“I didn’t think it would be folded in two”: faced with the damage of the test collision between a car without a license and a minivan, Monday, in a high school in Ajaccio, 300 students were able to understand that at 50 km / h, a shock can be fatal.
“It completely took away my desire to have one,” slips AFP Gabriella Fernandez, a fourth-grade student, who dreamed of driving one of these carts that can be used from the age of 14.
“It makes you think, we thought it was solid, but it’s not that solid,” adds Camelli Ghejaseppu, 17, after attending this first educational crash test organized in France. At 17, he rides a motorcycle, but he has already “rolled over once” in a cart.
On the handball ground of the Jules-Antonini professional high school in Ajaccio, transformed for the occasion into an accident zone, 4th, 3rd and second students from four schools in the city witnessed the accident of “Éric , driver of a minivan returning from a party”.
“As a passenger, Damien, his friend. He hasn’t fastened his seat belt,” explains Laurence Dragotto, who organizes this crash test with her husband Pascal and their company specializing in road safety stunts, by way of scenario. Eric and Damien will cross paths with an unlicensed cart driven by a 17-year-old teenager who has consumed “a little alcohol” and “a little cannabis”, she explains.
At the wheel of the minivan, Pascal, helmeted and equipped with cervical protection equipment, rumbles the engine before colliding laterally with the “yogurt pot” whose driver’s seat is projected on the passenger seat. At the time of the impact, the passenger of the minivan, represented by a 70 kg dummy, just hit the windshield.
“In reality, the driver of the cart died,” Laurence Dragotto told the students. As for the passenger in the minivan, he is “tetraplegic”.
“The side impact is practically the most violent impact you can have because it is the weakest place in the vehicle. This gives the worst injuries, ”explains Robert Camugli, chief warrant officer of the firefighters in charge of road rescue training, to AFP. With his team, he intervened in front of the students to extricate the passenger from the minivan.
“The new vehicles deform a lot on the outside, to absorb the shock. But the inside remains healthy, the victim is protected. Unfortunately, this is not the case with a car without a license,” insists Marc-Antoine Quilicci, one of the firefighters.
“It made me think a lot, because I have a car without a licence,” says Lisandru Carbuccia, a 16-year-old first-grader: “The shock scared me, I didn’t think the car would be doubled over,” says the student, who himself has never had an accident with his cart, which he sees as “precious freedom” for him and his parents.
Joan Sagot, a 15-year-old third-grader, prefers to walk. “It scares me too much,” he snaps.
“At the national level, Corsica is the first territory reported to the population in terms of the use of cars without a license. There are 5,000 on the island, compared to 90,000 at the national level,” Corsica’s prefect, Amaury de Saint-Quentin, told AFP, seeing these cars without a license, the number of which “has doubled in ten years” on the island, as “a real safety issue on [the] roads”.
However, the Corsican roads are very accident-prone. “We had 20 deaths in Corse-du-Sud last year, 50% compared to 2021”, including 45% of bikers, “and nine of them were under 25 years old”, he said. added. In total, 38 people died in 2022 on Corsican roads, “2.5 times more than the national average”, specifies the prefecture.
For Jean-Philippe Agresti, rector of the Academy of Corsica, the important thing with this presentation is to “make an impression”, by “making concrete and visible the risks run” by the students.