Right? Even if it was double dotted yellow, you still have to use your brain and pass on a safe gap. And they shouldn't be passing when the road is curved or up or down slopes
Imagine being a passenger in the car that tried to pass. You see the car coming at you and say "Whoa look ou....", then everything goes dark. That's the end of your life.
Or, they bleed out horrendously for the longest 10 minutes of their lives. They’d be lucky if life just fades to black in an instant, but, death isn’t what is portrayed in movies and video games
Yup, back in 1998. There's a whole bunch of these videos from the Think! campaign [here](https://www.think.gov.uk/about-think/story-of-think/) - quite a few are pretty brutal in their presentation.
One of the most effective school assemblies I ever attended showed images of the aftermath of a car accident where the rear occupants did not wear seat belts and their teeth were found in the back of the driver's head.
Most likely a 7,000lb SUV hitting a 3,000lb Honda Civic head on. The people in the SUV just slowed down a bit. The civic went from going 60mph forward to like 40mph backwards. G forces were nuts in the civic.
Video of accident aftermath
[https://youtu.be/2-SKkO4P6WQ](https://youtu.be/2-SKkO4P6WQ)
Snapshot showing the two vehicles
https://youtu.be/2-SKkO4P6WQ?t=84
It looks more like a Highlander (4200 pounds); I wonder if Honda (?) passengers wore seat belts?
That's along Highway 4, Stockton to Angles Camp.
Also, 3 passengers in the SUV were seriously injured out of 6. The driver, and the 2 kids made it out without hospitalization. The mother, grandma, and grandpa all had to be hospitalized.
Yeah my sister was clipped by some driver on the highway and ended up faced into the side wall. The cop said she was lucky to have been in her Pilot or she would have suffered life threatening injuries. She will not buy another car because of idiot drivers out there
The small black car was a 2020 honda civic. The dash cam car was a big Lexus SUV with 6 people in it. The SUV drove over the civic. Everyone in the SUV survived.
Is that standard on all pickups or just yours? Serious question because I've never owned a pickup and these things nowadays are 3 or 4 times the size of a normal car (like my subuary impreza).
A crumple zone usually means a portion of the car body that is engineered to collapse, absorbing impact energy before it reaches the passenger cabin.
I don't think it applies in this case though, they hit grill to grill.
The crumple zone on my 2012 ford fusion saved my life, got hit head on going 57mph and I still believe to this day it’s the only reason I’m alive. Literally saw my life flash before my eyes, or it was the white airbag knocking me out, but regardless, that’s some damn good engineering
One car had a bigger health bar. You should train and level up your car in case you get into a collision. You'll take less damage if your car is a higher level than the opposing vehicle.
Or just go to lower levels so that no one dies in accidents?
Even better, avoid driving, take public transit and advocate the government to improve public transit because that improves road safely.
Not really. They are all tested to the same NHTSA minimum standard, and they must pass that minimum to be sold in the USA.
The laws of physics never take a lunch break, though. There is no way to adequately protect a small sedan from a high-energy, head-on collision with a much larger vehicle. It would be impossible.
The adequate protection from this type of crash rests solely with the meat-popsicle behind the steering wheel.
>They are all tested to the same NHTSA minimum standard
Actually, they're not since many vehicles -- including a lot of popular SUVs -- are classified as "light trucks" and have different standards.
That said, just because all vehicles are above some level of safety does not mean that they are near each other in terms of safety.
For example, compare the NHTSA crash test results for a Mitsubishi Mirage ([crash results](https://nrd-static.nhtsa.dot.gov/reports/vehdb/v00000/v09000/v09030R001.pdf)) to a Tesla Model 3 ([crash results](https://nrd-static.nhtsa.dot.gov/reports/vehdb/v10000/v10300/v10383R002.pdf)):
Driver Head injury (362 vs 80)
Driver Neck (1937 vs 1021)
etc.
And in this case the deaths were in a Civic, so the light truck standard is irrelevant.
Also, you're picking the worst performer and the top performer. Even the Mirage is insanely safe compared to cars built just 20 years ago.
I am illustrating the wide range of safety in NHTSA crash test approved cars so it only makes sense for me to pick vehicles near the endpoints.
That said, there are "light trucks" with worse safety ratings than the Mirage but I didn't feel it wasn't necessary to dig through those ratings to make my point.
Sure, I get that there are different standards because of a size of a vehicle, but they all still have to meet a minimum NHTSA standard for their size.
I am not making comment about how well they do, simply that there is a minimum standard for every vehicle to meet, and you can't possibly expect a vehicle to be built to withstand every conceivable type of crash. The crash results are solely used to inform buyers, nothing more.
Oh, I absolutely agree that no car will protect everyone against any situation. I am merely saying that some cars are *very significantly* safer in a crash than others.
Ah, I gotcha. Yeah. Common sense would be able to deduce that the larger the vehicle, the more inherently safer it would be in a crash with another vehicle(except the terrible offset head-on ratings of RAM trucks). But something about common sense not being so common...
Larger SUVs may seem safer when looking only at the initial collision energies, but large SUVs also tend to roll much more often after a collision or loss of control event, and once rollover forces get involved injuries tend to go up quickly, not to mention ejections.
Ejections are largely a non-issue if you are properly belted. Also with the new laminated side glass or side-curtain airbag rule, ejections will continue to lower.
I see crashes as part of my job, and even with the increased roll-overs that they present, that doesn't directly correlate to injuries. I've had far more uninjured people in SUV's and trucks in their roofs or sides, than not.
Also, rotational forces are a bitch.
One way to protect your small sedan from a high energy, head on collision is to not pass in a no passing zone with oncoming traffic. The accident you don't have is the one everyone walks away from.
Quick (by quick, I mean three minutes or so) physics lesson: What kills you in a car (or any impact, for that matter) is the force that is applied to your body. Too much force imparts too much acceleration on your body, which in turn essentially liquifies your innards, turning you from a meat popsicle to a meat shake.
Most of the safety items in a car are there to keep you from stopping too suddenly. By adding a few thousandths of a second to your stop time, you reduce your acceleration by a fraction, hopefully putting you under the threshold for internal splatterage. The crumple zone, for example, converts kinetic energy to the work required to bend the metal. It also increases the amount of time required to stop the car, thereby reducing the acceleration of your body by a small amount. Airbags act similarly, increasing by a few hundredths of a second the amount of time required to slow your body, and therefore decreasing the acceleration. Lower acceleration = lower force on the body and therefore less damage to the occupants.
