It could also point to the limo having anti-lock brakes.
Limos aren’t required to have seat belts for all pax, & also seating is usually ‘in the round’, meaning everyone faces the middle. Seatbelts aren’t designed for people sitting sideways to the normal direction of travel.
Quoting from this NPR story:
Other rules are that the car is legal to be on the road, and that the driver be properly licensed. If the driver had imbibed a bit during the tour I wouldn’t be totally shocked.
It wasn’t a wine tour. Instead they had reservations to visit a brewery, and I believe the accident happened on the way there. As for seat belts, even if the vehicle had them, the party atmosphere in such circumstances means that people aren’t often wearing them.
I’ve only been in a limo a few times, but in each case, none of us passengers wore seat belts. However, the limo went at appropriate speeds for carrying a bunch of people who weren’t wearing belts, but were riding a limo as part of a social occasion and hanging out together, rather than just a way to get from Point A to Point B.
Which seems to be the same idea as a group of 18 people on their way to a birthday party. Why was the limo going 60 mph in the first place? Seems way too fast for some rural road, especially with the reasonable expectation that nobody in back would be wearing seat belts.
Well, if it was going 60 miles an hour. An observer on the ground watching an accident will tend to overstate the speed of a vehicle, often by a lot.
What? The initial stories that first came out were incorrect? I highly doubt that to be possible!
I actually never saw a story that said they were on a wine tour until you mentioned it in this thread. All the stories I saw said they were going to visit a brewery or didn’t mention the destination - but some did mention a 2015(?) accident in Long Island which did involve people on a winery tour.
ETA - The AP story linked in the OP didn’t mention this group’s destination but did mention the 2015 incident
I am really sorry to hear about this. I can’t imagine what you and your family are going through. I wish you and yours peace through this very difficult time, and I hope that you all get some justice from those responsible for this needless tragedy.
You’re right, those are amazing odds. Were you close to your second cousins? (I doubt I could identify mine in a lineup, but all families are different.)
Presumably once they get to work, the NTSB can compute the approximate speed of the limo by how far it moved the SUV and how much each vehicle weighed.
Or by how far the pedestrians were thrown, and the extent of the damage to their bodies.
Judging by the photos of the wreck being removed, it was going fast enough to break the body of the limo in half. As to Machine Elf’s observation about skid marks and anti-locks, I thought that it was not unusual to see interrupted skid marks from cars with anti-lock brake systems?
CNN article on the crash: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/08/us/new-york-limo-crash/index.html From it, we learn that the limo had failed a NY DOT inspection the prior month and wasn’t supposed to be on the road, per Governor Andrew Cuomo. Further, the driver didn’t have a CDL. The limo company was based in Gansevoort, NY, a town about 75 miles from the site of the crash in Schoharie. And that the limo business owner, Shahed Hussain, is currently in Pakistan.
Also, the engine intruded into the front of the passenger compartment and the roads were damp; the latter perhaps explaining the lack of skid marks, per NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt. No idea of the limo’s speed as of yet.
But you have to also take into consideration that if people were moving around in the car, their total speed as measured from an observer will actually be less than their individual speeds due to relativity 
Looking at Google Earth, and who knows if those elevations are right, the distance along NY 30 from I-88 to the intersection is about 1.67 miles. The elevation drop along that distance is 546 feet. (1165 feet-ish at the interstate, 620 at the T-intersection) That averages to a 6.2% grade, which is considerable. Looking at the last third of a mile, the grade looks to be about 6.6%. It didn’t look that steep in videos near the crash site, but that’s not unusual.
That’s more than enough of a grade that IME, there would have been warning signs about it, and as a former passenger driver with a CDL, it’d really give me pause about going too fast in a limo. Regardless of how behind schedule my passengers were. Especially considering the maintenance or lack thereof on that vehicle.
I’ve ridden with guys I was working with who would think nothing of it though.
My thanks for your condolences but it’s really not necessary. I was not really very close to these relatives. They were a distant branch of my very large family (I have twenty-five cousins on my father’s side of the family and dozens of second cousins). The girls’ father is my father’s cousin but there is a thirteen year difference in ages. He relocated a couple of hundred miles away when he grew up. The sisters themselves were born when I was in my twenties and I had also relocated away from where I grew up. So I was aware these relatives existed but we didn’t really see each other.
That said, they were relatives and it shocked me to hear about a tragedy like this and then realize I had a connection with the people involved.
Not only a few hours but quite a ways off course. The crash killed pro golfer Payne Stewart.
Yup, very true.
It vaguely reminds me of the R101 airship crash in 1930. The original design was so overweight and under-lift that they split the thing in half and added another gasbag, without redoing any of the calculations on stress to the framework. Then, just for good measure, they took it out on its maiden voyage in the teeth of a nasty storm, over a foreign country, in the middle of the night. It flew for about six hours before it smashed into a hillside at two AM, blew up, and killed about 90% of the people on board.
I was also reminded of Gilchrest Road, New York crossing accident - Wikipedia which took place about 140 miles away in 1972. I was about 13 when this happened and remember the news station in NY reporting the school bus didn’t have enough rivets holding it together in the case of an accident.
These stretch limos are lengthened by a factor of two or even three, adding thousands of pounds of weight, and who knows what, if any, engineering calculations are done for stresses, or steering, or braking. The tire surface touching the road and giving braking action isn’t any bigger than in a stock car of the same model. There are just about no safety features required. It seems kind of miraculous it took this long for something this bad to happen.
As for the owner of this limo company, if he had so many of his vehicles taken out of service (80% IIRC) in just the last few years, maybe he shouldn’t have been in business at all any more. This is where tax cuts and lesser government, not interfering with business, sometimes ends us up. There’s no guarantee having government inspections would necessarily have prevented this, but not trying at all doesn’t strike me as a viable option at the moment.
The company’s cars were inspected multiple times and failed! The owner was convicted of DMV fraud but got a license to run a car business (and I have to wonder if he bribed someone in that process). Literally the only reason the owner was still in this country is because he was employed by the government, as an informant.
I really don’t think there’s an ideological story here (and certainly not one of excess laissez-faire). Instead, I think this illustrates the extent to which someone apparently without much conscience can beat the system for a while – any system – if he’s willing to take risks without concern for consequences.
And my making one was in passing after making several other points with more text. But the NY State government should have shut the limo company’s ass down a while ago. Laws without enforcement are pretty words.
But sometimes you have to have a fatal wreck at a corner to get a traffic light. The Apollo 1 fire fatalities probably saved the lives of the Apollo 13 crew.
My dad was a USDA poultry inspector back when food safety was more strictly enforced. He could and did shut the entire plant down when he felt it needed it. Noticed how many food recalls there have been the last few years?