I’m Adrian Lund, and I’m the former president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
A good part of my career at the Insurance Institute was to make vehicles safer, to make
sure that they held up so that the belts and the bags could protect people and people could
walk away from severe crashes.
I woke up early that morning because I had a long drive.
I was trying to get to Savannah.
Kissed my wife goodbye, and she just said, you know, “Drive safely.”
I figured I would take the express lanes this day because they were southbound on a Saturday
morning, and I got on, no problem, and I see that I can merge all the way to the right,
and I say, “That’s what I’m going to do: I’m just going to merge to the right.”
It’s the last thing I remember deciding about the drive.
The next thing I knew there was like a blur, maybe with some lights in it -- it was just
in my windshield -- and there was a crash.
My car was rotating in some way -- I wasn’t quite sure what it was doing, but I knew I
was moving and I wasn’t moving in a straight line.
And then I hear a big thunk.
And then I hear another big thunk.
And at that second big thunk, I was hanging upside down.
The emergency teams began to show up shortly thereafter.
They kept asking me, “Are you OK?"
I said, “I think I’m OK.
I don’t feel anything broken.”
I guess they cut my seat belt, so I fell down, they were getting me out, at least, you know,
I’m out of the car, I can see people, and they can lean over and talk to me,
so I see faces.
And even with their masks, you know, it was really nice to see the faces.
This was a very severe crash.
I was probably doing, I thought I was doing, probably 60 to 65, in that range.
The other vehicle was apparently doing 50 because the other driver had, for reasons
that we don’t know, made a U-turn and was coming back the wrong way on the lanes.
So, you know, this was a high-speed crash, one that probably 10 years ago, I wouldn’t
be here to talk to you about it.
I was at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety for more than 30 years, the last 20,
my career was focused on how do we get cars built so that they provide better protection
in crashes.
What you’re trying to do is to come up with crash tests that will test the kinds of things
that need to work when you’re in a real-world crash.
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.
It did occur to me that, yeah, this is what we were after, there's room here.
In a crash like this, you don’t come out uninjured.
I did have some injuries.
I had a knock on my head and I was dizzy for maybe a couple weeks.
That seems to have gone away, probably a minor concussion although never sure.
Had a contusion on my leg and then a lot of cuts on the arm.
My neck, maybe from where I was hanging upside down, supporting my weight on my head, the
neck is still, it will catch sometimes when I try to turn it.
You know, 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.