A freight truck collides head on with a passenger car causing alot more damage to the car than to the truck.

Question

Is the magnitude of force of the truck greater than the force of the car, smaller than the force of the car or equal to the force of the car???

Answer 1

Equal, by Newton's Third Law. However, the car sustains more damage because its structure cannot tolerate as much force as the robust truck can.

Answer 2

The magnitude of the force of the car should be greater than (the part where the truck destroys the car).

Answer 3

equal

Answer 4

I think of Newtons 2nd law, F= ma, when I read this question.  Since you are asking about a force, then there must be an acceleration of a mass. And obviously there was: when they car and truck hit each other head on, each would have been slowed down from there initial speed. Those changes in speed are the acceleration. In fact the crash could either result in both vehicles coming to rest or one being pushed back in the direction it came from by the other. If we assume that both vehicles stayed together (and didn't fly apart into a zillion different pieces), figuring out which occurred would be be a case of figure out the linear momentum of each vehicle before the crash (momentum =mass x velocity) and applying the idea of conservation of linear momentum to the combined wreck after the crash.  If they both had the same momentum then the result would be they came to rest at the crash, if the momentum was unbalanced then the combined wreck would have continued in the direction that the vehicle with more momentum was traveling (although frictional forces on the wreck would probably soon cause it to stop).

But in any case their are no other forces acting at the moment ofthe collision besides (i) the force of the truck on the car, and (ii) the force of the car on the truck. And so while the momentum may be unbalanced, the force each exerts on the other must be identical. Therefore in anser to your question, the forces are equal.