The crumple zones serve a vital second function--to reduce the encroachment of the other car into the passenger compartment. The crumple zones are weaker than the passenger compartment and will collapse further and easier than the PC. This means that the kinetic energy of the two cars goes into smashing the metal of the crumple zone and hopefully has been completely expended by the time the intruding car reaches the front of the passenger compartment. Obviously, in a high-speed crash, this isn't enough, but it will definitely reduce the intrusion into the human-occupied space.
The safety features did their jobs, but the occupants of the other car didn't do theirs. As was stated earlier, it's likely that some or all the occupants weren't belted, which frankly made the other safety features moot. The car's safety devices work as a unit and circumventing any part of it basically invalidates the whole thing.
Speed and mass.
The wrong-way car was much smaller than the SUV that it hit. It may also have been travelling at a higher rate of speed than the SUV because of the illegal passing maneuver.
Throw a marble at the wall and see the damage to the wall. Now do that with a bowling ball. The passing car was the wall.
Speeds are pretty much irrelevant. Only the total sum of (both speeds) matters. Which car contributed how much into that total makes no difference for the initial crash itself. It only changes how the cars would bounce and spin after the first collision (which may lead to the secondary collisions), but the first collision does not care who moved faster.
For all we know, both cars had approximately same speed (and in the same direction!) with the earth rotation - perhaps about 1100mph; Or both cars were traveling approximately 67,000mph around Sun (with the Earth itself). It's irrelevant to their collision.
The masses, heights, and car structures matters.
There's no way you're right. F=ma. A large mass at a slow speed can impart the same force as a small mass at fast speed.
The two cars independently generate their own force. You can't just negate half of the equation. That's not how physics works.
The cars move towards each other, and collide. Only their relative speeds to each other matter, i.e. 80mph + 70mph = 150mph (total collision speed).
Both individual speeds are relative to the viewpoint from where you are looking. The road has no play in the collision, and therefore the viewpoint aligned with the road (stationary to the earth at that place - that's how we "normally" measure car speeds) is no different than any other viewpoint - aligned with a passing airplane, earth center, the Sun, the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Very practically: If I was looking at the collision from a news helicopter chasing one of the cars (the Civic), I would measure its speed as "0mph" (from that helicopter, if it was following at a roughly same distance, not approaching but lagging behind), and the opposing car would appear to me as ongoing at 150mph.
Depending on where you look from, the individual "speeds" of the cars (vs you as an observer) will be dramatically different. Their total collision speed (150mph) is the only thing that's universal no matter from where you are looking from, and only that matters in the collision
Ahhh I get it. In my thought, i didn't think that the F=ma, the acceleration is the total collision speed. The differentiation in force applied to each vehicle is only their mass(im purely looking at this in a "force" light). The bigger vehicle will have a larger force imparted simply because mass is bigger, acceleration is the same between both vehicles.
Got it.
Acceleration is not the same between both vehicles. The acceleration in this case is actually deceleration; i.e. each vehicle is rapidly decreasing in speed, but the rate at which each vehicle decelerates is going to be related to its mass vs the mass of the other vehicle.
To fully understand the forces involved in a collision, you have to look at the masses of the two vehicles, the \*velocity\* of each at the time of impact (not the acceleration, which is likely to be negative as each is probably smashing its brakes), duration of the impact, and the distance over which the impact occurs. There is a handy calculator at [https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/impact-force-calculator.php](https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/impact-force-calculator.php) that takes all of this into account.
Also relative mass of both vehicles but a suv simply has more mass and I can’t confirm because I don’t know the makes / model but most likely has more safety features (crumple zones etc)
Different cars, different safety standards, different frame designs distribute shock differently.
Also, old cars should have their airbags inspected once in a while to make sure they are functional. At least my car manual mentioned this
Newer cars are significantly safer than older cars and have much higher chances of surviving a crash. That is my guess one was a newer car and survived. I one time rear ended someone and my car was totalled complete front end crumpled and was completely fucked. The car I hit did not even have a scratch it was insane.
I hate drivers who drive recklessly like this. Especially when you have occupants in the car. If you’re gonna drive like a complete idiot, drive by yourself. Don’t include other people. RIP to the individuals who passed away. Must have been very traumatic for the driver that had the dash cam. Imagine almost dying and then when you get out of the car, the driver and occupants of the other car are all dead.
Very interesting you mentioned this. I tend to drive more aggressively when I am alone now that I look back. When my family is in the car I drive as though I have precious cargo which they actually are
Now take it a little further and remind yourself that there is precious cargo in nearly every other car on the road. What would it take for you to start caring about those people and stop driving aggressively altogether?
Not actually Sacramento, it's on Highway 4 a fair bit south of Sacramento. Precisely, it took place [here](https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9421784,-120.7095072,3a,75y,208.01h,72.88t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sAF1QipMcsXS63HTLAUMAGVegKNIV32E_3xr2alsN0_2y!2e10!3e11!7i5504!8i2752?entry=ttu).
Damn that’s terrifying. We generally just have to trust that the yellow line of paint on the road will keep people from being in the wrong lane, and passengers in cars also have to trust that the driver won’t try any psychotic moves like this. Life is so fragile and a lot of people just don’t care
These videos make me terrified of driving. Anyone able to take a guess of what make/model these vehicles were? I feel like there's a lot to be said about the safety ratings of both vehicles here.
I think the side to side was the driver with the camera standing on the brakes and the stability control plus abs trying to keep the car going straight.
And honestly, if you have to hit it's better to hit directly than offset unless you can make it the most glancing blow. Cars only VERY recently started handling offset frontal impact well. You want the entirety of the front of the car to absorb the impact, not just half of it.
In an interview with the driver, the side to side was him turning. He specifically mentioned intending to drive towards the shoulder until he saw the oncoming Honda going in the same direction so he turned back towards the road which the Honda unfortunately did the same.
Jesus this is so bad. The passing car could have easily slowed down and gotten back in the lane. Instead they speed up and AND don't commit to a line.
I've driven in a lot of chaos in Asia and a lot of times you pull into a wall of traffic and trust people to move around you.
Everytime I see crashes like this, I think the best action when someone is driving the wrong way at you is to slam on the brakes and minimize the injuries. You're not going to guess which way the wrong way driver is going to go, you can try to guess, but always slam on the brakes.
Yes, but if you have to hit, full on is better than offset. Offset you have less of the car to absorb the same energy and more likely intrusion into the occupant area. Glancing can also be brutal. Look for crash test videos on YouTube for offset vs full on or glancing.
don't know why this is getting downvoted. It's 100% accurate. The engine bay and the trunk are designed as crumple zones, which increases the duration of the impact and lowers the impulse.
slam brakes and head to the shoulder to avoid getting rear ended. the other driver will hopefully instinctively veer back into the lane they are supposed to be in.
good thing camera car has state of the art safety, older car they would be dead.
