Mattress on the highway: what to do?

What about if you see a pet on the highway and you have another car behind you? It seems most of the time the best thing to do for the humans involved is not give in to reflexes like hit the brakes or make a sudden manouvre to the left or right but keep on driving in your lane and hope it is dead on impact...

 

my wife drove over a metal pole/pipe in the road a couple weeks back.. It was about five feet long. All i can picture in my head is it popping up through the floorboard and impailing me. I saw it happening in my mind as she drove over it.. I squinted my eyes and heard it hit, but luckily it just bounced around on the road a little bit.. it still fucks me up.

 

You were lucky! I remember that poor German tourist in Florida that ran over a bumper jack in the road and it came right up through the floor and the seat and Killed him!!

 

Nah fuck that

I was driving and this stupid dog ran out in front and I slammed on the brakes and missed hitting it head on by like ONE inch!.. Then this dipshit on a motorcycle who was already right on my ass can't swerve to the left fast enough.. He clips the back corner of my car with his bike, and I see him doing the Superman right past my drivers side window.. lol he was fine but his bike was fucked.. I got 1500 dollars for the ding in my car and the dog lived another day. This dipshit told me I should have just hit the dog. He was really close like five feet @35MPH maybe 40. What an asshole. He wasnt physically hurt, but his bike wouldnt start and the steering was fucked up and rattling around and generally busted up. Everyone involved got a proper ending on that story.. Except the dog lives with owners who leave him out to run around on a busy street.

 

that doesnt help thanks. lol

 

Seems luck was involved here

 

i remember reading a story about a woman who swerved to avoid a deer and ended up flipping her car and killing her young child. That story stayed with me for a long time. I do brake or swerve to avoid deer because they'll fuck your car up pretty badly if you plow into them, and I brake for dogs and cats because I love them, but I run over smaller animals like squirrels if I don't have enough time to brake slowly and safely. They aren't worth risking my life.

 

A mattress was in my lane on highway 5 north ,west of Stockton and there were cars all around me. I just kept my speed up and ran right over it. When I checked the rear-view, I saw one car going sideways across the road, but I imagine there were others involved.

Here's something that might come in handy for driving on freeways. Cars ALWAYS travel in bunches, for some reason. Could be 2 or 3 cars or could be 12 or 15. But---there are always spaces between the groups. So that's where I stay. They go 70--I go 65. They go 75--I go 70. That way, if anything happens, which is more likely to involve more than one car in a group--flat tire--someone drifting one way or another or whatever-- I'm not involved. I'm in my little spaces between the groups.

 

I remember that, right in the crotch! The dude just pulled over and died.

 

Yep, "bunchers" is exactly what I call 'em...I stay the hell away too.

 

The story doesn't say if the mattress landed flat on the roadway (as most seem to assume) or wrapped around her windshield.

I once had a chunk of metal drop off a truck ahead of me, bounce once and impact the ondriveshaft emergency brake of my '50 Plymouth station wagon. Instant halt and bent driveshaft.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWAUJHKXLg0"]Woman trying to avoid mattress in highway killed in crash - YouTube

 

I think people should just run over the damn things. I don't see how a 3000-4000 pound vehicle can be harmed by running over one.

 

I wonder if doing that would cause the car to tilt and flip or get caught up in the drive train and cause the car to spin out of control.

 

the answer to this is clear.....never let a woman drive

 

I would probably just drive over it if there wasn't ample time to avoid it...it's soft and cushy

 

I don't know, Mike. Maybe it's just me. i saw it and my only thought was --"fuck it--I'm hittin' it." Maybe with a little car something could go wrong. I wouldn't want to try it on a motorcycle.

 

driving a few months ago, truck lost blocks of foam ahead about 200ft and closing in fast. cars directly behind the foam bounced off. the cars behind those. even seeing the object done no harms swerve and hit each other however continue a forward path. comes to me to hit foam, it was hard, wheels didn't exactly like it. 40-5mph and I carried a piece as it rolled under the trunk space. I dropped it in a gas station when I hit the bump coming in some 20miles later. As I was getting the gas, and I was like that piece of foam looks familiar..

 

well i can tell you what i wouldn't do. and that's try to sleep on it.

always remember those large friendly words on the cover of the hitchiker's guide "DON'T PANIC".

if i was driving, i would slow down, slowly, and hope the guy in front of me wasn't slowing down faster then i was, and hope the guy behind me wasn't slowing down slower then i was, until i could see where i was going.

the laws of physics being what they are, panic will do you no good, and only increase the likelyhood of harm.

now if you're talking about me, i probably wouldn't be driving, nor even in a car, but on a train, miles from the highway, or on a bus, taking my chances on the bus driver's compitancy, which has a reasonable probability of being greater then my own.

i DID have an experience once, on one of the freeways in the bay area, where a stray tire on its wheel, completely orphaned from any vehicle or obvious source, came bounding across multiple lanes in front of me. possibly from the direction of another freeway the one i was on had just passed under.

fortunately none of us hit us, as it went bounding on, across the all the lanes, the emergancy lane, and up and over the sound wall that isolated the freeway from the real world. i'm sure those around me were suddenly awakened from their cruse controlled complacency, if only for a few brief moments.

 

i did that with a stray traffic cone once. I still have it too!