Yeah I think that’s accurate. I had a car crash late last year. I was driving home on a single lane road with a car in front of me. This road has some slight height changes, so people just driving slow down some and speed up. I however was on cruise control, so my speed was constant. This was annoying because as the person slowed down I’d get close and as the speeded up the gap would grow. So to prevent getting too close to them on the slowing down parts, I put some extra distance between us and them, which meant leaving a longer gap on the downhill parts. Chill driving for me, no tailgating idiot for them.
However the person behind me was not pleased with the gap I created. He began tailgating, swerving, blasting me point blank with highbeams. I touched my brake pedal a couple of times, enough to flash the brake lights, not enough to disable cruise control. But he didn’t back off. As I was close to the point where I would turn off the road, I ignored them. As we got to the offramp, he tried to overtake me, but he also had to make the offramp. He couldn’t so he braked hard and went over the hard shoulder behind me. Figuring that was the last of it, I slowed down because there was an intersection at the end I would need to yield at.
However this dude was in full rage mode, so he gunned the gas, overtook me on the right and just steered into me. I managed to stay on the road, but the whole right side of the car was destroyed. When we stopped on the shoulder and got out, he was calmed down again. He had his wife and little kid in the car. Everyone was shook, but only the cars were damaged luckily.
He had no idea why he did what he did. He was so angry because of the gap I created to the next car and didn’t know why he did what he did. I explained the gap I left went from the normal 2 seconds to maybe 6-8 seconds? So he tried to use his car as a weapon because he would get home 6 seconds later than otherwise. Now he got home an hour later, with a damaged car, angry wife and kid and probably much more expensive insurance going forward. That’s what road rage does to a person.
He turned out to be a good dude and we handled everything in terms of paperwork and even had contact a few days later to figure some stuff out and chatted for a while. The insurance handled everything, I didn’t need to pay anything and a few months later I had the whole right side of the car replaced. Good as new, including a new right front wheel. I didn’t trust that wheel so I couldn’t use the car for a while, but that’s fine, I don’t use it all that much and can always borrow cars or rides when needed.
saltesc@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I don’t mind if people are dumb, slow, whatever. It’s out of my control so, meh. But when I’m put into risk I give a fuck.
My biggest hate is people just stopping or crawling on a road as they think of want they want to do next. Because so often there’s some other idiot on their phone that could be behind me that hasn’t noticed the idiot in front of me has slowed down to 20kph for their situational ponderings.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
I got rear-ended last week when some car taking a right pulled across the 2wheeler lane and stopped, ass sticking out so far he was blocking both lanes. I coasted to a stop a few inches from a scooter who’d emergency stopped because this guy pulled infront of her, and immediately get rear-ended by a motorbike who braked late because he was on his phone.