Quote:
Originally Posted by zx10guy
The common denominator is the idiot driver that causes the roll overs. It just baffles me how many times I see a traffic report even to this day about some fool that rolled their car around the DC Metro area. So we're not even talking about an SUV.
You can put all the engineering you want into a car to prevent even the most unlikely scenario and some fool is going to find a way to make it happen. One of my track coaches talked about all the electronic nannies on the S1000RR. He said even with how good the nannies are, it can't fix stupid.
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I don't remember the exact year, but it was at least a decade ago, I was up in the DMV for some reason I don't remember (I moved from Kensington out to the mountains in Virginia in 2003). Anyway, I was on the Beltway between Georgia Avenue and heading to Connecticut Avenue. It was a snowy day, but not bad. On the hill coming down just before the Surrender Dorthey Bridge, someone somehow got their SUV spun 180 deg. flipped over AND up above the Jersey wall on the outside lane (headed towards Connecticut). So the SUV somehow climbed up the Jersey wall, got on the flat grass plateau above the wall and was on its roof facing traffic. It was a near new modern SUV, say 2008 - 2010 with all the stability control nannies.
20 years or so before that, same area of the beltway when it was being widened and there was a construction area between the inner and outer loops, I was on the inner loop heading to Silver Springs with my friend Bogey in the aforementioned Ranger STX. At the turn coming up to Connecticut, a young woman in a Civic somehow got out of control to avoid rear-ending slowing traffic. With God driving I guess she went left after glancing off the rear of the vehicle in front of her and through the construction opening gap in the Jersey barriers. Hitting the gravel of the construction area, she couldn't slow down much, and front-ended right into a large pile of dirt. Her Civic flipped up onto the front end and came back down on all fours. BEHIND the dirt pile opposite of her was a large backhoe bucket, obviously placed there by the construction company to guard it from being hit. Bogey and I saw the entire event and turned around at Georgia and went back to offer aid (we thought she was dead). When we got there, no police or EMTs had arrived yet. She was out cold. I knocked on the drivers window, and it startled her. She began to flop around jerking the steering wheel and footing the brake pedal. I guess she was unconsciously going through the motions of car control just before the accident; it really freaked me out. LOL.
To this day I can't understand how bad people can just lose control of a vehicle.
I've never owned a motorcycle with any driving aids. I don't like the linked brake system the industry came up with decades ago. I'm sure now it's all ABS. Maybe I'm a purist.