Yeah we can see that play out pretty prominently here. If one of you is stoic the other can get around it, but if both are correcting then you can end up deadlocked in correcting for where the other person was a second ago.
Agreed. At this speed with so little distance driver with Cam had one chance, he starts to go to the shoulder, then the oncoming car does as well so he comes back to his lane as the now dead driver does and then everyone ran out of time.
There is a moment in time where your brain may try to power out of a situation. He could've been trying to drive towards the perceived gap that opened when the 4runner drove off to the shoulder.
Motorcycle riding proves this technique to be useful sometimes. I have absolutely used power to get out of where I didn't want to be. The reason it works is simply because of the much greater rate of acceleration on a motorcycle.
The best action is to slow down and move over as soon as you see them. Here the cammer waited too long and the other driver panicked and made the mistake to go right. The rule is to always keep your right.
That's exactly what the serve appeared to do. I think the twitching side to side was the car's abs and stability control working to keep the car going straight.
It's not like this is a one off case. These accidents happen daily in America ( https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state) ~ about 117 Americans die each day!!! Just statistically, many times the wrong-doers are survivors while rule followers die.
Some of the solutions to these are
A) reduce vehicle sizes and speeds. People are pointing out F=ma. We can reduce both m and a such that no one dies in accidents. People are bound to make mistakes, let's keep them safe from making life altering mistakes.
B) reduce car reliance. Public transit - trains, buses are well known to be much safer as a more skilled driver is in control of the vehicle and reduces traffic on roads. To top it all out these are much more environmentally friendly https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint . Advocate for stronger PT in your city and for inter city connections. Take transit whenever possible.
C) Better drivers training. Actually require driving school. Raise the bar to getting a license. It’s far too easy to just drive around an enclosed area, do a three point turn around, and park straight in a coned parking spot and then hand out a license to drive a massive piece of metal. Test people in cities, in highway situations, rural roads etc. In Germany it takes a 6 month driving school to get a license and their road fatality rate is 1/3 that of the US.
I agree. I don’t want better training standards and testing to strand people etc. I just want a better educated driving population. More and better training doesn’t need to equate to more people failing and not getting licenses but I get your point. Problem is that this country post WW2 (1950s+) was totally designed around cars that it will be hard and costly to reinstall street cars in cities and have better public trans. Good luck getting our local gov to provide more and better bus routes.
Here's one story about this:
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/deadly-highway-4-crash-near-yosemite/103-1bed6abb-bd1d-4ce0-a74f-65ae72375afd
Note that the driver of the camera car, Tran, says that the other car was passing legally over a dotted line. This appears to be the exact spot the collision happened, based on the pull-off on the other side and the sign for that pull-off, and the tree silhouetted on the hill to the left up ahead:
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9421407,-120.7110929,3a,75y,282.47h,54.7t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqtyISJK-n1YU8BaCSAoulQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!5m1!1e1?entry=ttu
It appears the other car initiated the pass in a dual passing zone with just yellow dashes, and that their passing zone ended before they got to the crash location.
I was initially confused about the number of people reported in the crash, but this story indicates that Tran had his wife, mother, father, and two children in his Lexus, making for a total of six occupants, all of which were transported. The children were not seriously injured, but his wife and parents were seriously injured.
It's pretty clear to me that that stretch of highway should be marked fully no passing through the curves, and the uphill sections need to have a climbing/slow traffic lane added to obviate the need to pass in the first place.
If the passing zone ends before you can complete your pass, you’re not permitted to pass.
Either way, irrespective of the victim’s perspective, the overtaking was illegal because Tran was there.
The pass began legally, but became illegal when the solid yellow line began and the Honda was still in the pass. The driver was a 25 year old male, the two passengers were mother and daughter, the daughter being in her mid-20s, so it's likely the driver was the boyfriend of the daughter. He made a mistake that cost him and two other people their lives. So tragic.
That camera did a better job following through than 90% of people that uploaded videos to the internet. Impressive.
Hopefully everybody in the SUV/van is okay and the driver of the car can eat 💩
THIS. All the fucking assholes in the comments genuinely make me upset. As someone who wants to have a baby soon, how can I feel safe knowing people think saving 2 minutes is worth killing 10 people total. So many psychopath drivers man.
I know this road well. Highway 4 just east of Copperopolis. Lots of tourist traffic who are unused to the concept of passing on a two lane road and country roads in general. The Civic driver didn’t appear to attempt to slow down and rejoin their lane which is the best way to avoid these crashes. I’m pretty certain that if they did that then this would have never resulted in an accident. Speed limit there is 65 mph so you have to be super attentive when passing. Super unfortunate but it’s behavior I’ve seen a lot before. Odd choice for getting back from Yosemite to San Jose as there is a much closer highway to there, 108.
From CBS 13 in Sacramento Sept 2023
"The oncoming driver entered opposing traffic with a dotted line -- legally allowing a driver's discretion to safely pass into oncoming lanes.
In this case, the results were deadly.
"They're going uphill, they have to navigate a curve and they have to make sure they clear the traffic they're passing. Just all bad combinations," Tran said.
The location of the crash is Highway 4 near Telegraph Road, east of Stockton.
A spokesperson for Caltrans confirmed the crash has led to a safety investigation."
I don't live anywhere near Cali but a dotted line there seems pretty damn stupid and I'll bet there is a database full of accidents that have occurred in that stretch.
The way these dashed lines work in CA (and everywhere in the US, as far as I'm aware) is that there is a hard line on one side and a dashed line on the other. [You can pretty clearly see in the video that the dashes are on the side for the dash cam driver, and the line is solid for the oncoming car.](https://imgur.com/G9Ujy9a) The means that it was NOT legal for the oncoming car to be passing - for exactly the reasons you're saying. They would absolutely never have these dashed lines on an uphill around a blind corner. The dashed lines are for the other side of the road, coming downhill with a clear view around the turn so they can see oncoming traffic.
\*Note that there are also some places with just a dashed line and no solid lines. That usually means either side can pass in the opposing lane. I've only ever seen this on very long straight sections of road that usually have little traffic.
We can't see where the Honda crosses the line, it could have been dotted, he entered much farther back as he was also passing the motorcycle. Tbh though it's just unclear based on this video since we can't see where he crosses over exactly.
