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Jeep Commander is clearly in the wrong, but could the other driver have tried harder to avoid the collision?
by Chris Chilton
October 5, 2023 at 15:10
We’ve all found ourselves in the wrong lane at an intersection, and when that happens no one wants to have to go through with the mistake when they can just cut into the lane they intended to take.
That’s what millions of us do every week with no ill consequences, but the Jeep Commander driver in this video got an abrupt reminder of why those lines separating turning lanes from straight-ahead lanes are solid and not segmented. His risky move causes damage to his vehicle and flips an approaching SUV onto its roof.
The footage posted to Reddit shows the Jeep waiting in the left-hand lane to turn left at a stoplight, then deciding it actually wants to rejoin the main drag and go straight-ahead on the green light. Traffic seems light in the two lanes to his right so he puts his blinker on and slowly begins to move into the adjacent lane.
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Video Reddit
And when we say slowly, we mean like Ford Model T slowly. If you’re going to swap lanes the best plan is to wait for a safe gap then swap lanes and accelerate hard enough that your speed soon matches that of the other cars in the new lane. But that’s not what happens here. The Jeep appears to underestimate the speed of the SUV approaching in the lane he wants to join, so hasn’t identified a sufficiently big gap, and makes the whole manoeuvre way too slowly.
As is often the case with these videos, we don’t know the whole story. Was the Jeep moving slowly because it was close to the Ford Focus in front and was trying not to damage it (if so, he failed big-time)? Or because his visibility across his right shoulder was obscured by something in the car, or vehicles behind him? And the flipped SUV – it looks like it was probably driving above the posted limit and made little or no effort to slow down, so might not have been paying attention. It might not even have been in the middle lane when the Jeep started the maneuver, and only jinked left to overtake the white SUV, failing to realize that the Commander was pulling out.
Who knows? What we can be sure of is that this dashcam footage shows the Jeep driver in the wrong, meaning his insurance, like his SUV, is going to take a battering, especially if the occupants of the flipped car ended up with some big medical bills.
H/T to u/Vzise
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