You’ve probably checked the crash-test ratings of plenty of cars you’ve been interested in purchasing without giving much thought to how the process works. Crash testing cars is usually done with crash-test dummies and the car in question to see how the vehicle and passengers will be impacted in standard crash scenarios and at different speeds. Crash testing is a safety test that car manufacturers go through to ensure the safety of their passengers, but it does require wrecking one of their production-ready cars. For a typical consumer car that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but what if the vehicle you are trying to crash is worth more than a million dollars, like a Bugatti Veyron?

Crash testing million-dollar cars

The Bugatti Veyron is a $2 million dollar hypercar that many car enthusiasts only dream of actually seeing one day — imagine a car so exclusive and expensive that your only goal is to see one. Not to mention the fact that the maintenance of owning a Bugatti costs more than buying a new car every year. The high price tag doesn’t exempt the Veyron from needing crash tests, and although safety standards do allow for manufacturers to complete their own testing, that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to see this beautiful $2 million car smashed to pieces.

Crash testing doesn’t just require the vehicle to be crashed just one time, and for some manufacturers that can mean crashing dozens of cars to see how they will react to normal damage, high-speed crashes, or roll-over damages. That’s a lot of Bugatti Veyrons to crash — yikes! Luckily Bugatti takes the time to rebuild the cars to completion so they don’t have to keep wrecking millions of dollars worth of their already low-production cars.

Avoiding an actual crash

As you could imagine, car manufacturers don’t exactly love the idea of crashing their million-dollar cars, so it makes sense that they would spend just as much money to try and figure a way around it. That’s where test-crash simulators come in, and while they aren’t the most common or widely accepted tests, it can save companies millions of dollars, if not more.

As you could imagine, Bugatti isn’t the only supercar company that has to complete crash testing. Yes, that’s right, Lamborghini, Ferrari, and even Koenigsegg all complete crash testing of at least some of their cars. Because these cars are so expensive, not all of the vehicles manufactured by these companies go through actual crash testing, and companies like Ferrari spend the money to develop realistic crash-test simulators to reduce the number of cars that they need to crash in real life.