I was in exactly the situation described in the OP. After I graduated from high school, I bought a ‘72 MG Midget (which, for those of you who can’t deduce it from the name, is a really small car). It was a summer, my first car was a ragtop, and I was stylin’.
On morning on the way to work, I pulled into the left-turn lane right behind a Ma Bell service truck (the heavy-duty kind with the 3/8" welded steel treadplate rear bumper, a fact that features prominently in the upcoming story). I sit there idling, and see something in the rear view mirror out of the corner of my eye. I look up; that “something” is the grill of a refrigerated beverage-distributor truck. I have just enough time to think “oh shit” before Wham! Midget sandwich.
The truck couldn’t have been going very fast, because everyone was able to drive away from the accident. Nonetheless, it had a lot of kinetic energy, none of which was absorbed by the heavy-duty bumpers of either truck. Conversely, my car had a nice crease right across the front grill and a crumpled rear end. My poor Midget. Totaled, of course, even though it was still driveable.
So I learned some valuable lessons:[ul][li]Sometimes you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.[/li][li]Comprehensive insurance would have been a nice thing; I make sure to buy it now.[/li][li]It’s amazing what people can get away with. The truck had no registration, and the driver admitted that the brakes had been faulty for a week and his boss hadn’t fixed it. Neither the cop nor the insurance company nor anyone else cared, which to my 17-year-old mind was astonishing.[/li][li]Some people can be real pricks. MI law (at the time) allowed collection of $400 from at-fault vehicles. The truck owner wanted me to sign a buch of stuff before he’d give it to me (note particularly #3 above). I had to sue in small-claims court. Bastard.[/ul][/li]And finally, in answer to the OP: I think what you ought to do in such a situation depends on circumstance. In most cases, it seems, braking as much as possible to prevent either sliding into the intersection or hitting the car in front of you would be prefereble. In my case, I don’t think it would’ve made much difference.
This is a good thread, & I wanted to bring it up again because I was hit a couple of days ago. High speed impact from the back right after I glanced in the rearview mirror. My neck might feel better had I braced my head against the neck rest as mentioned above.
I’ve been hit from behind at least 5 times and every time I’ve been hit I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on behind me. These days I’m usually paying attention to what’s going on behind me when I stop and when I’m stopped waiting to move again. I try to keep enough distance between me and the car in front of me to provide myself and escape route. I had a situation recently where I was coming to a stop, looked into the rearview and saw and SUV coming for me, I got off the breaks and on the accelerator in enough time to get the lightest of love taps from the SUV behind me, pretty amazing thing.
Don’t you just love the sound of the screeching tires on the two-lane rural road with no shoulders?
I remember thinking, “that sounds awful close.” I glanced up at the mirror just in time to see the car hit me. The impact made my foot slip off the break and pushed me into the car in front of me.
I got tail ended once. Sitting with my turn signal on waiting to pull into a gas station when I heard a screech behind me. I started to look in my rear view mirror and got hit. I had the headrest all the way up and I got thrown back into it so that it hit my neck, not my head.
Got out of my car to see what hit me and it was a small black convertible, looked like it was from the 60’s. I was driving a '76 Ford Galaxy. I had two small (1/4 inch) dents in my rear bumber, his front end was gone. Seemed like a fair trade to me.
If you know that you’re about to be rear-ended, keep your foot on the brake. The second time my Volvo 240 wagon got rear-ended (by an armored car, mind you), I was pushed into the car in front of me. Luckily, I had several witnesses who said that the armored car was at fault. I’m pretty sure that I could’ve been held liable for the damages to the car in front of me if I hadn’t braked on impact. Stacking that on top of a totalled car (my poor wagon…) would’ve sucked a lot.
[Total hijack, sorry, this sets me off]
This is exactly what happened to me. In CA (at least) you are automatically at fault if you rear-end someone else. The justification is that if you were driving safely you would have left enough room to avoid the car in front no matter what lame stunt they pulled.
I got rear-ended at freeway speed by a BMW that didn’t notice that all the traffic in front of her had stopped. I was pushed into the pickup in front of me. It was pushed into the VW in front of it. The BMW was totalled, my Toyota had a mangled exhaust system (the BMW went under me!), the pickup lost it’s front license plate when it hit the VW, the VW was fine.
11 months and 30 days later the owner of the pickup sued me for disabling injuries (none of them apparent or reported at the time of the accident) and 1000’s of dollars in repairs to her pickup (license plate). Fortunately, my insurance took care of it. I was at fault because I rear-ended her. Yeah, right! :wally