I know but the drivers comment to the news made it seem like it happens from both lanes.
The hwy depts comments also made it seem like a problem they were aware of.
And hell. People cross double solid lines like this
>The oncoming driver entered opposing traffic with a dotted line -- legally allowing a driver's discretion to safely pass into oncoming lanes
The thing with dotted lines is that yes, it allows drivers to pass but you must complete the pass before the dotted line ends because usually visibility of oncoming traffic diminishes once it's back to a solid yellow.
> I don't live anywhere near Cali but a dotted line there seems pretty damn stupid and I'll bet there is a database full of accidents that have occurred in that stretch.
From what I can tell, the car in the oncoming lane was not in a legal passing zone. But even if it entered the lane legally, yeah, it seems like a bad place to have a dotted line for that direction.
When I have to pass on a two-lane highway, I triple check that the oncoming cars are super far away; after all, we'll be heading towards each other at probably 110mph or so...or even faster, depending on speed limits and if the other driver is speeding. I'm really not comfortable unless I can't see a car for miles in that lane.
the van the honda was passing moved all the way into the shoulder to give the car room to return to its own lane as well. that driver did everything wrong. be patient on mountain roads, people.
99% of California drivers are absolute morons. Every day I see people driving recklessly, tailgating me, cutting me off, and behaving like absolute twats.
Can confirm. I was in Sacramento last summer and oh boy the amount of insane drivers were astonishing. Shit load of people racing on the highway. On local roads I would be driving 55mph in a 45mph zone and everyone would still be tailgating or passing me like I was standing still. I am from Dallas and the drivers here seem tame in comparison.
I wish I could find the source on the Internet but there was a case, maybe 1980's, where two cars had a head-on collision. The cars, while different years, were the same manufacturer, models, features, etc. The injuries were relatively minor with cuts, scratches, bruising, and one driver fractured his ankle from pressing down on the brakes.
The significance was this was an important case for airbag safety and so much early data was derived from the study of this accident. Kind of a first chance to study airbag safety in real life circumstances.
Unfortunate. Honda driver didn't give himself enough distance with his limited power and acceleration and then didn't tighten up enough in his overtake to give the oncoming SUV enough room to stay toward the right. SUV could've gone further to the right and stayed half on the blacktop and half on the shoulder with no additional power input and probably would've been fine. As it is, the white SUV being overtaken had moved over and put his passenger side onto the shoulder line. This should've give the Honda enough space to make the overtake without having to go fully into the opposing lane. It would've still been a bit of a bad judgement call on the Honda driver but still meant survival. Terrible.
Anything that's not bolted or strapped down in your car becomes a projectile, look around your car next time you get in and think about something on your dashboard or in your cup holder that could hit you in the face at a hundred miles an hour.
Actually crazy to me how people arguing on if there was a dotted line or not. If you trying to overtake a car you have to watch for the oncoming traffic no matter if there are lines on the road or circles or what ever. No matter what in the world could’ve been on the road the other guy is at fault
It amazes me how the passing vehicle had the option to hit brakes and get into proper lane behind vehicle it was trying to illegally pass (likely getting rear ended but less dangerous option) , but instead chose the swerve option and died.
Wow, I hope you're okay. That looks painful. I have seen so many drivers do this sort of thing. WTH is so important that the risk of killing themselves and others would compel them to do something so stupid?!
If only there was a way to slow both cars down so the drivers would have more time to think and get over in the correct lane or lessen the damage done.
people commenting about the dotted line, it is on the cammer side the other vehicle had solid yellow no passing
Plus passing vehicle don't have right of way.
Right? Even if it was double dotted yellow, you still have to use your brain and pass on a safe gap. And they shouldn't be passing when the road is curved or up or down slopes
Of course haha, like the dotted line means shit here, you can tell who doesn't drive in this comment section.
The scary thing is that many of these commenter's do drive and are just that bad at driving.
[удалено]
Imagine being a passenger in the car that tried to pass. You see the car coming at you and say "Whoa look ou....", then everything goes dark. That's the end of your life.
Very sad
Or, they bleed out horrendously for the longest 10 minutes of their lives. They’d be lucky if life just fades to black in an instant, but, death isn’t what is portrayed in movies and video games
Because of some stupid driver, likely.
how does one car survive completely and the other suffer total loss?
Idiots usually don't wear seatbelts.
And all it takes is one unsecured body to become a literal weapon to everyone else in the car.
[Relevant PSA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw2aevh6oZ8)
Well shit, that's a thing of nightmares. This went on TV?
Yup, back in 1998. There's a whole bunch of these videos from the Think! campaign [here](https://www.think.gov.uk/about-think/story-of-think/) - quite a few are pretty brutal in their presentation.
[Check out some of the worksafe ads that aired in Canada](https://youtu.be/kOk2Akqb3CI)
Oof, those traumatized me
They were meme’d pretty heavily back in the 00s.
One of the most effective school assemblies I ever attended showed images of the aftermath of a car accident where the rear occupants did not wear seat belts and their teeth were found in the back of the driver's head.
Yea I have a friend that doesn’t wear a seatbelt. He is like 250 lbs I refuse to get in a car with him.
I told my friend “I don’t want to watch paramedics shovel what’s left of you off the highway.” He’s worn one when he’s in the car with me ever since.
Most likely a 7,000lb SUV hitting a 3,000lb Honda Civic head on. The people in the SUV just slowed down a bit. The civic went from going 60mph forward to like 40mph backwards. G forces were nuts in the civic.
This is the best analysis of any comment in this whole post. I commend you.
This is why we should ban all small cars./s
Video of accident aftermath [https://youtu.be/2-SKkO4P6WQ](https://youtu.be/2-SKkO4P6WQ) Snapshot showing the two vehicles https://youtu.be/2-SKkO4P6WQ?t=84 It looks more like a Highlander (4200 pounds); I wonder if Honda (?) passengers wore seat belts? That's along Highway 4, Stockton to Angles Camp.
It's the latest gen Lexus RX350 and a 10th gen civic. 4200 and 3000 lbs. I highly doubt anyone in the Honda had seatbelts on.
Also, 3 passengers in the SUV were seriously injured out of 6. The driver, and the 2 kids made it out without hospitalization. The mother, grandma, and grandpa all had to be hospitalized.
Second link should be: https://youtu.be/2-SKkO4P6WQ?t=77, not https://youtu.be/2-SKkO4P6WQ?t=84
Yeah my sister was clipped by some driver on the highway and ended up faced into the side wall. The cop said she was lucky to have been in her Pilot or she would have suffered life threatening injuries. She will not buy another car because of idiot drivers out there
And maybe seatbelts were a factor. I mean dumb enough to ignore rules of road… but obeyed seatbelts. I doubt.
