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So I was heading home from work and it was about 9:30pm. The BART station's about 2-3 miles away and it's usually a pretty quick and uneventful drive home. There's this Josh Groban CD playing which is a cd someone bought and has left in my car's cd player. He's the singing kid from Ally McBeal. Let's face it: it's not a great cd. I'm thinking I'll get home, grab a snack, and head back out to the gym. And as I'm turning left on Magnolia Way which leads up the road to Poplar Drive where my house is, a bright light suddenly appears behind me and everything starts moving in slow motion.
My car caves in like an easy parent and pivots counter-clockwise as a huge white pickup truck slams into the driver side of my RAV4 EV and pushes/drags my car some 15-20 feet before slamming the car into a yellow caution school zone sign across the street.
Tires squealing as they're dragged sideways along newly paved street. The sickening crunch of metal upon metal. The groan of distressed metal and splintering plastic. Then silence... save for the incessant electronic sounds of an electric car as its sensors trigger like dying synapses.
Who says that you don't see bright lights when you have a near death experience?
It turns out to be a young man driving his parent's truck. There's a blue childseat in the back of the truck's cab. He's going in the same direction but he's driving too fast. He's in the wrong lane for some reason driving on the side of oncoming traffic. He doesn't stop at the stop sign on the corner. He smashes into a car making a left turn on a residential street.
The guy's pretty young and it's not even his first accident since, apparently, he's done this before. It's a good thing his parents decided he'd have a better chance of survival in an 8000 pound Ford F-150 truck. "Built Ford Tough" as they say.
Let's hope he wasn't in a hurry to get home because he was missing Dawson's Creek. That'd really piss me off.
That'd mean they don't have TiVo.
-skao
The RAV4 EV, like most new cars built after 1997, has something called side-impact door beams which is designed to keep the passenger compartment structurally intact and sound. It did a helluva job and I'm a believer. It's also a good thing we were on residential streets. I hesitate to think how fast he would have been going on a wider less twisty road.
So the moral of this story?
Dawson's Creek isn't worth rushing home for.
(The police report will later state that he was racing a friend on residential streets.)
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