You can see this working on a BRZ in this different video. As the BRZ comes into view, visualize where the engine is sitting (remember it's a little further back than most cars, 53/47 weight ratio and all that) and see how well that space is preserved:
http://youtu.be/bDi0pE8IRNg?t=40s
At full impact, it looks like the engine might be encroached upon by the test barrier, but as the BRZ bounces away you can see that no, the test barrier was deformed and the FA20's engine bay was largely preserved. You can see it in this picture too, that the power train has not encroached into the passenger compartment:
http://www.iihs.org/frontend/iihs/ra...6Mn0&width=800
The passenger compartment is preserved because the front crash beam successfully carried ~35% of the energy to the structural rails on the opposite side of the car. You can also see that the front crash beam is actually not in terrible shape, all things considered.
What happens when the crash beam fails and this energy is not carried to the other side?
A 35 mph frontal offset collision with a worthless front crash beam results in 40% more energy being absorbed by the passenger cabin than in a 45 mph frontal offset collision with a well-functioning crash beam.
You read that correct. You would be safer in a 45 mph collision with a good crash beam than in a 35 mph collision with a bad crash beam.
Your car basically has a structural cage surrounding your engine bay so that the engine etc do not get shoved into the passenger compartment during a collision. The most important part of that cage is the front crash beam. It absorbs a significant amount of energy during its crumple phase, and it distributes uneven crash loads so that neither side of the car gets more than it can handle. In a 100 mph collision you are probably toast no matter what, but it has been proven to significantly reduce the deformation energy absorbed by the passenger compartment in collisions up to 45 mph.
Chop holes in it at your own risk. Replace with a $150 steel tube at your own risk.
Edit: Just to clear up potential misconceptions about where the whole "low-speed" and "5mph" idea came from, these front crash beams
are designed to absorb the energy from a collision of ~10mph without needing to be replaced. However, this is clearly not their only purpose.
