Mercedes-Benz drove two CLA models into each other on purpose at 56 km/h (35 mph) with nobody touching the brakes. The automaker calls it the world's first public high-speed side-impact test between two moving production vehicles.

A hybrid CLA Shooting Brake struck the driver's side of a fully electric CLA, recreating a T-bone collision at an intersection. Each car weighed around two tonnes. Eight crash-test dummies rode inside to measure what the impact did to the people.

The setup mirrored a real intersection crash with one car running perpendicular into the side of another, both moving, neither braking. The impact speed was 56 km/h, or about 35 mph. Mercedes-Benz describes that as the upper end of typical intersection crashes.

Mercedes-Benz says the passenger compartments of both CLA models stayed intact after the hit. That is the basic goal in any side-impact crash test, a cabin that holds its shape instead of folding in on the people inside.

"Mercedes-Benz's ambition is to build the safest vehicles in the world," said Jörg Burzer, the company's chief technology officer for development and purchasing. He called the test "a powerful demonstration of that ambition" and presented it as proof the automaker designs for how crashes actually happen.

Paul Dick, Mercedes-Benz's director of vehicle safety , linked the test to the brand's long-running habit of feeding real crash lessons back into new designs. He calls that approach "Real-Life Safety" and says the two-CLA demo shows it working in practice. The company has reconstructed roughly 6,000 real-world accidents since 1969 for exactly this kind of development work.

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