I didn’t realize how much the sound of two cars hitting each other at high speed still bothers me. It’s amazing how that stuff sticks with you.
My heart rate is slowing down now and the crying is easing off. Dammit, my accident was almost a year ago now. When am I going to stop reacting this way? I feel like such a loser. The accident wasn’t even that bad!
Anyway, that was really friggen depressing. I’m surprised I watched it all.
I’m sorry, congodwarf. You’re not a loser, you’ve just had an experience that most people don’t know about. It’s pretty freaky when something as big and heavy as a car reacts to the forces of physics as if it were a marble on a tabletop, and that feeling stays with you for a while. I still remember going through the windshield when I was 6, and that’s been over 40 years.
Yeah, there’s something about the sound of a very small car t-boning a big pickup truck at 55 MPH that definitely sticks with you. All things considered, the accident wasn’t bad. The police and insurance companies all agreed it wasn’t even remotely my fault. My (brand new) car was paid off. No one was seriously hurt (physically).
But that sound, my god that sound. It’s horrible. There’s nothing like it. There’s actually a commercial out right now (I don’t even know what it’s for). I have to change the channel as soon as it comes on. I’ve seen accidents in commercials before but for some reason, the sound on this one is so much more accurate.
Anyway, as far as the PSA goes, it’s very effective at getting its point across. I don’t know if it will change the habits of anyone though. As someone pointed out upthread, the type of people who text while driving are probably the type of people to think it’ll never happen to them.
Hell, I never thought I’d get in an accident either. I had a perfect driving record. I didn’t do things that were unsafe. I forgot about the other people though. People who text while driving ARE the other people, and probably don’t even realize it, or care.
I don’t know if the vids work for teens. I agree with BiblioCat in that teens are indestructible. As an old fart, though, that vid made me rethink my “ability” to multi-task while driving. Maybe one life has been saved today.
I think it probably made more sense in the original 30-minute drama. I find the clip to be… well, a little too clipped, or at least clipped poorly. In addition, during the crash they looked a little too “crash test dummy” like, they weren’t even trying to fight the inertia like most people I’ve seen do when a car swerves and it kind of took me out of it. Of course, I’m probably wrong and it really would look like that.
Regardless of the effects and acting, I think it would have been more effective if it just cut off at the girl screaming OR if I had seen all 30 minutes. The kid, the baby, it all kind of left me going “oh, okay, more people died and this girl is still freaking out, I think we expected that.” I’m guessing the rest of the drama probably dealed with the emotional stress the surviving driver (and perhaps the child?) was going through and would have made it much more powerful (or, alternatively, gave us leadup to the incident and gave us emotional attachments to the characters). The place they cut it off it was just too long for me to still feel the “shock” of the accident, but too short for me to really get into the gravity of what happened.
Okay, I just rewatched it and I was a way too harsh on that part, it’s pretty well done. Something still strikes me as “off” about it, but it’s a lot better than it seemed the first time for some reason.
It occurred to me today - it might be a useful thing to add a ‘moving theatre’ driving simulator to driving tests, and throw in some sort of Kobayashi Maru scenario where no matter what choice you make, you end up either hitting something or being hit. That could be the answer for all these people who seem to think that they’re better drivers than anyone else and they can handle _____ (fill in speed, text messaging, talking on a cell phone, practicing the violin, whatever.)
Whatever happened to ‘Defensive Driving’ courses, anyway? I remember those ads from 30 years ago where someone would drive to the store and back, and the voiceover would describe whatever idiocy another driver was about to commit and sure enough, they’d do it. The person driving had taken one of the courses, though, so she’d be able to avoid the guy who changed lanes without signaling or ran the stop sign, etc.
Link for people who refuse to sign up to YouTube.
This. I kept waiting for them to cover the bodies, close the open eyes on the corpses, something. If you want to keep it short, leave it a mystery…did the friends die, did the people in the other cars die, are they “just” in a coma, will some die en route to the hospital, etc.?
Here’s a slightly more comical driving PSA, as some sort of antidote to the visceral trauma of the OP.
My main thing is that it goes on way too freaking long. It felt like it should have cut from the crash straight to the results without all of that dead space in the middle. If you want it to air in the US, it can’t be more than commercial length. I know entire commercial breaks that do not last that long. And I have never seen a PSA on American TV that was not aired during a commercial break.
Of course, I actually got bored when the sound track cut out. And most teenage drivers I know have shorter attention spans than mine.
I agree that there needs to be way more traffic safety programming in America. When I was in Driver’s Ed, I think I only watched one safety video that actually depicted car accidents and it was pretty tame, showing only the wreckage of cars and not the actual crash victims and the impact on their bodies.
The winter before last, I was in a three-car accident (I was hit by two different cars) and fortunately I was unhurt (and the car also relatively undamaged) but it was definitely a jolting and utterly surreal experience. The feeling of being struck by two other cars was very scary and intense, but afterwards I was in a floaty dream-like state. I remember more about the aftermath of it than about the actual crash. The first car that collided with me was a white Nissan Maxima driven by an attractive half-Japanese girl of 17 or 18. The next car to strike me (after I veered into the other lane of traffic, on an icy and wet road) was driven by a Korean-American National Guardsman who was dressed in full combat fatigues. I gave them all hand-warmers which I had kept in a pack in the car - the type that heat up after you open the plastic packaging. (These are a really good thing to have during the winter in your car, and if you don’t, you’re a fool.)
The whole experience was bizarre. All the more so since it occurred immediately after I had just purchased the novel Crash by J.G. Ballard (after having watched the film.) Literally, it happened right after I left the parking lot of the bookstore. When I tell people this, they insist that I must have wanted to be in a car accident and that I subconsciously intended for the whole thing to happen, but I swear to God it was just a genuine accident.
Argent Towers - when I got shoved into the ditch in 1994, my CD player was playing Billy Bragg’s “You’re an Accident Waiting to Happen” from the album ‘Don’t Try This at Home’. In with all the other forces of physics, it got shifted over to ‘repeat track’, so I got to listen to that song over and over while I got sorted out. I was unhurt, but it’s pretty bizarre to be in the left ditch facing the wrong way after the car has all but rolled.
I don’t think the ads will be effective because of the way the have the driver texting. He first thing I thought of when I saw that was that when I text while Erving (I know, I know. I’m breaking myself of that habit) I glance at the phone once to read the message and when I reply I never have to lok at the phone. I can type out and send an entire message withouT looking.
So I think when the target audince sees this they will say, “That can’t happen to me, I am much better.”
Is this what you’re trying to say about yourself?
Yes, that is the first thing that came to my mind. I am a lot better texter than the girl in the video. They made her extremely bad at texting, not how their target audience actually texts. Like I said, they had her staring at the phone, whereas most people can text without looking at the screen once.
But like I said, I’m stopping my texting while driving because I know all it takes is one moment for something to go wrong.
I’m sending this to all my friends while I’m heading down I-80 today!