So I was driving down twisty roads in the Black Hills outside Rapid City, SD with dad in my grandfather's 06 Passat. It was a rainy evening, and I was doing about 5 under the limit at close to 30 MPH. At the moment it happened, I was looking straight ahead and just driving. I like to go on fun drives in the black hills, since every single road here is curvy and wonderful (unlike my home in KC). But tonight it had been raining substantially for over an hour, and it was almost too wet for me to feel comfortable at the speed limit. Then, very suddenly, from the left part of my vision, there's a deer, sprinting across the road, and about to be smacked by the Passat. The moment I see the deer, I give the brakes a hard stab and feel the ABS kick in for half a second while I'm plowing straight into the deer. I probably hit the deer at around 28 MPH - that's how little time there was to react. There's a line of two or three cars behind me who feel that they should be driving a little faster than I was, so I release the brake pedal completely and slowly pull off to the side of the road after the deer has gone flying off into the grass next to the road. There's no point in continuing to brake hard anyway, since the deer is gone. We stop for a minute to gather our thoughts, but we both agree it's not necessary to get out in the rain and check for damage at the moment. The Passat should be able to make it 5 miles back to my Uncle's house. And make it it did. It drove like new on the way back, showing no signs of damage at all. The thing actually passed 140k miles yesterday while I was driving it. Once there, I was greeted with a front fascia without a VW badge, and some broken plastic. Before and After And that was the extent of the damage. Street View from near where I hit the deer. I'm happy with the way things turned out, although the somewhat small deer that we hit may not have fared so well. It's interesting to think that if I had taken five more seconds get in the car, this may not have happened. It seems like we were pretty unlucky, but I'm just glad everyone's okay, including the Passat. It looks like Volkswagen makes some tough little cars. This Passat actually hit 140k miles yesterday, and my grandpa plans to drive it 140k more before he parts with it. His last Passat had 280k miles, and he had a Jetta that racked up 400k miles. Felt like I should share this, since I was curious what it would be like to hit a deer up until two hours ago. Stay safe everybody. This would have been way worse if I was going faster.
[link] [3 comments]
No comments:
Post a Comment