Car accidents can occur at any moment. If you’re a safe driver, you can do your best to avoid them. However, to some extent, you’re risking your health and vehicle every time you drive.
You should know about where most car accidents occur if you want to stay safe. For instance, intersections cause about 25% of lethal accidents, or so the Federal Highway Administration reports.
You should also be aware of the most common types of car wrecks. We’ll discuss five of them now. We’ll also run down some ways you can often avoid them.
Fender Benders
When you hear the term “fender bender,” you might think it sounds fairly innocuous. Some people use the term rear-end collision instead, and that sounds a bit more dangerous.
Whatever you call them, these accidents usually happen when a vehicle hits another car ahead of it. The front bumper of one car taps the back bumper of the vehicle up ahead, or perhaps it rams into it with force.
Injuries and damage in these accidents can range from minor to extremely significant. Like many car accidents, how fast the vehicle moves before striking the other car makes an enormous difference.
You can often avoid these accidents if you watch the traffic ahead of you closely. If you start daydreaming behind the wheel or you let something distract you, like your smartphone or a passenger, then you might hit the vehicle ahead of you if it stops abruptly.
T-Bone Collisions
A T-bone accident occurs when one vehicle hits another one broadside. This can resemble the capital letter T if you use your imagination.
A T-bone collision often comes with far worse injuries than a fender bender. Luckily, they don’t happen as much. That’s because if one car T-bones another, that probably means a driver made a serious error rather than stopped paying attention to the road ahead for a moment.
If one car T-bones another, and the driver’s side or the passenger’s side receives the impact, the crash can kill or seriously hurt the driver or passenger. Broken bones from these kinds of accidents happen often. You might also see cuts, scrapes, contusions, etc.
Usually, these accidents happen if someone tries to run through a yellow light before it turns red. Don’t ever do this. If you do, and you also have another driver who tries to enter the intersection a fraction of a moment too early, a calamity might occur.
Rollover Accidents
Rollover accidents happen relatively rarely. You will certainly see many more fender benders than vehicles rolling over. It’s still possible, though, and when it occurs, you can seriously injure yourself, as you might imagine.
Many times, you will see a car roll over if it goes off an embankment. In that instance, maybe another vehicle pushed it off, or perhaps a much larger vehicle, like an 18-wheeler, impacted the unfortunate car.
If a car rolls over, it can land on its roof, on its side, or perhaps back on four wheels again after multiple revolutions. If you’re in a car and that happens, it can easily kill you, especially if the vehicle not only rolled over but fell from a decent height.
Highway accidents and rollovers sometimes coincide. That’s because, for a car to roll over, another vehicle must usually hit it going at a high rate of speed. It’s also possible a driver might lose control of their car and have a single-car rollover accident.
Driving at a normal rate of speed can often save you from causing a rollover accident. You should also drive slower than normal if you’re in unfamiliar territory on the highway or driving in bad weather. Fog or mist and a car driving too fast on the highway make rollover accidents far more likely.
Sideswipe Accidents
The sideswipe accident occurs fairly often. You might see one as often as you’d see a fender bender. When a car scrapes another, maybe you’ll have one vehicle facing one direction and the other facing the opposite way. However, sideswipe accidents happen more often when cars are facing the same direction.
If a vehicle scrapes another along its side, that often occurs because the driver who caused the accident tried to change lanes without signaling. The turn signal can indicate to the cars on either side if you’re about to change lanes.
They’re not there to use if you feel like it. It’s illegal to change lanes without signaling, though some drivers elect to only use their blinkers occasionally or not at all.
If the police see you doing that, they will likely ticket you. Also, if you don’t signal and you change lanes without checking your blind spot, there’s a high chance you might hit a car coming up on your flank that you didn’t realize had snuck up beside you.
Head-to-Head Collisions
Like rollover accidents and T-bone collisions, you’ll often see fatalities with head-to-head collisions. When they happen, it probably means someone made a bad driving mistake. For instance, someone who drank alcohol or used drugs and then drove might cause a head-to-head collision.
Maybe they’ll go the wrong way up a one-way street. In an intoxicated state, they might miss a sign. You might also have a driver who can’t see very well, and they cause a head-to-head collision for that reason.
You should always wear corrective lenses or contacts if you need them to drive. If you’re an older adult, you should also stay off the roads if you don’t have excellent reflexes anymore.
Not driving after consuming alcohol or drugs and staying off the roads if you’re too frail to drive will usually prevent most head-to-head collisions. You should also avoid street racing and similar risky behaviors, or you could very well cause any of the accident types we’ve mentioned.
Now that you know about the most likely accident types and how to avoid them, you can make the streets safer.
