Is it true that limited-production supercars don't have to pass crash tests?

[Big time]

How limited their production has to be so they avoid crash-tests? both in the US and EU?

What if the cars were built in the US or EU? Would they still avoid crash tests?

What if a supercar manufacturer proactively decided to crash-test their cars, Could they deduct the crashed cars expenses from taxes or something?

[demonrunning07]

I'm not entirely sure what the rules are but I think they still have to do some form of crash testing.

For example, the Ruf CTR3.
I remember reading when it came out that the CTR3 was originally intended to be a completely original production car but they chose to use the front section of a 911 so they wouldn't have to spend millions of dollars doing front-end crash tests on an original design.

And any business expenses are always taxed differently. That's why you save your receipts when you go on a business trip.

[250gto boy]

I have never heard that they didn't require crash tests but I'm sure that they would want to do some form of crash testing because the last thing you want is someone suing you for not providing enough safety equipment.

[pimento]

Depends on local laws - I believe in the US for anything to be road legal you have to have some crash tested, but not so much for Europe.

[kingofthering]

It depends. Caterham and other kit-makes (like Morgan) can get away with that by selling just the rolling chassis, but if you want to do what Lotus is doing (selling a complete running car) you need to crash/emission test it. Registration is another can of worms.

[drakkie]

To clarify I send an e-mail to a contact that works in a crash lab here in the Netherlands. Anyway. All vehicles, including supercars will need to be crash tested. No easy treatment for them. However they fall under a different category in these regulations and there needs to be only one crashed. If it fails however the manufacturer must make the neccesary modifications and come back.

If the car is changed but the structure remains the same, like the earlier Pagani Zonda and the later Zonda R, the manufacturer only needs to show the ride to inspectors together with neccesary paperwork. Here included must be solid proof that it will behave the same in a crash.
The same goes offcourse with type-approval. The manufacturers deliver only 1 or 2 examples of the car to go through the procedures. These are usually "middle of the lineup" models. With some accesories but not all. The series of cars is then approved based on these models. Any new accessory the manufacturer wants to sell, needs to go through the paperwork separately.

This is the regulations for the EU anyway. Offcourse other countries might be different. Hopefully with less paperwork. On school we tried to get a type-approval for series of cars we plan building. In the end we had about 1700 pages of data to fill in to even be allowed to file for approval testing. Unbelievable bureaucracy.

[TVR IS KING]

Darn, I'm sure I read something like this recently. It was a snippet about a Koenigsegg or something. I'm sure it said that they designed it to meet all the crash test rules and all that, before they were altered to help lower volume cars. Unfortunately I can't find a source =[

What do we think, should there be less stringent rules for low volume cars? It seems a bit silly subjecting them to the same rules. With 206 Zondas in the world, less people will be injured in Zondas than they will in Corollas, even if the Corolla is safe as anything. So how can you blame the Zonda?

[pimento]

The problem with less stringent rules is that they'll have to be regulated for insurance porpoises and all the other wateborne mammals that go with that sort of thing. The paperwork would be tripled!