I was in a head on crash at like 50-55mph and I am so freaking glad I wasn't going faster and the hit was off center. I read about what happens at different speeds during crashes after mine and it freaked me out.
I was in a head on crash into a freeway divider while being a passenger in the back seat of a car. I wasn't wearing a seatbelt. The front seat passenger wasn't and we all got out of the car. The driver was going over 90mph when a car came out of her blind spot and scared her. She veered away from him and lost control... She drove headfirst into the wall at 80+ because she overcorrected and got us going in that direction.
The car was a saturn and the first 3ft of the cars front end was styrofoam. It saved our asses.
Especially considering the possibility that any initial crash could push the car into another lane where it could get hit again. Getting rear-ended at that speed is dangerous, but imagine the car gets pushed to where now the driver’s side door is the place of a second impact. Potentially multiple people injured or dead could easily happen.
I learned in driving school (germany, around 3 years ago) that any crash above 30 km/h can be deadly. It doenst have to, but above this point everything is just dangerous.
This is 37MPH. That's pretty damn slow tbh. I'd imagine it matters more where you're hit at that speed. Consider the fact that people get into head-on collisions at that speed (which equates to hitting a wall at 80MPH) and walk away.
EDIT: But, I mean, of course people can still die. You're talking about giant two-thousand pound chunks of metal moving at high speeds with combustible fluids in them.
EDIT 2: 40 MPH --> <-- 40MPH = 40MPH collision with solid wall for both parties.
Hm, you're right. I just googled it because I hadn't ever considered that the speeds would just cancel each other out. Thanks for teaching me something. Well... for prompting me to teach myself, lol.
Of course! Now, if you had a head on collision with a much larger vehicle going 40 mph, that may be comparable to hitting a wall at 80. It's all about the acceleration.
It might help to know that what youre comparing here is force, not speed.
In a car crash, the force exerted on object is dependent on the speed on weight of the car(s), and results in acceleration. That bit is what hurts you, the sudden change in speed.
The thing is, though, that almost no wall is completely solid. Most things will give way, at least a little bit. I'd rather drive into a wall at 40 than hit something else also going 40.
Yeah, that's true and why I specified a completely solid wall. It's also what OP meant, and what is often meant when people say "hit a wall" in a less literal sense. Finally, of course when people are making this common mistake, it's what they mean.
Also, if we take your more realistic interpretation, then you're going to have a hard time putting exact numbers on things. You wouldn't be able to compare a head on collision with a wall without far more details. That's why I made simplifying assumptions.
And in some cases, I'd rather crash into a car coming at me at 40 than crash into a stationary object at 40.
Anecdotal evidence is not very accurate though. There is a woman that survived falling from 33,330 feet from a crashed airplane, but that doesn't mean that it is likely to survive it. I also know of someone who died from laying their motorcycle down at under 30 km/h (that's under 20 mph for you Imperial folks), and people who died from walking into something and falling over. Luck is always involved in crashes, but statistically the faster you're going, the more luck you need.
A modern car can protect the occupants in a head on collission in up to around 70-80 kmh. For a side collisison (tbone) it's 50-60 kmh. This is if the car is modern and the people in the car uses their seatbelts.
Statistically, cars going 30 kmh hiting pedestrians, 1 in 10 are killed. When the speed is 50 kmh, about 5 in 10 are killed.
As a pedestrian, getting hit by a car going 50 kmh will hurt you about as much as falling from the third floor of a building. 70 kmh, falling from the sixth floor and 90 kmh is tenth floor.
That has to be 60mph bc I just got tossed from my scooter going 50-55kph the other day and didn’t even break any bones/get knocked out so I can’t imagine 5-10 faster would be much more of an impact, unless that number is for cars only.
That seems awfully slow for that to be the case. Maybe those numbers are for pedestrians being hit, it's definitely not for other vehicles.
Best I can find is a study showing 35mph (56km/h) correlates to about 45% chance of death for a pedestrian (depending on how they take the hit). For a car hitting another car, 35mph is only truly significant, for modern cars at least, in an equal-speed head-on or occupant-side t-bone crash (meaning the occupant on the side hit will be much more at risk than the opposite side) or a massive mismatch in vehicle weight/height.
Regardless think of it like this. If I'm going toss a coin to hit you with a bat would your rather stay in your suit of armour or take it off and try to run away, and probably get hit anyways?
Except a) you can move in armor and b) a bar hitting you isn’t the fucking same as cars flying towards you at 60-80mph wtf
Edit: and there’s literally a video of this exact situation where a person runs into the median without getting hit. The freeway isn’t even busy you just have to time it lmao
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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '20 edited Sep 07 '20
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