Last Friday a 24 year old Fort Collins woman slammed her car at 55 MPH into the back of a school bus, which was stopped to pick up a child along a rural road. Somehow she seems to have survived the crash.
The impact threw the bus forward 18 feet. None of the children were seriously injured,
When you hear that “ding, ding”, reading your texts is hard to resist…
…such results could be the consequences…
nice car.
Wow … this is identical to my car … in 2004 I had ordered a Solara convertible when the new models were announced and got it for my 50th birthday. Ten years of trouble free driving and luckily accident free driving. Having lived with the convertible for all these years I’m amazed the woman survived this impact! I wonder if she ducked to the passenger side at the time of impact?
Yep. My money is on texting while driving.
How about under the influence of a legal drug?
Oops. should have read the linked article first.
Is texting a drug? It is legal in many states.
God loves that woman.
I bet if you asked her she would tell you right now that she wasn’t worried at all about a bit of mild warming.
The Toyota Solara will not be repairable, the lady driver hopefully will be.
Talk about getting thrown under the bus!
I assume she was very shorts, the type who peers through the steering wheel! I am surprised that there’s no anti-submarining bars on the rear of the bus, to prevent such a result from happening.
Hey …. did anyone look at the pictures at the bottom of the article and if so did you notice the wing / spoiler on the back of the school bus? What is with that?
Those might be cowls over the rear indicators / stop Lights.
http://youtu.be/N_1jkLxhh20
That car looks like it gets great gas mileage.
The more you can avoid using the brake pedal, the better the mileage…
Brings a whole new meaning to ‘low-rider’.
In Love With My Car
http://youtu.be/cYkcI8b3ZYM
The ‘spoiler’ on the back of the bus is actually there to direct air flow over the rear window of the bus, blow the dust off, and keep it clean. These things were pretty common back in the 60’s and 70’s when station wagons ruled the highway. Nowadays they’ve been replaced with rear window wipers. Here’s a picture of an old AMC station wagon with one…. Note the attempt to appeal to “Green” customers by covering it with woodgrained vinyl.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/coconv/6333781828/
Thanks to tech solutions accidents like this are not possible in the near future.
You can now buy a care that stop automatically if an object blocks it;s trajectory and the driver is “sleeping”. The same system also keep a minimum safety distance on the highway and automatically adjusts the speed of the vehicle of the car in front accelerates or decelerates.
We have come a long way since the introduction of the safety steering column, the safety belt, the airbag and the energy absorbing deformation zone.
Another very useful application, the FLIR night vision camera, now becoming a standard in MB cars.
Here’s a problem with the “smart” cars that stop like that. The driver is not expecting it, so the results are virtually the same. They are thrown through the windshield or some other mishap because they are driving along, oblivious to their surroundings, and then they are stopped.