Has anyone ever described to you before how a .50 BMG is so powerful, it will shoot right through a car, end-to-end, through the engine block? Well, the truth is that they may have been exaggerating, according to informal testing recently conducted by LooseRounds’ Shawn:

Last year I did a series of posts where I fired a variety of common rifle and pistol rounds into a car to see what would penetrate  different parts of the body. Today, we did a little PM on a Barrett M82A1/XM107 and decided to fire some rounds into the same car to see what would happen. We used plain ball and armor piercing.

We all have hear about the 50s power and ability to make scrap metal out of some pretty heavy cover. I have also heard claims it will shoot  through the engine block.  So today we put it to the test.  We went the extra mile with it and even shot from only 25 yards.

I set a “Q” target on the back side of the car to simulate some one taking cover behind the engine  and also to show any round that would go through and what it would look like.

And then one in front for the aiming point.

As you can see in the picture, the AP round hit in the kill zone.   But it did not make it through the engine. Which also had been shot to pieces over the last few years anyway and was not in its best shape to begin with as can be seen in the picture.  Of course, ball did not even come close. and AP failed completely as well. [emphasis mine]

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With this limited test, in this limited environment of shooting from 25 yards showed the 50BMG even using AP certainly is not the ultimate weapon some may think it is.

I’ve reiterated many times that the difference in effectiveness even between disparate small arms rounds like 5.56 and 7.62 is much smaller than their difference in size would suggest, but this surprised even me. I would have expected at least the .50 BMG AP to make it through the block and into the target.