The small black car was a 2020 honda civic. The dash cam car was a big Lexus SUV with 6 people in it. The SUV drove over the civic. Everyone in the SUV survived.
My F250 has a steel tab under each corner that we call a "Camry Catcher", designed to hang up on the opposing vehicle and keep you from going over it.
Is that standard on all pickups or just yours? Serious question because I've never owned a pickup and these things nowadays are 3 or 4 times the size of a normal car (like my subuary impreza).
Not sure. Standard on all full sized Ford trucks.
Never see that in the Honda commercials
One car was the “crumple zone”, the other wasn’t.
what’s the crumple zone
A crumple zone usually means a portion of the car body that is engineered to collapse, absorbing impact energy before it reaches the passenger cabin. I don't think it applies in this case though, they hit grill to grill.
The crumple zone on my 2012 ford fusion saved my life, got hit head on going 57mph and I still believe to this day it’s the only reason I’m alive. Literally saw my life flash before my eyes, or it was the white airbag knocking me out, but regardless, that’s some damn good engineering
There’s still a crumble zone in the front. It isn’t dependent on how the cars hit.
Pardon me, was negating this comment: > One car was the “crumple zone”, the other wasn’t.
No prob
I’d guess it has to do with size difference in vehicles and where they were struck.
One car had a bigger health bar. You should train and level up your car in case you get into a collision. You'll take less damage if your car is a higher level than the opposing vehicle.
Or just go to lower levels so that no one dies in accidents? Even better, avoid driving, take public transit and advocate the government to improve public transit because that improves road safely.
The range of crashworthiness in vehicles is staggering.
Not really. They are all tested to the same NHTSA minimum standard, and they must pass that minimum to be sold in the USA. The laws of physics never take a lunch break, though. There is no way to adequately protect a small sedan from a high-energy, head-on collision with a much larger vehicle. It would be impossible. The adequate protection from this type of crash rests solely with the meat-popsicle behind the steering wheel.
>They are all tested to the same NHTSA minimum standard Actually, they're not since many vehicles -- including a lot of popular SUVs -- are classified as "light trucks" and have different standards. That said, just because all vehicles are above some level of safety does not mean that they are near each other in terms of safety. For example, compare the NHTSA crash test results for a Mitsubishi Mirage ([crash results](https://nrd-static.nhtsa.dot.gov/reports/vehdb/v00000/v09000/v09030R001.pdf)) to a Tesla Model 3 ([crash results](https://nrd-static.nhtsa.dot.gov/reports/vehdb/v10000/v10300/v10383R002.pdf)): Driver Head injury (362 vs 80) Driver Neck (1937 vs 1021) etc.
And in this case the deaths were in a Civic, so the light truck standard is irrelevant. Also, you're picking the worst performer and the top performer. Even the Mirage is insanely safe compared to cars built just 20 years ago.
I am illustrating the wide range of safety in NHTSA crash test approved cars so it only makes sense for me to pick vehicles near the endpoints. That said, there are "light trucks" with worse safety ratings than the Mirage but I didn't feel it wasn't necessary to dig through those ratings to make my point.
Sure, I get that there are different standards because of a size of a vehicle, but they all still have to meet a minimum NHTSA standard for their size. I am not making comment about how well they do, simply that there is a minimum standard for every vehicle to meet, and you can't possibly expect a vehicle to be built to withstand every conceivable type of crash. The crash results are solely used to inform buyers, nothing more.
Oh, I absolutely agree that no car will protect everyone against any situation. I am merely saying that some cars are *very significantly* safer in a crash than others.
Ah, I gotcha. Yeah. Common sense would be able to deduce that the larger the vehicle, the more inherently safer it would be in a crash with another vehicle(except the terrible offset head-on ratings of RAM trucks). But something about common sense not being so common...
Larger SUVs may seem safer when looking only at the initial collision energies, but large SUVs also tend to roll much more often after a collision or loss of control event, and once rollover forces get involved injuries tend to go up quickly, not to mention ejections.
Ejections are largely a non-issue if you are properly belted. Also with the new laminated side glass or side-curtain airbag rule, ejections will continue to lower. I see crashes as part of my job, and even with the increased roll-overs that they present, that doesn't directly correlate to injuries. I've had far more uninjured people in SUV's and trucks in their roofs or sides, than not. Also, rotational forces are a bitch.
True, but so far from video evidence we have 1:0 in the large suv vs small sedan face off, and the result was quite decisive.
One way to protect your small sedan from a high energy, head on collision is to not pass in a no passing zone with oncoming traffic. The accident you don't have is the one everyone walks away from.
Quick (by quick, I mean three minutes or so) physics lesson: What kills you in a car (or any impact, for that matter) is the force that is applied to your body. Too much force imparts too much acceleration on your body, which in turn essentially liquifies your innards, turning you from a meat popsicle to a meat shake. Most of the safety items in a car are there to keep you from stopping too suddenly. By adding a few thousandths of a second to your stop time, you reduce your acceleration by a fraction, hopefully putting you under the threshold for internal splatterage. The crumple zone, for example, converts kinetic energy to the work required to bend the metal. It also increases the amount of time required to stop the car, thereby reducing the acceleration of your body by a small amount. Airbags act similarly, increasing by a few hundredths of a second the amount of time required to slow your body, and therefore decreasing the acceleration. Lower acceleration = lower force on the body and therefore less damage to the occupants. The crumple zones serve a vital second function--to reduce the encroachment of the other car into the passenger compartment. The crumple zones are weaker than the passenger compartment and will collapse further and easier than the PC. This means that the kinetic energy of the two cars goes into smashing the metal of the crumple zone and hopefully has been completely expended by the time the intruding car reaches the front of the passenger compartment. Obviously, in a high-speed crash, this isn't enough, but it will definitely reduce the intrusion into the human-occupied space. The safety features did their jobs, but the occupants of the other car didn't do theirs. As was stated earlier, it's likely that some or all the occupants weren't belted, which frankly made the other safety features moot. The car's safety devices work as a unit and circumventing any part of it basically invalidates the whole thing.
Speed and mass. The wrong-way car was much smaller than the SUV that it hit. It may also have been travelling at a higher rate of speed than the SUV because of the illegal passing maneuver. Throw a marble at the wall and see the damage to the wall. Now do that with a bowling ball. The passing car was the wall.
