Question: what do people do if they are about to get hit by a car

Gustav Markkula answered on 29 Jun 2021:

That’s a great, but quite difficult, question. I don’t think I have actually seen any research on it for pedestrians, which is perhaps what you are thinking of here? The tricky thing about studying crashes is that even though quite a few happen every year, from the perspective of every individual human they are very very rare! So it’s really not easy to collect research data on real crashes.

However, in recent years, with data logging of different kinds getting ever more powerful/cheap, and with most of that data collection happening in cars, we are starting to get some insights about how *drivers* behave when they are about to crash. There tends to be very noticeable physical reaction – a change of posture and facial expression – so it’s very clear when they realise that something has gone wrong. Then almost all drivers at least try to brake – previously many researchers thought that lots of crashing drivers didn’t do anything at all, but actually the data tell us that unless drivers are really fast asleep or something like that, they basically always try to do something to avoid the crash, or make the crash less severe. Sometimes they make things worse though, for example by steering too much so they start skidding, or when they are about to collide with the side of another moving vehicle, there is often a tendency to steer “in front of” the other vehicle, instead of behind it which is typically more likely to avoid the crash.