No, not quite right.
The truck was stationary and a Estes like rocket motor was buried in the dirt below the trucks side mounted gas tank. A car was remotely driven into the side of the truck.
In slow motion video you could clearly see the rocket engine ignite - flames shooting upward from the ground.
I am curious why you make this assertion. I have seen pictures of the truck, which is one of the “exhibits” Harry Pearce refers to. I tried to find them on the net but have not. It has been a few years, but my very clear memory is that the motor was still visible on the truck.
And to pick at your nit, a car-to-truck “test” is still a test of the truck (and the car as well). But in my haste and sleepiness this morning, I should not have called it a test. It was a lie, a fabrication, a staged fantasy, a defamation. It was anything but a test.
THE SCANDAL WAS EXPOSED ONLY BECAUSE FIREMEN FROM AVON AND BLOOMSBURG, Indiana, have more ethics than the NBC crowd. The firemen were called to the test site outside Indianapolis as a safety precaution, and they watched as the rocket motors were put under the gas tanks. Chief Andrew S. Burnett of Avon asked what was going on and was told that "they didn't want a tank rupture and no resultant fire." But was this fair? Someone replied that the procedure would be explained when the segment aired. During the tests, a fire truck was parked on the road just beyond the GM truck. A video camera mounted on its dashboard had a "head-on" view of the crash. The video showed a brief burst of flame upon impact, then a patch of grass burning alongside the truck for perhaps 15 seconds. In contrast to NBC's angle, which implied a fireball. the firemen's video showed how small and brief the fire actually was. When the segment aired, the firemen were surprised that NBC did not mention the rocket engines.
EVENTUALLY ONE OF THE FIREMEN READ A SKEPTICAL COLUMN ABOUT THE NBC segment written by Pete Pesterre, editor of Popular Hot Rodding, of Los Angeles. Pesterre had owned GM pickups and gone through a crash in one of them and simply did not believe what NBC reported. The fireman called Pesterre and told him how the tests had been rigged; Pesterre called GM, and in due course GM lawyers scoured Indianapolis junkyards and found the four test vehicles. A rocket motor was still on one of the trucks, held in place by duct tape. The "burned" vehicle proved to have only minor paint blistering on one door. The lawyers also obtained the firemen's tell-tale tape and statements about how the test crew overfilled the gas tank on the test truck, and proof that the gas cap was defective. GM asked NBC for a retraction but said nothing publicly. When NBC refused, GM made its evidence public during a two-hour press conference during which general counsel Harry Pearce, announcing that GM was suing NBC, said he would be happy to have an Indiana jury judge NBC's ethics. NBC retracted the next day.
http://www.aim.org/publications/aim_report/1993/03a.html
This highlights the difficulty in investigating car crashes - no independent tape, no independent eyewitnesses. And in jurisdictions owned by the plaintiffs' lawyers like John Edwards and others, no honest cops or firemen standing by to do the right thing - they are often volunteers, who get paid for alerting the lawyers to a good case.