8 ms·

I had a similar personal reaction after getting into a high speed car crash (mechanical failure of my car, while traveling at 70 mph on the highway. Entered a s

I had a similar personal reaction after getting into a high speed car crash (mechanical failure of my car, while traveling at 70 mph on the highway. Entered a spin, slid off the road, did at least one complete roll). 8 years later, I still sometimes think of all the ways the crash could have gone differently that would have resulted in my death. If I was going a little faster, my car could have ended up in the irrigation ditch and caused me to drown. The 220 lb combat robot in the trunk it could have killed me during the tumble (it tore through its straps and ripped through the back seats into the car). If I had a passenger, the only part of the roof that wasn't crushed in was the driver. A passenger could've easily been killed. The result was a few superficial injuries (bruises from seatbelt and airbag system). Unscathed otherwise. Woke up thinking the car was on fire (was smoke from airbag) and crawled out. Walked down the street to find my phone (it was in my backpack which flew out a window during the crash) and called for an ambulance. These are natural human reactions, but the sad truth is that many of the things in our lives come down to luck. You can only do so much to make your environment safer. I, for one, have never transported another one of those combat robots inside my vehicle. edit - 220 pound combat robot, not 300.

EForEndeavour 6y ago
What was that about a 300-pound combat robot?
- YarickR2 6y ago
  Short Circuit movie remake ?
  - bregma 6y ago
    Remake? Number 5 is alive!
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  Got the weight wrong. It was a 220 pound robot for the heavyweight class in Robogames. I was driving between my university campus and the campus extension in the next town when the crash happened.
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    Wow that is a good reminder to secure my robots when driving... a deer jumped out in front of me recently and I had to hit the brakes hard. Luckily didn’t have my robot in the car. As a fellow Robogames competitor I’m glad you made it out of that crash!
    - ant6n 6y ago
      Huh. Fighting robots in car trunks seem to be more common than I realized.
      - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        Well my robot is an explorer: https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/ https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/
        jacquesm 6y ago
        That's a beast. Nice work!
        TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        Thank you!
    - kungtotte 6y ago
      You should secure everything in your car. If you crash into something going only 50 kilometres per hour, things that are the same weight as your average smartphone will have enough force on impact to kill you.
      - barrkel 6y ago
        In a dead stop, maybe, but a car isn't likely to be stopped dead. I've been told on motorcycle hazard awareness courses that if your body hits a solid object at 50 kph, it's 50% mortality risk - it's enough deceleration force to rupture your aorta. Take something like a sign post to the chest and you'll be lucky to survive.
rtlfe 6y ago
> The 300 lb combat robot in the trunk Please explain?
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  I didn't quite remember the weight properly. It was a 220 pound robot for the heavyweight class in Robogames. I was driving between my university campus and the campus extension in the next town when the crash happened.
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    I think it was the exact weight of the combat robot that elicited the curiosity :)
    - Teknoman117 6y ago
      It was a university robotics club project, I had mainly remembered it was the highest weight class. I mostly worked on the electronics (my personal main gig was robomagellan), the others were more interested in the welding. I got it crossed with he superheavies from BattleBots.
rolph 6y ago
sounds like a scout or a sapper?
dkn775 6y ago
This was a great reminder to secure objects and keep them in the trunk/boot whenever possible.
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  Yep. I did not use straps of the proper strength and it ripped through the back seats (it was in my trunk). I had a '06 Saturn Ion and the rear seats could be folded down to make more space in the trunk. They were in their normal position, but the force of them being hit my the robot must've broken the latches.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    Unfortunately with the immense popularity of SUVs in the US, a lot of people no longer have trunks/boots that are isolated from the rest of the cabin. I was in a 40-mph crash last year with a large old CRT in my SUV. It shot forward from the back and crashed into the dashboard but if the car had rolled, like yours did...who knows
wuunderbar 6y ago
> mechanical failure of my car That's scary. What was the failure if you don't mind me asking?
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  Front passenger control arm. Basically the suspension collapsed and planted that corner of the car into the road.
  - sgt 6y ago
    Had the same happen to me when I was younger and drove a BMW 525i. It happened in a corner where the car basically just spun and did a 360. I managed to limp home as the car was sort of drivable still.
jxramos 6y ago
what part failed on the car?
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  Control arm on the front passenger wheel. That corner planted into the road and threw the car into a spin.
  - throw1234651234 6y ago
    Was it the control arm or the control arm ball-joint? Did you have any warning, i.e. was your suspension really loose? This is something you should have noticed under normal circumstances.
    - Waterfall 6y ago
      Not him but maybe as a uni student he was driving a crappy car that had problems before, more bad things happen to people without reliable hardware.
      - throw1234651234 6y ago
        I am not indicating fault. I drove a $1500 car for 4-5 years. Just wondering if the issue could have been prevented. Loose balljoints are notoriously hard to diagnose, since they are supposed to have movement and it's hard to distinguish "play" and "movement". A ball joint popping out of the steering knuckle is probably one of the most critical failures your car can have. Hard to think of anything worse. Even if your brakes all locked up at the same time, it would probably be safer, since there is less chance to immediately flip the car.
