Outback Skewered by a Guardrail

@HFV_Junkyardin Holy mother of God talk about a lucky escape!

@HFV_Junkyardin That is some Final Destination shit

@HFV_Junkyardin Amazing. There are no words to describe how lucky she is.

@HFV_Junkyardin the guardrail looks like its occupying pretty much the whole area where the driver would sit, I have no idea how she only got minor injuries, pretty amazing

@HFV_Junkyardin said in Outback Skewered by a Guardrail:

I can image how scary that had to be.

I'm guessing this young woman was petite, and the blunt end of the guard rail managed to deflect/shove her relatively thin torso forward and out of the way as the car continued skewering itself upon the rail.

@HFV_Junkyardin said in Outback Skewered by a Guardrail:

@atfsgeoff that or a quick and accurate reaction lead her to pull herself up the the steering wheel.

That would be a hell of a sequence of events to not only have the prescience to pull yourself up against the steering wheel BUT to first unbuckle your seat belt so you could do so. The seat belt being over the rail leads me to think her positioning was luck rather than reaction, but I wasn't there

@HFV_Junkyardin

@HFV_Junkyardin Waitaminute that's not a Chevy Impale-a!

@HFV_Junkyardin The caps on the ends of guard rails are supposed to flatten the rail so it rolls up rather than spearing cars. Clearly that didn't happen here (there was a big mess with many being found to be defective a few years ago)

I hit the start of a guardrail segment once, but it was buried so no real spearing potential (I just glanced it bouncing me hard into the opposite rail):

They've since replaced it with a more normal endcap:

Which even more recently seems to have gone missing?

@john-norris said in Outback Skewered by a Guardrail:

@HFV_Junkyardin

Well, close enough, anyway, the airbags didn't deploy, I'll bet you could have it back on the road with a junkyard driver's door, if you really wanted to

@HFV_Junkyardin
Precisely none of that is supposed to happen. Which makes all of it quite amazing and thankfully fortuitous for one young lady.

@HFV_Junkyardin jesus CHRIST

@ranwhenparked said in Outback Skewered by a Guardrail:

I have no idea how she only got minor injuries

Obviously she was thrown clear of the vehicle.

Seriously though, the rail goes between the seat and the belt, which is unbuckled in the photo. Was she strapped in?

@ibRAD said in Outback Skewered by a Guardrail:

@ranwhenparked said in Outback Skewered by a Guardrail:

I have no idea how she only got minor injuries

Obviously she was thrown clear of the vehicle.

Seriously though, the rail goes between the seat and the belt, which is unbuckled in the photo. Was she strapped in?

That's what I'm wondering. If she wasn't, then she'll be one of the "seatbelts are dangerous" crowd and will use this story to proselytize for her cause.

@BicycleBuck Take it one step further and seat belts and guard rails are dangerous!

I wonder what happened that the side airbags didn't deploy.

@HFV_Junkyardin I don't feel like that guardrail went through slow and steady.

@ibRAD said in Outback Skewered by a Guardrail:

Seriously though, the rail goes between the seat and the belt, which is unbuckled in the photo. Was she strapped in?

I think she was. If the belt wasn't buckled, it'd still be hanging up on the pillar and the rail wouldn't be inside the loop like that. If she was the type to latch it in order to turn off the dummy light and sit on top of it, I still don't think the rail would have gotten in the loop from that angle. I also don't see a reason to have unbuckled it after the crash if she had it buckled behind her previously. It makes much more sense that she was wearing it, and she probably instinctively leaned forward to hug the steering wheel when she lost control and saw that she was headed for the rail.

@Urambo-Tauro That's a good point. I bet she just got lucky and jostled enough by the impact that she was missed though. How would you know the rail was going through or where it would? Not like flipping over where you might duck down.

@ibRAD I think it's pretty natural to fixate on the car's trajectory upon losing control. She literally had a front row seat to see the rail coming, and likely had a couple of seconds to react to its approach. Perhaps not enough time to climb out of the seat in the heat of the moment, but enough to hug the wheel and hope for the best.

@HFV_Junkyardin Uhhhhh, no thank you.

Seems like a poor guard rail design if it can do that?