Team-BHP - Accidents in India

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Originally Posted by ImranHyd (Post 5496290)

I cannot understand what happened here. The rider couldn't be sleeping. He directly ran into the truck which was clearly visible.

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Originally Posted by Everlearner (Post 5496506)

Exactly, I'm wondering how is this possible. It's not possible to miss such a big truck in your way. May be he was distracted on phone.

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Originally Posted by poised2drive (Post 5496538)

At the end of the day, the impatience, ignorance and the lack of common sense ( that the truck cannot behave like a bike ) took his life.

A majority of main road merges from side road happens exactly like this. The folks who 'merge' simply think that the approaching vehicle 'will take care of not hitting them'.

Majority of them are near misses that we all see on our every day drives. Equally horrifying is the very common pattern of two wheelers waiting for signals at point blank blind spot areas of heavy trucks. These people are simply waiting for their luck to run out :unhappy

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Originally Posted by epiccross (Post 5496611)

I absolutely LOATHE how this guy has narrated this without anything concrete. He has spun some yarns around how he was "showing off" against the Thar guy. Just see the godawful title! Just all set for the commenters to mock the "tin can" Swift guy.

While it looks like a pre-planned thing, where all two (or three?) of them holding cameras and recording the whole thing, as you said. Either way, silly as heck, what on earth was the Swift guy smoking?!

The reason why our insurance premiums are increasing every year.
Does insurance company cover the damage caused by these stupid stunts?

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Originally Posted by MT_Hyderabad (Post 5496284)

This appears to be a road rage/race invite gone wrong.

But I disagree with the assessment of the uploader.

As per me, all three cars are related to each other and were trying to film something interesting when this happened.

To me it seems that this was an attempt to film some brake check stunt of sorts. Driving under influence could also be the cause / influencing factor.
One of the clear clues is the steering input and a resultant mini fishtail just prior to the repeat and divider slam.
Driver incapacitation, unseen obstacles or potholes cannot be a factor too.

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Originally Posted by Sanket299 (Post 5496885)

Accident from gujrat.
Hyundai i20 rear ends SUZUKI Grand vitara.

Seems build quality is just like other maruti cars even at 20L.
I20 pillars looks intact.

It's more of a rear, side, fish tailing impact rather than simple rear ending. Almost any high GC car if rear ended in a corner while taking a turn would flip and all the damage is due to the car flipping over. The heading doesn't help either. And then people will go gaga over it saying that Hyundai i20 is better than Maruti GV. None of the cars in market currently are tested for rear ending by the GNCAP. i20 didn't turn turtle so the pillars would be intact. If you look at GV, the sunroof is gone but the roof hasn't caved in even after rolling over a few times, the curtain airbags have also deployed. And the people inside it are injured, not dead. So I would not comment on a build quality of a car when it goes through an accident. Even an S Class may not save someone incase of some bad crash.

I've long since come to the conclusion that there's no absolutely safe car on earth. Speed, angle of collision, dumb luck...so much is at play in accidents. You never know.

Here's one recent realization I had when my dad smashed his head against the raised window while sleeping in the front passenger seat, when our car went over a bad road; even if we had been in a 5 star GNCAP rated car with 2 airbags (we weren't in one), a sideways impact will still cause the car's occupants to bang their heads against nearby windows or against the heads of nearby occupants. That has to be catastrophic in the event of a sidelong impact. Thus, curtain airbags start to make sense to me.

But even if I get a car with 6 or 7 airbags (e.g., Carens), I would do well to remember that airbags are only a second line of defense. A proper bodyshell matters more.

Another example - a 5 star crash-rated low bonnet car comes a cropper when rear-ending a high slung heavy vehicle that has no underrun protection bar. Such cars have nothing to collide against in their designed failure path and instead they arrange a direct meeting of the car occupants with the undercarriage of the truck being rear-ended. It won't be a pretty sight.

So should I get a high-bonnet, 5 star rated car with 7 airbags, which won't roll over due to its high center of gravity?

This is a never-ending cycle of must-haves and don't-haves. We'll probably never have a perfectly safe car.

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Originally Posted by locusjag (Post 5497463)

I've long since come to the conclusion that there's no absolutely safe car on earth. Speed, angle of collision, dumb luck...so much is at play in accidents. You never know.
...

Completely agree. The most important safety device is between the ears - the driver's brain. Attitude towards driving, better driving skills and discipline, the way we interact with the road and other road users - are all behaviours that are the best way to prevent accidents. The lack of these, in my opinion, account for the root cause of about 80% of the accidents in India.

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Originally Posted by locusjag (Post 5497463)

But even if I get a car with 6 or 7 airbags (e.g., Carens), I would do well to remember that airbags are only a second line of defense. A proper bodyshell matters more.

Finally, thank you for saying this. It's hard to convince people when it comes to a choice between a questionable bodysheell with 6 airbags v/s a stable-strong bodyshell with 2 airbags

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Originally Posted by locusjag (Post 5497463)

So should I get a high-bonnet, 5 star rated car with 7 airbags, which won't roll over due to its high center of gravity?

Opposing requirements - high CG needed to reduce probability of underrun, low CG needed to reduce probability of overturn. What really is key is the ratio "h/t" where "h" is the height of the CG of the vehicle w.r.t the road and "t" is the wheel track width. This is why something like the Hummer is so unreasonably wide, given the mega ground clearance it has.

There is nothing wrong with getting the best one can afford in terms of safety devices and design.

There is everything wrong in thinking that one then has a safe car. No: it is only safer and maybe not by as much as we think.

All my driving life I have felt safe in my cars, regardless of the number of three-letter-abbreviations, etc, etc. And all my life I have tried to remember that it is mostly a myth. I'm still driving a thin-metal box. It's a hard thing to remember: I need to remind myself often, and often forget.

Let's not forget. The poshest of cars can be scrapped by a humble tree --- let alone a truck.

The first line of defence is defensive driving and try not to get in to an accident! Everything else is secondary. Most importantly, avoid a sense of complacency that one is inside the safest car of all. However safe the car is, it is still a toy in front of a dump truck.

I read plenty of posts about the "road presence" of one's car and how everyone else on the road scurries to make way for them. Just remember the dump truck driver will have the same feeling about your "road presence" car!

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Originally Posted by Nalin1 (Post 5497783)

Lungi Dada-

Disappeared when he saw the dashcam :p

Not so dramatic, but similar experience happened to me many times on Bangalore roads.
People drive in the wrong way and try to pick fights. The moment I point to the camera, they take U turn and disappear.
DashCam is a life saving device now.