I recognize that this is a term for a type of motorcycle accident when you go over the “high side” of the motorcycle in contrast to a the “low side” (the bike on top of you).
However, I had always used the term high sided to describe a situation where a vehicle gets stuck because the terrain prevents the wheels or tracks from touching the ground and gaining traction. A good example is a stuck limo trying to go down a streen in San Francisco, or a snowmobile stuck on a snowbank where the track is off the ground.
Has anyone heard this term used this way before? If not, is there another term for this situation?
The term I’m familiar with is “high-centered”, where you don’t have enough clearance to drive over a particular obstacle (or if the “road” you’re on has really deep ruts).
I’ve also heard the term “high side!” in relation to white water rafting. If the raft starts to tip up too far (and the raft is in danger of flipping), the guide would yell “high side!” at which point everyone in the raft was supposed to throw themselves on the high side of the raft (to try to prevent flipping).
I’ve heard quite a number of automobile racing commentators use “high-sided” in just the manner that the OP describes. I’ve often wondered how this usage came about, but I wonder the same thing about many twists of language so there’s nothing especially remarkable about that.
This article in CanadianDriver (which I found by Googling) contains the usage (addressing a Jeep Grand Cherokee’s Quadra-Drive system):
“High-centered,” as mentioned by Colibri, makes more sense to me, but I can’t say I’ve heard that used very often.
IR not a motorcyclist. However, I’ve had enough mountain bike wipeouts over the years to have learned the difference the hard way.
Low-side crashes are relatively benign, assuming you don’t go under the wheels of a truck or get diced by central reservation crash barriers. This is where the bike washes out from under you, and you get dumped on your arse. The energy of impact is fairly low, the same as falling over from stationary, but there are risks from abrasions as you’re still carrying the same forward speed, and that energy has to be dissipated away through the friction from sliding along. The biggest risk is from secondary impacts while scudding along on your butt.
A typical low-sided crash could arise from losing lateral traction from the back wheel while cornering, to the extent that the bike just falls over.
High-side crashes are really fucking nasty. They mainly occur when you lose control of the front end of the bike, which tries to drive itself into the ground. Much of your body’s forward momentum goes into slamming your face hard into the ground after being swung over the top of the bike, often tangentially so that the only way for your body to go is straight back up. In this respect the bike effectively acts as a fulcrum, changing the direction of your travel from forwards to straight down, and the kinetic energy your body is carrying is dissipated very quickly. On a motorbike these crashes are often fatal; on a bicycle they at the very least hurt like hell. One of the most painful crashes I’ve ever had was a high-sider, at about 3 mph. The faster ones hurt too, but it’s a lesson in the principle of moments to find out how much damage can be done at such a low speed.
Often high-sided crashes arise when control of the handlebars is lost, for example being wrenched round by clipping the bar ends on an obstacle or having the front wheel caught in a rut or pothole.
In the deep south, in a car/truck, with too deep ruts in the road, the most common phrase is “bottomed out”. Second is “high centered”. Once is a great while some yankee transplant might say “high sided”. But most common of all is “aww fuck Cleatis, we aint going to make it to the hoot ninny in time”.