Hundreds of people die on British roads every year, with tens of thousands injured – and the multi-vehicle motorway crash is the most terrifyingly lethal way a car journey can go wrong. But the good news is, reality TV is on the case. Welcome to the car-crash telly that is Pile Up: World’s Biggest Crash Test, a programme that, suitably enough, hurls several different documentary genres together with messy results.
The problem that needs addressing is this. Experts studying road safety have long been able to propel cars into one other under laboratory conditions, but controlled tests lack the crucial element of flawed humans with unpredictable reactions; actual crashes obviously do involve fickle drivers, but we don’t know when they’ll happen, so nobody’s there to capture high-quality footage from every angle.
The solution, years in the making and dreamed up by top smash boffinProf James Brighton of Cranfield University, is a grand experiment that luckily lends itself to light-factual television. Four ordinary motorists are invited to attend a Scottish airstrip that has been converted to a lifesize mockup of a stretch of motorway. They are told they’re to take part in a study of driving habits. What they’re not told is that Brighton has arranged for an articulated lorry to drive sideways across all four lanes without warning, guaranteeing that the guinea pigs will be involved in a pile-up and allowing full scrutiny of their split-second attempts to avoid disaster.
Even the lawless free-for-all that is reality TV in 2025 wouldn’t lure people into a probably-fatal car crash under false pretences, though, so all the vehicles have been rigged up to be driven remotely. The stooges sit in static cars a couple of hundred metres away, with their steering, accelerating and braking simulated in real time on a wraparound video screen. The problem with this is that it surely isn’t an accurate representation of how these people would react in real life. They can’t feel the acceleration when they press the pedal and aren’t burdened with the fear of serious injury.
Perhaps to distract from this, or just to fill the inexplicably epic two-hour slot Channel 4 has given Pile Up, the programme throws all manner of other stuff at us. It leans into the reality-show element heavily, introducing us to its four disparate volunteers – a carefree 19-year-old woman, a man in his 20s who is a self-confessed boy racer, a nervous grandmother, and a guy who, er, doesn’t really have any pertinent foibles but seems nice – by filming them driving in everyday life, packing to leave for Scotland, meeting one other, being allocated a car, comparing notes after their test drives, and so on. Everyone’s encouraged to play up to their personality type, apart from the chap who doesn’t have one, and they’re soon caricaturing themselves happily.
If that doesn’t entertain you, swathes of the programme are taken up with sensational dashcam footage of real incidents, of the kind normally featured in cheap documentaries on obscure satellite channels that are called something like Britain’s Worst Drivers Volume 12: B-Road Bedlam. Such shows marry up the barrage of clips with a torrent of facts, and Pile Up is no different: approximately 17% of the voiceover here is made up of intimidating statistics about speed limits and seatbelts.
When the experiment does finally take place, it’s rigged with false jeopardy. Professional crash-scene investigators are invited to analyse the pile-up post hoc, without access to the slow-motion video and 3D modelling that everyone else is looking at, as a contrived test of their skills. Plus, it’s suggested that the test is not just groundbreaking, but controversial: “A lot of naysayers [said] this was never going to work,” says one of Brighton’s triumphant colleagues, after it’s all over. A lot of naysayers? Really? Sadly, the unlikely claim that the scientific crash-test community is a cesspit of cynical haters is left unexplored, but if they do exist, these naysayers may have had a point, since none of the most interesting conclusions end up deriving from the way the human drivers responded, which was meant to be what made the stunt unique.
The thing is, though, none of this programme’s manifest snags really matter. The experiment may not have worked on its own terms, but the sense of dread when the innocent drivers are unknowingly approaching the hazard is real, as is their emotional reaction when they see the state their cars are left in. If people at home are disturbed enough to slow down and pay more attention next time they’re on a motorway, lives will be saved. Pile Up does get to somewhere worthwhile in the end, even if it takes a circuitous route.
Pile Up: World’s Biggest Crash Test is on Channel 4 now