CNY drive home: Do this to protect yourself from becoming a victim of a pile-up crash

Picture this: You are driving on the highway. You drive up a mild but long uphill incline, once you go over the crest and boom – you see traffic ahead is at stand still. You slam on the brakes, your car stops in time. Phew. You look up at your rear-view mirror, you see another car approaching fast – the driver’s eyes and mouth wide open, screaming an inaudible “Aaaaahhhhhhhhh” and slams into your rear. Your head jerks backwards, injuring your neck.

Rear-end crashes are the most common types of high-speed accidents in Malaysia during peak travel seasons. Sometimes the damage is just vehicular, other times fatalities do happen but since it’s something that happens so often, nobody bats an eye on such news anymore.

Of course, it goes without saying that you should watch your distance and adjust the gap with the car ahead to match your driving speed. But realistically speaking, suddenly coming up to standstill traffic will catch anyone by surprise. It helps to give other drivers a little bit more prior warning.

Over in Germany, local driving custom say that the last car in the queue of a traffic jam must activate the hazard lights and leave them on until another car joins the queue, which then takes over the hazard lights flashing duty.

There is a reason why most cars have their hazard lights switch marked out in bright red-orange, within easy reach of the driver. It’s not a park-anywhere-I-want mode button.

Once you see traffic building ahead and cars in front have come to a complete stop, immediately put on your hazard lights. Slow down by applying consistent but gentle braking pressure, so as not to cause unnecessary panic for the cars behind.

That’s the first part. The second part is to maintain sufficient distance with the car ahead of you, even after coming to a stop. This is so that in the worst-case scenario, you have some form of escape path to quickly move out of a dangerous position.

The most dangerous situation is when you are the last car on a curve, or after the peak of an incline, because a curve or a crest shortens our visual distance, which means less time for the driver coming from behind to respond to a suddenly slowing traffic.

Exercise some judgement on how far ahead of the curve you want to come to a stop, how fast you should slow down versus the traffic coming from behind, and on which lane do you want to come a stop in.

Deciding all these within a split second comes naturally to drivers who actively practice defensive driving, because good drivers don’t just look at the immediate car ahead, but they train their sights farther. More importantly, they know exactly how much distance they need to come to a complete stop.

If you want to know how far down or up your driving skills stand on the totem pole, do this test – as you drive, ask yourself what speed are you doing, without looking at the speedometer (or HUD). Mastering the art of accurately estimating speed and distance is the most basic of all advanced driving skills. If you can't do this well, your driving abilities are poorer than you think so reduce your speed.

Getting this right is becoming increasingly hard with modern cars due to their superior insulation to mask out engine, wind, and road noise. An unintended side effect of this improved refinement is that lesser skilled drivers are now travelling at speeds much faster than they can handle, and worse – they have no idea how long it takes to bring their car to a complete stop. They control their vehicle based on nothing but their ‘butt’ feel. If your visual distance and required braking distance don’t match, adjust your speed. 

Then there is situational awareness. When you drive, you are not just driving your own car, but the cars in front and the cars behind you. Only when all these information come together, can you drive well.

Also read: Watch: Tesla Model S with FSD sees ghost, brakes abruptly and caused 8-car pile-up in a tunnel

Remember the 8-car pile-up incident caused by a faulty Tesla Model S operating in FSD mode, and how that Subaru WRX narrowly avoided it? That’s defensive driving at work. He looked far ahead, noticed something isn’t right, adjusted his speed, by the time the driver realized that traffic has come to a complete stop, he managed avoid becoming the 9th car in the pile-up.

You might ask what about autonomous emergency braking (AEB) feature? Flip through your vehicle’s owner’s manual, and you will learn that there are many conditions where AEB cannot work. AEB is a visual-/radar-based system, which means there is a limited field of vision / detection, and since cars don’t have necks, the front-end of our cars don’t turn like our heads so a car can’t see what’s ahead of a curve, or what’s beyond the incline.

AEB’s performance is severely compromised when bright sunlight is shinning directly ahead, or if it’s raining, or if it’s at night / in a dark tunnel. Only fools would equate a car's marketing videos as reality. AEB and other safety features are assistance-only features. The driver must always be in full control.