Would a regular-sized vehicle (say, a medium-size car) do any harm to an elephant if it crashed into one at about 20-30 miles per hour? Or would the impact just make the pachyderm angry?
What about a grizzly bear or a Kodiak bear? Could a similar impact from a medium-size vehicle kill or seriously wound a big bruin?
Why do you want to know? Goin’ huntin’?
Nope. Not goin’ huntin’. Just curious is all!
Let me get to cipherin’ and I’ll git back to ye…
I imagine a 30mph car collision would be pretty dangerous for everybody involved and can prove lethal to the elephant, bear and the driver/passengers of the car. I imagine you would break the elephants legs and have the thing collapse on your car.
Elephants are generally reported as being able to walk at 30 MPH. Of course, a creature will generally have pretty good control over its motion, but every critter bumps into things occasionally. And I assume that when it happens with an elephant, the beast generally survives (albeit perhaps wounded). There’s also the fact that an elephant is not negligible in mass compared to a car (as opposed to, say, a rock firmly embedded into the Earth), so an elephant-car collision would be less serious than an elephant-rock outcropping collision.
And it’d also probably be pretty hard to hit the elephant in the first place. It’s not like you’d just not notice it and hit it accidentally, and even if you were trying to hit it, if it walked directly away, you’d only pace it at those speeds. Then, of course, if it decided you were actually a threat (it might take a bit to convince it of this; not much threatens an elephant), it could very easily do a great deal of damage to your car.