A male driver of a rental Chevrolet Cruze was involved in what can only be described as a nightmare scenario for any road user when an 18-wheeler truck loaded with cardboard boxes flipped on its side and landed on top of the compact sedan.
The accident took place in the northbound lanes of the Dallas North Tollway in Texas in the late morning hours of Thursday.
The large rig also knocked over the concrete center barrier and hit another vehicle, a black Volkswagen Touareg, hurling it over the median and onto the other side of the road.
The man wedged under the truck's trailer was 49-year-old Gregory Neece, who despite the seriousness of the crash, made it out alive. Neece did suffer injuries to his back and neck but according to officials, he was doing better on Friday.
According to reports, the two passengers in the Touareg were not hurt.
Police are still investigating the accident, though officials suggested that the truck driver might have lost control of the vehicle due to a shift in the load he was carrying and because he may have been going too fast.
Story Sources: Fox, NBC & CNN
11 Comments:
good thing it wasnt china... they wuld have jus ignored everything
Wow! Good to hear that everybody is still breathing. We all sometimes complain about the rising weight of modern vehicles, but those structural improvments (more high strength steel, etc.) along with better passive restraints, airbags and other added safety measures are probably what saved these people. I guess we don't think much about those things until they are needed.
A similar horrible accident happened here in Poland today.
A tipper full of gravel flipped over and crushed Citroen C5 Break into a car-pancake.
Unfortunately two occupants died immediately.
http://biskupiec.wm.pl/27995-92744,Wypadek-na-krajowek-16,660981.html
A tipper's sides are much more solid than an 18 wheeler trailer. In the highway case the trailer walls gave in just enough to keep the Chevrolet Cruze safe enough for the driver to surprise.
Also impressed on how people did contribute.
Besides the people who stopped to help, the safety engineers at Chevrolet need to be saluted for the role the car played in saving the driver's life. With the support of the driver, this could be one advert that sends a powerful message about GM engineering.
Exactly.
The steel stud walls of a trailer are just there to hold up the roof. The frame of a car is stronger than them and is more than capible enough to resist them.
This, of course, depends on the load inside the trailer. In this case, it was cardboard boxes. It would be different if the trailer was filled with something heavier like washing machines or lumber.
To even attain any realistic basis to your statement you would have to test other makes in the same simulated crush test. Perhaps others perform better/worse?
one cruze down, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand to go.
Good thing he wasn't renting a Toyota/Honda/Kia/Nissan/etc...
Any other part of the DNT and the Southbound traffic would have been ramming the Touarge. People seem to think it is no speed limits in some sections.
Why? because those cars are imports? Hate to break it to you but the Cruze is Korean.
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