45 my ass. looks like going a little fast, went off the road, jerked back, and the rest is history.

8/6/2008 5:31:37 PM

The PT is on a Neon chassis. Oddly enough the Neon is actually a decent FWD chassis that "rotates" quite a bit. It's also quite capable of power off oversteer, lots of people crash SRT-4's this way. It's probably less common with the PT simply because of how people drive them.

Basically, if you let off the gas abruptly, it could have transferred the weight off of the rear wheels enough to cause the car to oversteer. Then once you got on the brakes, this simply took the weight off of the back even more causing it to worsen. The correct thing to do would have been "counter intuitive" for many folks, which would have been to give it more throttle without counter-steering too much (Too much counter-steer may cause the car to whip back in the other direction after it regains traction).

That's why I hate it when people give these blanket statements about "how to get out of a 'skid.'" Things like, "turn into the skid." Yes, that is helpful, but depending upon the type of drivetrain and other factors that is not the only thing that has to be done to save you. Lots of things have to happen quickly, yet smoothly, to get out of that situation. Things usually also have to happen not so smoothly to get into that kind of situation in a car like that in the first place. My guess is that you weren't going too fast, that would have caused understeer from the beginning. I think you went faster than you were comfortable with and let off abruptly while near the limit of the car's traction abilities. When you're on the edge of loosing traction you cannot do abrupt things. Your turn in, braking and acceleration have to be smooth above all else when at or near the limit.

[Edited on August 6, 2008 at 5:38 PM. Reason : ]

8/6/2008 5:32:25 PM

WTF gg airbags

8/6/2008 5:37:06 PM

if it was anything like my crash, aka 2 seconds of oh my god i am gonna die, several more of oh god i am never riding a roller coaster again, followed by oh my god i am alive and upside down, the airbags prob did not deploy. That is NORMAL in a roll.

8/6/2008 6:02:16 PM

Admit it...He was trying to Tokyo Drift that bitch!

8/6/2008 6:06:09 PM

aha

almost. I wasn't wondering if I would die
i mean, front air bags aren't going to deploy if there was no frontal impact. If they were designed otherwise, you'd be risking random inflation which would be a decidedly bad thing

8/6/2008 6:06:22 PM

Glad to hear that both of you are alright.

Now, some things to point out:

Quote :

"repaving should work in your favor"

Newly paved roads are better than old roads. Old roads have more pits in them and you get less rubber on the surface. Less rubber can result in less control(some mentioned friction earlier). Asphalt roads are paved in layers and the top layer consists of more(or different) binder and less aggregate in the surface coarse than the others. (http://www.mnh.si.edu/earth/text/3_1_1_1.html)

Quote :

"how does someone remark on how a road is slick unless they pushed the limits of the road"

They make test roads and test them countless times and then create production roads for us to drive on. Also, they look slicker when wet but they're still better than old roads. And if the road was wet and you were on a curve, the grade of the road should drain to the inside of the curve and then away. You shouldn't have issues of hydroplaning on a superelevated curve because the water should pond off the road, not on it.

Quote :

"speed limits are made for the lowest common denominator and the pt cruiser isn't anywhere close to that"

Speed limits are usually posted for 5 MPH less than the design speed. In some cases politics or traffic volumes will result in the lowering of the speed limit on a road. We designed an extension of the Cary Parkway to Garner in CE 503 last semester. Not once did we say "What should be our design car?" Everything that highway designers use is in the AASHTO greenbook:


Being said, sounds like a fluke accident and I hope that you can win your case.

8/6/2008 6:44:34 PM

Thanks for dropping some CE knowledge

8/6/2008 6:49:57 PM

Quote :

"the airbags prob did not deploy. That is NORMAL in a roll."

Quote :

"front air bags aren't going to deploy if there was no frontal impact."

Well, IDK what year that PT is, but since at least 2002 side and curtain airbags were standard features.

8/6/2008 6:59:31 PM

I dunno about that

I priced it on KBB today, since an adjusted will be looking at it tomorrow, and I want a ballpark of what they should be offering, and (this assumption could be wrong) I thought KBB automatically checks standard features on a car, as applicable.

Side airbags weren't checked

8/6/2008 7:01:17 PM

Quote :

"You're not actually suing him; you're suing his insurance company. Then y'all take a cruise, buy a sofa, and carry on with your lives."

that's what my friend's insurance agent told him to do, when he was involved in an accident while his GF was driving. he came away a winner.

Every experience I've had with SHP has been shitty. They always assume I'm guilty of something, even when it's the other person's fault and they're on drugs. Seriously. Trooper must have known the guy or something, everyone in the guy's car was on ecstasy and the trooper has the balls to try and trick me into admitting that it was me and not the guy who hit me that was at fault.

8/6/2008 7:13:51 PM

I'm glad you're ok!

8/6/2008 10:57:46 PM

8/6/2008 11:00:46 PM

bump

3/17/2009 10:31:59 AM

why this shit is fucking done.

3/17/2009 10:36:59 AM

[old]

3/17/2009 10:37:17 AM

no way you were only going 45. if so, learn 2 drive.

3/17/2009 10:39:39 AM

I had a nightmare about this shit last night

Shitty way to start the day

I'm always freaking out whenever he takes a curve, and in my dream, we were on icy roads in chicago. I started freaking out, he told me 'watch...I'm gonna show you how much I can do and STILL not roll'. Oh, we rolled. Then we started sliding towards lake michigan, and I was like, dammit and started trying to calm down to save O2. And the onstar button didn't work, but the cops got there anyways. I said to him "Oh, your insurance rates are gonna get even worse" while we were still rolling. We didn't end up in the lake because of a berm in a skate park.

[Edited on March 17, 2009 at 10:42 AM. Reason : sd]

3/17/2009 10:40:29 AM

why was there dirt in a skate park

3/17/2009 10:45:31 AM