    - Teknoman117 6y ago
      It was used and deemed to be from damage the car had taken in an accident prior to us buying it. We knew it was involved in an accident previously, but it was supposed to have been professionally repaired (we got it from a Ford dealership iirc). As far as anyone could tell post crash, the control arm had broken through, rather than coming loose.
qorrect 6y ago
You actually did die, we've been waiting to tell you. This is your third reality, you died back in 2003 also.
renewiltord 6y ago
It's interesting how different people react to things like this. I went off the road and my car rolled and smashed into a concrete barrier upside down, squishing every part but where I was sitting. I wasn't afraid at any time, immediately before, during, or after. The concussion was rough and I had a lot of suicidal ideation going on in the next few days, though, for no real reason³. I genuinely cannot believe the person I was in the next few weeks. Some sort of total sap. But I don't really think about it anymore and I don't carry it with me as anything more than a memory of an incident. Objectively, minor changes to circumstances could have led to my death, but contemplating that brings me no fear or anger. This reminds me of the fact that most soldiers going through combat don't actually get PTSD¹. Even among those seeing horrific things it's not that high². It's not a tough vs weak thing, imho, just an accident of how we are. I didn't do very much to be 184 cm. I didn't do very much to have functioning lungs. I didn't do very much to walk away from a car crash and be suicidal for two weeks and then have no adverse effects after. ¹ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2891773/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2891773/ ² https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/why-some-soldiers-develop-ptsd-while-others-dont.html https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/why-some-... ³ My life was fine, no one else was hurt, and I had a slightly strained calf. The desire for suicide was not driven by reason.
- Waterfall 6y ago
  This is the kind of comment I enjoy on here. Thank you for sharing your human experience. I am not sure when the idea of nature/nurture will be put to rest, I have accepted it but it also has very strange philosophical ideas, like the idea of how laws are made making assumptions about humans, but what if the humans are not knowledgeable or understand what they are doing, or have different values? We already have laws for disabled or other classes of humans, and also temporarily insane. This brings up very interesting points on how equality is not equal, how laws are complex for the purpose of gaming them by those of higher intelligence or memory of obscure facts. Genetics has a lot to do with who we are, our race/looks, height, thoughts/intelligence even. Yet many cling to the idea that nurture can overcome nature. Our mtDNA and Y chromosome is the hardware our consciousness runs on. Just the way we are, not a strong or a weak thing you say, there are mutations in us, some are beneficial, some are good/bad, but I disagree, of course some are weak or objectively bad. Hotwheels from 8chan made a good post about how he doesn't like his existence and would support euthanasia for people like himself. I doubt anyone would want to be born with tay-sachs, and when you say not strong/weak you may be using a surviorship bias to say it, although most humans are on average quite healthy. I was originally going to post how I had the opposite reaction to an event like this like you, a car crash when I lost control in the rain, thinking I was about to die. I didn't and I was mostly fine aside from some back pain from whiplash. I have aphatasia, do you happen to have it? I have a bad memory so I don't think people with it can get PTSD, so it is an adaptive mechanism, although I lose a lot of richness in thought I suppose I have been through really bad things with no problems, had a gun pointed at me, demanded my stuff, and I said no, he was confused and didn't really know what to do, I left. I didn't really think much of it but others thought it was crazy. No PTSD either.
khazhoux 6y ago
Morbid thought: Google Street View right now almost certainly has a 360 panorama of the location of your death. An intersection, a highway, a hospital, somewhere. That panorama will someday be filled with sadness for your loved ones. But you don't get to know its coordinates just yet.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Statistically, it's usually a hospital, nursing home, or your own home. So you may already know the three most likely coordinates, if you're old enough that you aren't moving again.
  - wombatpm 6y ago
    That’s why I avoid hospitals. Guy is perfectly alive, taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
- pfarnsworth 6y ago
  That doesn't apply to ML-370 unfortunately
- Balgair 6y ago
  2005's Lord of War, staring Nick Cage and Jared Leto, has a great quote similar to this. I'll bungle it, because I can't find the exact line but it goes like: "Yuri, every single person has a bullet waiting for them; trying to find them. The trick to life, Yuri? Before that bullet finds you, find a way to die." The opening sequence to that film is also superb film-making. A set-up, a mid point, and a twist ending, all in three minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LUEiKs2UAo&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LUEiKs2UAo&feature=emb_titl...
  - andrew_ 6y ago
    Such an underrated film. And before the decline of Cage.
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pfarnsworth 6y ago
When I was in high school, I was at school camping event and we were playing tag in the woods. I ran down a slope and tripped, and fell chest first onto a log, right on my sternum. I was uninjured, but since then I've always thought, "what if there were a broken tree branch right there, it would have punctured my heart and I would have died very quickly." I'm almost 50 now, so we're talking over 30 years I've been thinking about that tree log and the branch stub that could have killed me.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
You mean that you had a "combat robot" in the trunk? What exactly is a combat robot? Custom-built by you?