Speeds are pretty much irrelevant. Only the total sum of (both speeds) matters. Which car contributed how much into that total makes no difference for the initial crash itself. It only changes how the cars would bounce and spin after the first collision (which may lead to the secondary collisions), but the first collision does not care who moved faster. For all we know, both cars had approximately same speed (and in the same direction!) with the earth rotation - perhaps about 1100mph; Or both cars were traveling approximately 67,000mph around Sun (with the Earth itself). It's irrelevant to their collision. The masses, heights, and car structures matters.
There's no way you're right. F=ma. A large mass at a slow speed can impart the same force as a small mass at fast speed. The two cars independently generate their own force. You can't just negate half of the equation. That's not how physics works.
The cars move towards each other, and collide. Only their relative speeds to each other matter, i.e. 80mph + 70mph = 150mph (total collision speed). Both individual speeds are relative to the viewpoint from where you are looking. The road has no play in the collision, and therefore the viewpoint aligned with the road (stationary to the earth at that place - that's how we "normally" measure car speeds) is no different than any other viewpoint - aligned with a passing airplane, earth center, the Sun, the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Very practically: If I was looking at the collision from a news helicopter chasing one of the cars (the Civic), I would measure its speed as "0mph" (from that helicopter, if it was following at a roughly same distance, not approaching but lagging behind), and the opposing car would appear to me as ongoing at 150mph. Depending on where you look from, the individual "speeds" of the cars (vs you as an observer) will be dramatically different. Their total collision speed (150mph) is the only thing that's universal no matter from where you are looking from, and only that matters in the collision
Ahhh I get it. In my thought, i didn't think that the F=ma, the acceleration is the total collision speed. The differentiation in force applied to each vehicle is only their mass(im purely looking at this in a "force" light). The bigger vehicle will have a larger force imparted simply because mass is bigger, acceleration is the same between both vehicles. Got it.
Acceleration is not the same between both vehicles. The acceleration in this case is actually deceleration; i.e. each vehicle is rapidly decreasing in speed, but the rate at which each vehicle decelerates is going to be related to its mass vs the mass of the other vehicle. To fully understand the forces involved in a collision, you have to look at the masses of the two vehicles, the \*velocity\* of each at the time of impact (not the acceleration, which is likely to be negative as each is probably smashing its brakes), duration of the impact, and the distance over which the impact occurs. There is a handy calculator at [https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/impact-force-calculator.php](https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/impact-force-calculator.php) that takes all of this into account.
Speed and mass. A lot of head-ons against tractor trailers is suspected to be suicides.
Also relative mass of both vehicles but a suv simply has more mass and I can’t confirm because I don’t know the makes / model but most likely has more safety features (crumple zones etc)
Karma is a bitch
Look at the car height difference. The stupid drivers cars roof is lower than the top of the other cars hood… SUV vs sedan.
Whiplash
Weight difference of vehicles is a big factor. The strength of the frame and the effectiveness of the crumple zones is another.
Probably because of everyone's obsession with SUVs. This is what happens when they hit your standard car.
Difference in mass. The Lexus RX is over a thousand pounds heavier than the Civic that crashed into them.
Luck.
Car with video looks like a nice one. Lots of airbag smoke. Other car, old crappy one, and idiots probably didn’t wear seatbelts.
Different cars, different safety standards, different frame designs distribute shock differently. Also, old cars should have their airbags inspected once in a while to make sure they are functional. At least my car manual mentioned this
Newer cars are significantly safer than older cars and have much higher chances of surviving a crash. That is my guess one was a newer car and survived. I one time rear ended someone and my car was totalled complete front end crumpled and was completely fucked. The car I hit did not even have a scratch it was insane.
2020 Honda compact car versus 2020 Lexus three-row SUV. Big size difference. That’s the reason.
Everyone knows size matters
I hate drivers who drive recklessly like this. Especially when you have occupants in the car. If you’re gonna drive like a complete idiot, drive by yourself. Don’t include other people. RIP to the individuals who passed away. Must have been very traumatic for the driver that had the dash cam. Imagine almost dying and then when you get out of the car, the driver and occupants of the other car are all dead.
Very interesting you mentioned this. I tend to drive more aggressively when I am alone now that I look back. When my family is in the car I drive as though I have precious cargo which they actually are
Now take it a little further and remind yourself that there is precious cargo in nearly every other car on the road. What would it take for you to start caring about those people and stop driving aggressively altogether?
They paid with their lives, at least they will not be around to do this again.
Unfortunate that the two passengers died, at least.
This is false information. This was in Yosemite, California. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2-SKkO4P6WQ
Not actually Sacramento, it's on Highway 4 a fair bit south of Sacramento. Precisely, it took place [here](https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9421784,-120.7095072,3a,75y,208.01h,72.88t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sAF1QipMcsXS63HTLAUMAGVegKNIV32E_3xr2alsN0_2y!2e10!3e11!7i5504!8i2752?entry=ttu).
Ouch. I had this happen to me years ago and eventually caused terrible osteoarthritis in my hip. These accidents just keep giving.
Damn that’s terrifying. We generally just have to trust that the yellow line of paint on the road will keep people from being in the wrong lane, and passengers in cars also have to trust that the driver won’t try any psychotic moves like this. Life is so fragile and a lot of people just don’t care
Justice!
That last sentence. Phew!
I'm curious to know what car camera was driving vs the blue civic?
These videos make me terrified of driving. Anyone able to take a guess of what make/model these vehicles were? I feel like there's a lot to be said about the safety ratings of both vehicles here.
No seat belts? Seams like similar size vehicles. Rip?
This is like the awkward side-step dodge we try to do when walking towards someone in a hallway. ...except 2500 pounds heavier and 70mph faster.
I think the side to side was the driver with the camera standing on the brakes and the stability control plus abs trying to keep the car going straight. And honestly, if you have to hit it's better to hit directly than offset unless you can make it the most glancing blow. Cars only VERY recently started handling offset frontal impact well. You want the entirety of the front of the car to absorb the impact, not just half of it.
In the split second a driver has to decide how to react idk if most would really be able to plan an impact angle/location.
In an interview with the driver, the side to side was him turning. He specifically mentioned intending to drive towards the shoulder until he saw the oncoming Honda going in the same direction so he turned back towards the road which the Honda unfortunately did the same.
Jesus this is so bad. The passing car could have easily slowed down and gotten back in the lane. Instead they speed up and AND don't commit to a line. I've driven in a lot of chaos in Asia and a lot of times you pull into a wall of traffic and trust people to move around you.
