Convertibles may look like a sporty car on wheels, but they are also incredibly dangerous. But, what makes convertibles so much more dangerous than other vehicles? For starters, because convertibles usually have a soft top, in the event of a rollover (in which the vehicle lands with the roof of the car on the ground), whoever is inside of the vehicle stands a much greater chance of suffering life-threatening injuries and/or even death.
Convertibles have been around for a long time. James Dean was famous for driving convertibles and even died in a sports car when it crashed. Recently, one of my friends (who is a police officer) told me about a call that he responded to in which someone phoned in that they had witnessed a car accident where a woman driving a convertible ran off the side of the road. When he responded to the scene of the accident, it was a horrific site. The vehicle that the woman had been driving veered off of the side of the road, down an embankment and had apparently flipped over multiple times before landing upside down.
In the process of the car flipping over, the woman was ejected from the vehicle by way of the front windshield and had died immediately.Besides the fact that the woman was going too fast, the officers were able to determine that the cause of the accident was the combination of the woman driving too fast plus the fact that she realized that she had missed her turn. In an effort to try to make the turn anyway, she over-corrected her steering and wound up losing control of her vehicle. Additionally, she was not wearing her seat-belt. However, even if she had been wearing her seat-belt, there is no guarantee that she would have survived because the entire top of the vehicle was crushed down almost completely.
Had she been driving a regular, hard-topped car and wearing her seat-belt, she probably would have survived.My boyfriend drives a BMW Z3, and every time he has to leave to go to work or drive somewhere at night, I always remind him to be careful. In a regular vehicle, you at least have a fighting chance of walking away. However, when you own and drive a little sports car convertible, it becomes increasingly difficult to beat those odds. There have been a few times where I have had close calls with deer and other wild animals crossing or standing in the middle of the road at night, and it was all I could do to swerve out of the way at the last minute.
Had I struck one of those animals, there would have been damage to my car, but I don't doubt that I would've walked away. However, when you are driving a little convertible, you're lucky if you even make it out alive. If you do own a convertible car, try to make sure that you exercise even greater caution when you are out and about driving. Wear your seat-belt and be cognizant of what other drivers around you are doing.
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