Which means he wasn't allowing himself enough stopping distance. By definition.
But that's ok, people don't like it when the car ahead of them is going 73mpg and they want to go 75mph, so they get 5 inches behind that car ahead of them to psychologically "nudge them forward or out of the way". Because after all, every car you pass shaves 1.5 seconds off your arrival time and those 1.5 seconds can really add up.
It's worth risking your life, your feet, your face, your knees, your eyes to shave off a few seconds from your arrival time. Totally worth it. I get it. I absolutely do.
My wife tries to tell me that tail-gaters are demonstrating effective IQ levels lower than body lice but I explain to her that those 1.5 seconds are really monumental achievements in peoples lives and have to be respected.
“Which means he wasn’t allowing himself enough stopping distance. By definition.”
I had a car directly in front of me get clipped by a car pulling out. Spun him 90 degrees and then into a barrier. Pretty decent crunch. Even though the car in front of me was going sideways for a bit, I had no problem stopping - my only concern was stopping slow enough to not get rear-ended (thankfully I didn’t).
Needless to say, I always have and always will make a point of not following too closely. No matter how fast one’s reflexes are or how good their brakes are, it simply is not possible to slow down a car quickly enough to handle a car going sideways in front of you - they will slow down 10 times faster.
Based on the damage, It is pretty clear that the driver was not focused on the back of the truck when it hit the brakes. He may have looked away for a second, or been texting, or who knows what else, but the damage is too severe for a “following too close” explanation. If he was following too close and didn’t even bother to hit the brakes it would not be that serious. The reason is that the relative speed difference is not that great.
Imagine you are one foot off the bumper of a truck and it slams on the brakes and you don’t brake. The speed difference as you make up that one foot is not enough to do that kind of damage. More than likely there was enough distance between them for the trucks speed to scrub off significantly and the car plowed into him pretty much at full speed.
i.e. the evidence suggests that this was not a following distance problem, but a speed difference problem, created by ample distance between the vehicles to increase the speed differential.
Good rant, though. :-)
Oh, and the 1.5 second thing was kinda funny. I drive 80 miles to my workplace every day on two lane highways. I pass at least 5 people a day - sometimes lots more. On some stretches I see the guy I passed a few minutes ago is already 30 seconds behind me. It adds up.
But more importantly, it’s not always about saving time. It’s about stress. Following a guy doing 54 in a 55 for 30 miles is not emotionally healthy, especially since the “real” speed limit is 69.
Exactly right. Low IQ idiot driver. It is HIS fault she is in the condition she is in.