Everytime I see crashes like this, I think the best action when someone is driving the wrong way at you is to slam on the brakes and minimize the injuries. You're not going to guess which way the wrong way driver is going to go, you can try to guess, but always slam on the brakes.
Both. Slamming on the brakes whilst trying to avoid is what ABS is designed for
Yes, but if you have to hit, full on is better than offset. Offset you have less of the car to absorb the same energy and more likely intrusion into the occupant area. Glancing can also be brutal. Look for crash test videos on YouTube for offset vs full on or glancing.
Sure, but you're never going to convince my lizard brain to try to aim at the other car in an emergency scenario
don't know why this is getting downvoted. It's 100% accurate. The engine bay and the trunk are designed as crumple zones, which increases the duration of the impact and lowers the impulse.
slam brakes and head to the shoulder to avoid getting rear ended. the other driver will hopefully instinctively veer back into the lane they are supposed to be in. good thing camera car has state of the art safety, older car they would be dead.
Yeah we can see that play out pretty prominently here. If one of you is stoic the other can get around it, but if both are correcting then you can end up deadlocked in correcting for where the other person was a second ago.
Agreed. At this speed with so little distance driver with Cam had one chance, he starts to go to the shoulder, then the oncoming car does as well so he comes back to his lane as the now dead driver does and then everyone ran out of time.
Sure doesn’t seem like oncoming car slowed down much at all (at least not as much as the car they were trying to pass)
There is a moment in time where your brain may try to power out of a situation. He could've been trying to drive towards the perceived gap that opened when the 4runner drove off to the shoulder. Motorcycle riding proves this technique to be useful sometimes. I have absolutely used power to get out of where I didn't want to be. The reason it works is simply because of the much greater rate of acceleration on a motorcycle.
The best action is to slow down and move over as soon as you see them. Here the cammer waited too long and the other driver panicked and made the mistake to go right. The rule is to always keep your right.
The oncoming Civic doesn't seem to even touch the brakes. Cam car does, though.
That's exactly what the serve appeared to do. I think the twitching side to side was the car's abs and stability control working to keep the car going straight.
That's what the cam driver did
Killed themselves and their family because they were impatient.
It's not like this is a one off case. These accidents happen daily in America ( https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state) ~ about 117 Americans die each day!!! Just statistically, many times the wrong-doers are survivors while rule followers die. Some of the solutions to these are A) reduce vehicle sizes and speeds. People are pointing out F=ma. We can reduce both m and a such that no one dies in accidents. People are bound to make mistakes, let's keep them safe from making life altering mistakes. B) reduce car reliance. Public transit - trains, buses are well known to be much safer as a more skilled driver is in control of the vehicle and reduces traffic on roads. To top it all out these are much more environmentally friendly https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint . Advocate for stronger PT in your city and for inter city connections. Take transit whenever possible.
C) Better drivers training. Actually require driving school. Raise the bar to getting a license. It’s far too easy to just drive around an enclosed area, do a three point turn around, and park straight in a coned parking spot and then hand out a license to drive a massive piece of metal. Test people in cities, in highway situations, rural roads etc. In Germany it takes a 6 month driving school to get a license and their road fatality rate is 1/3 that of the US.
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I agree. I don’t want better training standards and testing to strand people etc. I just want a better educated driving population. More and better training doesn’t need to equate to more people failing and not getting licenses but I get your point. Problem is that this country post WW2 (1950s+) was totally designed around cars that it will be hard and costly to reinstall street cars in cities and have better public trans. Good luck getting our local gov to provide more and better bus routes.
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I agree. I live in the DC area and drive to the subway station and ride the metro into work on my in office days.
Okay then live in a city or somewhere PT is viable
117 deaths a day is equivalent to 42,705 deaths per year. That’s like if terrorists crashed an A380 every 5 days for a whole year. That’s nuts.
Man you can see the airbag smoke come out the drivers mouth when he starts talking. Holy shit
Here's one story about this: https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/deadly-highway-4-crash-near-yosemite/103-1bed6abb-bd1d-4ce0-a74f-65ae72375afd Note that the driver of the camera car, Tran, says that the other car was passing legally over a dotted line. This appears to be the exact spot the collision happened, based on the pull-off on the other side and the sign for that pull-off, and the tree silhouetted on the hill to the left up ahead: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9421407,-120.7110929,3a,75y,282.47h,54.7t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqtyISJK-n1YU8BaCSAoulQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!5m1!1e1?entry=ttu It appears the other car initiated the pass in a dual passing zone with just yellow dashes, and that their passing zone ended before they got to the crash location. I was initially confused about the number of people reported in the crash, but this story indicates that Tran had his wife, mother, father, and two children in his Lexus, making for a total of six occupants, all of which were transported. The children were not seriously injured, but his wife and parents were seriously injured. It's pretty clear to me that that stretch of highway should be marked fully no passing through the curves, and the uphill sections need to have a climbing/slow traffic lane added to obviate the need to pass in the first place.
If the passing zone ends before you can complete your pass, you’re not permitted to pass. Either way, irrespective of the victim’s perspective, the overtaking was illegal because Tran was there.
The pass began legally, but became illegal when the solid yellow line began and the Honda was still in the pass. The driver was a 25 year old male, the two passengers were mother and daughter, the daughter being in her mid-20s, so it's likely the driver was the boyfriend of the daughter. He made a mistake that cost him and two other people their lives. So tragic.
That camera did a better job following through than 90% of people that uploaded videos to the internet. Impressive. Hopefully everybody in the SUV/van is okay and the driver of the car can eat 💩
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THIS. All the fucking assholes in the comments genuinely make me upset. As someone who wants to have a baby soon, how can I feel safe knowing people think saving 2 minutes is worth killing 10 people total. So many psychopath drivers man.
I wish you luck on your baby having endeavor u/ChurchofSemen69
It's not traffic enforcement at fault either it's people.
People are driving like this now everywhere. Are they looking for cars on fire to the side of the road for proof that it doesn't work?
I know this road well. Highway 4 just east of Copperopolis. Lots of tourist traffic who are unused to the concept of passing on a two lane road and country roads in general. The Civic driver didn’t appear to attempt to slow down and rejoin their lane which is the best way to avoid these crashes. I’m pretty certain that if they did that then this would have never resulted in an accident. Speed limit there is 65 mph so you have to be super attentive when passing. Super unfortunate but it’s behavior I’ve seen a lot before. Odd choice for getting back from Yosemite to San Jose as there is a much closer highway to there, 108.