EForEndeavour 6y ago

What was that about a 300-pound combat robot?

YarickR2 6y ago
Short Circuit movie remake ?
- bregma 6y ago
  Remake? Number 5 is alive!
Teknoman117 6y ago
Got the weight wrong. It was a 220 pound robot for the heavyweight class in Robogames. I was driving between my university campus and the campus extension in the next town when the crash happened.
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  Wow that is a good reminder to secure my robots when driving... a deer jumped out in front of me recently and I had to hit the brakes hard. Luckily didn’t have my robot in the car. As a fellow Robogames competitor I’m glad you made it out of that crash!
  - ant6n 6y ago
    Huh. Fighting robots in car trunks seem to be more common than I realized.
    - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
      Well my robot is an explorer: https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/ https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/
      - jacquesm 6y ago
        That's a beast. Nice work!
        TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        Thank you!
  - kungtotte 6y ago
    You should secure everything in your car. If you crash into something going only 50 kilometres per hour, things that are the same weight as your average smartphone will have enough force on impact to kill you.
    - barrkel 6y ago
      In a dead stop, maybe, but a car isn't likely to be stopped dead. I've been told on motorcycle hazard awareness courses that if your body hits a solid object at 50 kph, it's 50% mortality risk - it's enough deceleration force to rupture your aorta. Take something like a sign post to the chest and you'll be lucky to survive.

rtlfe 6y ago

> The 300 lb combat robot in the trunk Please explain?

Teknoman117 6y ago
I didn't quite remember the weight properly. It was a 220 pound robot for the heavyweight class in Robogames. I was driving between my university campus and the campus extension in the next town when the crash happened.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  I think it was the exact weight of the combat robot that elicited the curiosity :)
  - Teknoman117 6y ago
    It was a university robotics club project, I had mainly remembered it was the highest weight class. I mostly worked on the electronics (my personal main gig was robomagellan), the others were more interested in the welding. I got it crossed with he superheavies from BattleBots.

rolph 6y ago

sounds like a scout or a sapper?

dkn775 6y ago

This was a great reminder to secure objects and keep them in the trunk/boot whenever possible.

Teknoman117 6y ago
Yep. I did not use straps of the proper strength and it ripped through the back seats (it was in my trunk). I had a '06 Saturn Ion and the rear seats could be folded down to make more space in the trunk. They were in their normal position, but the force of them being hit my the robot must've broken the latches.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  Unfortunately with the immense popularity of SUVs in the US, a lot of people no longer have trunks/boots that are isolated from the rest of the cabin. I was in a 40-mph crash last year with a large old CRT in my SUV. It shot forward from the back and crashed into the dashboard but if the car had rolled, like yours did...who knows

wuunderbar 6y ago

> mechanical failure of my car That's scary. What was the failure if you don't mind me asking?

Teknoman117 6y ago
Front passenger control arm. Basically the suspension collapsed and planted that corner of the car into the road.
- sgt 6y ago
  Had the same happen to me when I was younger and drove a BMW 525i. It happened in a corner where the car basically just spun and did a 360. I managed to limp home as the car was sort of drivable still.

jxramos 6y ago

what part failed on the car?

Teknoman117 6y ago
Control arm on the front passenger wheel. That corner planted into the road and threw the car into a spin.
- throw1234651234 6y ago
  Was it the control arm or the control arm ball-joint? Did you have any warning, i.e. was your suspension really loose? This is something you should have noticed under normal circumstances.
  - Waterfall 6y ago
    Not him but maybe as a uni student he was driving a crappy car that had problems before, more bad things happen to people without reliable hardware.
    - throw1234651234 6y ago
      I am not indicating fault. I drove a $1500 car for 4-5 years. Just wondering if the issue could have been prevented. Loose balljoints are notoriously hard to diagnose, since they are supposed to have movement and it's hard to distinguish "play" and "movement". A ball joint popping out of the steering knuckle is probably one of the most critical failures your car can have. Hard to think of anything worse. Even if your brakes all locked up at the same time, it would probably be safer, since there is less chance to immediately flip the car.
  - Teknoman117 6y ago
    It was used and deemed to be from damage the car had taken in an accident prior to us buying it. We knew it was involved in an accident previously, but it was supposed to have been professionally repaired (we got it from a Ford dealership iirc). As far as anyone could tell post crash, the control arm had broken through, rather than coming loose.

