After spending much of his career working to create crash tests with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), former president of the organization Adrian Lund found out exactly why safety ratings are important. Early one August morning last year, he was involved in a head-on collision and likely owes his life to the safety technology in his 2020 BMW 540i.
Lund, who retired from the IIHS in 2017, was on his way to Savannah, Georgia, last summer and merged onto the I95 when, after just 15 miles (24 km) he collided with a BMW 2-Series driving the wrong way down the interstate. He estimates that he was driving at around 65 mph (105 km/h) and the other car was driving at around 50 mph (80 km/h).
“This was a high-speed crash, one that probably 10 years ago, I wouldn’t be here to talk to you about it,” he said in a video published by the IIHS recently.
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Tragically, the 29-year-old woman in the 2016 BMW 228i did not survive the crash. Although her car did earn high safety ratings when it was tested, her chances of surviving the accident were severely diminished because she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was ejected from the vehicle on impact.
Lund’s 5-Series, meanwhile, flipped onto its roof after the initial impact. Fortunately, though, he didn’t break any bones and he felt, all things considered, alright when safety crews got there. He said that seeing their faces, even behind masks, was really nice, and made him feel better.
“When you’re hanging upside down there—the first thing I did was just see if I could move my legs because I’ve seen a lot of offset crashes and I had plenty of room to move my legs,” said Lund. “It did occur to me that this is what we were after.”
Although he was fortunate to escape, the crash did leave an impact on Lund. He had cuts and scrapes all over and was dizzy for several weeks after the accident, he suspects because of a concussion.
“In a crash like this, you don’t come out uninjured,” Lund said. “Considering the crash I was in, that I had a frontal, followed by a rollover — yeah, I’m pretty lucky. The car did its job.”
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