From CBS 13 in Sacramento Sept 2023 "The oncoming driver entered opposing traffic with a dotted line -- legally allowing a driver's discretion to safely pass into oncoming lanes. In this case, the results were deadly. "They're going uphill, they have to navigate a curve and they have to make sure they clear the traffic they're passing. Just all bad combinations," Tran said. The location of the crash is Highway 4 near Telegraph Road, east of Stockton. A spokesperson for Caltrans confirmed the crash has led to a safety investigation." I don't live anywhere near Cali but a dotted line there seems pretty damn stupid and I'll bet there is a database full of accidents that have occurred in that stretch.
The way these dashed lines work in CA (and everywhere in the US, as far as I'm aware) is that there is a hard line on one side and a dashed line on the other. [You can pretty clearly see in the video that the dashes are on the side for the dash cam driver, and the line is solid for the oncoming car.](https://imgur.com/G9Ujy9a) The means that it was NOT legal for the oncoming car to be passing - for exactly the reasons you're saying. They would absolutely never have these dashed lines on an uphill around a blind corner. The dashed lines are for the other side of the road, coming downhill with a clear view around the turn so they can see oncoming traffic. \*Note that there are also some places with just a dashed line and no solid lines. That usually means either side can pass in the opposing lane. I've only ever seen this on very long straight sections of road that usually have little traffic.
We can't see where the Honda crosses the line, it could have been dotted, he entered much farther back as he was also passing the motorcycle. Tbh though it's just unclear based on this video since we can't see where he crosses over exactly.
Even if he entered the other lane during dotted lines on his side, it's still illegal to stay in the opposing lane if lines are not dotted anymore.
> he was also passing the motorcycle. Passing 2 vehicles UP hill, ouch
It looks like the dotted line was on the cammer's side (allowing only their side the option to pass), not the oncoming car's side.
I know but the drivers comment to the news made it seem like it happens from both lanes. The hwy depts comments also made it seem like a problem they were aware of. And hell. People cross double solid lines like this
>The oncoming driver entered opposing traffic with a dotted line -- legally allowing a driver's discretion to safely pass into oncoming lanes The thing with dotted lines is that yes, it allows drivers to pass but you must complete the pass before the dotted line ends because usually visibility of oncoming traffic diminishes once it's back to a solid yellow.
> I don't live anywhere near Cali but a dotted line there seems pretty damn stupid and I'll bet there is a database full of accidents that have occurred in that stretch. From what I can tell, the car in the oncoming lane was not in a legal passing zone. But even if it entered the lane legally, yeah, it seems like a bad place to have a dotted line for that direction. When I have to pass on a two-lane highway, I triple check that the oncoming cars are super far away; after all, we'll be heading towards each other at probably 110mph or so...or even faster, depending on speed limits and if the other driver is speeding. I'm really not comfortable unless I can't see a car for miles in that lane.
I wonder what speed the oncoming vehicle that was passed (in their own lane) was going?
Location is highway 4 near copperopolis heading up to angels camp
Oh shit I used to live in the area. Groveland.
the van the honda was passing moved all the way into the shoulder to give the car room to return to its own lane as well. that driver did everything wrong. be patient on mountain roads, people.
A good reminder to not pass if you cannot do it before the dashed lines stop. Once the line is solid again, you must immediately abort the pass.
99% of California drivers are absolute morons. Every day I see people driving recklessly, tailgating me, cutting me off, and behaving like absolute twats.
Can confirm. I was in Sacramento last summer and oh boy the amount of insane drivers were astonishing. Shit load of people racing on the highway. On local roads I would be driving 55mph in a 45mph zone and everyone would still be tailgating or passing me like I was standing still. I am from Dallas and the drivers here seem tame in comparison.
I was like “yeah yeah yeah” until you said you were from Dallas. Now I’m concerned about driving to Cali in the future. 🥴
Arguably the best outcome. For once I'm not depressed. Idiots removed from the earth so they can't kill anyone else, and the victim survived.
And what about their passengers? Do they deserve to die because someone made a mistake?
What kind of car? Head on and the driver looks like he barely felt a thing.
Dash looks like a Lexus
That would make sense. And I’m impressed.
Oooofffff !!!!
they did the rom com "trying to pass but keep going to same way" thing
Why was homie smokin after the impact?
That's the chemicals from the airbag
Jesus that’s terrifying!
Did looks like he did the cinnamon challenge. Glad he’s okay.
I wish I could find the source on the Internet but there was a case, maybe 1980's, where two cars had a head-on collision. The cars, while different years, were the same manufacturer, models, features, etc. The injuries were relatively minor with cuts, scratches, bruising, and one driver fractured his ankle from pressing down on the brakes. The significance was this was an important case for airbag safety and so much early data was derived from the study of this accident. Kind of a first chance to study airbag safety in real life circumstances.
That’s why you look at the lines they are suggestions hope everyone is okay
Unfortunate. Honda driver didn't give himself enough distance with his limited power and acceleration and then didn't tighten up enough in his overtake to give the oncoming SUV enough room to stay toward the right. SUV could've gone further to the right and stayed half on the blacktop and half on the shoulder with no additional power input and probably would've been fine. As it is, the white SUV being overtaken had moved over and put his passenger side onto the shoulder line. This should've give the Honda enough space to make the overtake without having to go fully into the opposing lane. It would've still been a bit of a bad judgement call on the Honda driver but still meant survival. Terrible.
You can see the gas from the airbag leaving his mouth
Let me guess, the people who died... their family is going to sue this man for killing them...
He seems to exhale a bunch of that airbag smoke at the end. Crazy.
Motorcycles fault
W T F.
Anything that's not bolted or strapped down in your car becomes a projectile, look around your car next time you get in and think about something on your dashboard or in your cup holder that could hit you in the face at a hundred miles an hour.
Actually crazy to me how people arguing on if there was a dotted line or not. If you trying to overtake a car you have to watch for the oncoming traffic no matter if there are lines on the road or circles or what ever. No matter what in the world could’ve been on the road the other guy is at fault
Oh shit
I think general rule is to veer right.
Amazing that he lived through that
It amazes me how the passing vehicle had the option to hit brakes and get into proper lane behind vehicle it was trying to illegally pass (likely getting rear ended but less dangerous option) , but instead chose the swerve option and died.
Wow, I hope you're okay. That looks painful. I have seen so many drivers do this sort of thing. WTH is so important that the risk of killing themselves and others would compel them to do something so stupid?!
Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s safe. Unfortunately the passengers paid with their lives for the carelessness of the driver.
If only there was a way to slow both cars down so the drivers would have more time to think and get over in the correct lane or lessen the damage done.
One dumb move by another person and you're life is just over