qorrect 6y ago

You actually did die, we've been waiting to tell you. This is your third reality, you died back in 2003 also.

renewiltord 6y ago

It's interesting how different people react to things like this. I went off the road and my car rolled and smashed into a concrete barrier upside down, squishing every part but where I was sitting. I wasn't afraid at any time, immediately before, during, or after. The concussion was rough and I had a lot of suicidal ideation going on in the next few days, though, for no real reason³. I genuinely cannot believe the person I was in the next few weeks. Some sort of total sap. But I don't really think about it anymore and I don't carry it with me as anything more than a memory of an incident. Objectively, minor changes to circumstances could have led to my death, but contemplating that brings me no fear or anger. This reminds me of the fact that most soldiers going through combat don't actually get PTSD¹. Even among those seeing horrific things it's not that high². It's not a tough vs weak thing, imho, just an accident of how we are. I didn't do very much to be 184 cm. I didn't do very much to have functioning lungs. I didn't do very much to walk away from a car crash and be suicidal for two weeks and then have no adverse effects after. ¹ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2891773/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2891773/ ² https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/why-some-soldiers-develop-ptsd-while-others-dont.html https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/why-some-... ³ My life was fine, no one else was hurt, and I had a slightly strained calf. The desire for suicide was not driven by reason.

Waterfall 6y ago
This is the kind of comment I enjoy on here. Thank you for sharing your human experience. I am not sure when the idea of nature/nurture will be put to rest, I have accepted it but it also has very strange philosophical ideas, like the idea of how laws are made making assumptions about humans, but what if the humans are not knowledgeable or understand what they are doing, or have different values? We already have laws for disabled or other classes of humans, and also temporarily insane. This brings up very interesting points on how equality is not equal, how laws are complex for the purpose of gaming them by those of higher intelligence or memory of obscure facts. Genetics has a lot to do with who we are, our race/looks, height, thoughts/intelligence even. Yet many cling to the idea that nurture can overcome nature. Our mtDNA and Y chromosome is the hardware our consciousness runs on. Just the way we are, not a strong or a weak thing you say, there are mutations in us, some are beneficial, some are good/bad, but I disagree, of course some are weak or objectively bad. Hotwheels from 8chan made a good post about how he doesn't like his existence and would support euthanasia for people like himself. I doubt anyone would want to be born with tay-sachs, and when you say not strong/weak you may be using a surviorship bias to say it, although most humans are on average quite healthy. I was originally going to post how I had the opposite reaction to an event like this like you, a car crash when I lost control in the rain, thinking I was about to die. I didn't and I was mostly fine aside from some back pain from whiplash. I have aphatasia, do you happen to have it? I have a bad memory so I don't think people with it can get PTSD, so it is an adaptive mechanism, although I lose a lot of richness in thought I suppose I have been through really bad things with no problems, had a gun pointed at me, demanded my stuff, and I said no, he was confused and didn't really know what to do, I left. I didn't really think much of it but others thought it was crazy. No PTSD either.

khazhoux 6y ago

Morbid thought: Google Street View right now almost certainly has a 360 panorama of the location of your death. An intersection, a highway, a hospital, somewhere. That panorama will someday be filled with sadness for your loved ones. But you don't get to know its coordinates just yet.

tyingq 6y ago
Statistically, it's usually a hospital, nursing home, or your own home. So you may already know the three most likely coordinates, if you're old enough that you aren't moving again.
- wombatpm 6y ago
  That’s why I avoid hospitals. Guy is perfectly alive, taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
pfarnsworth 6y ago
That doesn't apply to ML-370 unfortunately
Balgair 6y ago
2005's Lord of War, staring Nick Cage and Jared Leto, has a great quote similar to this. I'll bungle it, because I can't find the exact line but it goes like: "Yuri, every single person has a bullet waiting for them; trying to find them. The trick to life, Yuri? Before that bullet finds you, find a way to die." The opening sequence to that film is also superb film-making. A set-up, a mid point, and a twist ending, all in three minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LUEiKs2UAo&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LUEiKs2UAo&feature=emb_titl...
- andrew_ 6y ago
  Such an underrated film. And before the decline of Cage.
  - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pfarnsworth 6y ago

When I was in high school, I was at school camping event and we were playing tag in the woods. I ran down a slope and tripped, and fell chest first onto a log, right on my sternum. I was uninjured, but since then I've always thought, "what if there were a broken tree branch right there, it would have punctured my heart and I would have died very quickly." I'm almost 50 now, so we're talking over 30 years I've been thinking about that tree log and the branch stub that could have killed me.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

You mean that you had a "combat robot" in the trunk? What exactly is a combat robot? Custom-built by you?